Blake’s Sublime, Sexy Serpentine Lines; or, Just How Do We Read This Stuff?

Ben P. Robertson, Doctoral Student, English

 

Among the poets of the Romantic Period of British literature, William Blake might be cited as the one who wrote poetry that was the most difficult to understand. In their incorporation of mythical, visionary experience, Blake’s poems have confused readers for years, and a brief perusal through the criticism will produce a variety of conflicting explications. This disparity is no surprise considering Blake’s tendency to resist simplistic, one-to-one symbolic correspondences in his texts and illustrations. One is tempted to take a quotation from An Island in the Moon (admittedly out of context) as a mantra in studying Blake—“Here was Great confusion & disorder”—and to dismiss the poet, as Robert Southey did, as “evidently insane.”

 

However, examined in terms of Neoplatonism—in terms of a continuum of experience between the spiritual and the physical—Blake’s poetry begins to make sense. As a man who believed he saw visions, Blake attempts to evoke that visionary experience through his poetry. His objective is not to reproduce his own experience but to evoke a similar sense of spiritual vision in his readers. One of his techniques in guiding his readers toward the visionary realm is his evocation of the sublime in the illustrations that accompany his texts, and he uses the serpentine line, as William Hogarth called it, to accomplish this task. For Blake, the serpentine line has shifting, dynamic possibilities of interpretation which allow him to use the line itself as both an artistic and a symbolic means of representing the sublime. In Hogarth’s terms, the line is artistically sublime, but the very word serpentine elicits thoughts of serpents, introducing a symbolic element into Blake’s illustrations. Serpents can represent phallic sexuality, and Blake is not afraid to incorporate this sexual imagery in his illustrations in the form of serpentine lines—particularly when he uses such lines to draw serpents themselves. This use of sexual imagery creates a paradoxical situation in the viewer’s mind. For Blake, being gendered is a negative quality because the division into genders is destructive, but Blake also believed that sexual union could be a positive emotional experience through which a person could obtain a visionary glimpse of the spiritual plane of existence. Thus, serpentine lines, as symbols of sexuality, perform the dual role of negative symbol of division and positive symbol of union. As Blake said in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Without Contraries is no progression,” and this contradictory symbolism certainly qualifies as a “contrary.” The symbolic duality which the line represents evokes a sense of the sublime in Blake’s readers because of its “contrariness” while the line itself is artistically sublime in Hogarth’s terms. Thus, the serpentine line is a perfect means of destabilizing Blake’s readers’ sense of symbolism. Once readers learn to suspend their reliance on reason through this experience of the sublime, they can begin to comprehend the spiritual, visionary experience that Blake tries to evoke.