William Blake/2002 email

24 Nov 2021 - 10 Dec 2022

So as long as we're talking about Blake, let me throw out a > Blake question that I'd like to get opinions on. One of > the most famous disseminations of Blake is the song "Jerusalem", > which includes the phrase "dark Satanic mills". That phrase > is often alluded to be writers, generally to connote the > "mills" that emerged in England during the Industrial Age. ... > This interpretation of the phrase drives my wife nuts. My > Inestimable Treasure, who majored in 19-th century English > literature, insists that this is not what the phrase means > at all. She says that Blake frequently uses the word "mill" > in his writing, and he is not talking about smoke-belching > factories at all. She says that Blake has his own vocabulary > for many things, based on a general constructed-fictional-world > that pervades the works of Blake, and Blake very frequently > co-ops ordinary words and uses them in his own highly > ideosyncratic fashion. "Mills" is one of those words, and > what he's talking about are "mills" in the mind, evidently > an image of little wheels (like windmills) rotating around > and around in your head, or something like that.

I would hate to second-guess an English major, but in my limited understanding, the point of poetry is to compress many meanings into the same few words. Otherwise, you might as well use prose, or first-order predicate calculus. I'd assume that in Blake's mind the images of the psychological notion of mills and the actual dark mills in England were closely joined; and he used that in his poem. If we have to choose one or the other -- well, Blake was certainly more interested in the battle between different modalities of mind than in industrial reform (he probably never saw a mill town, although he saw plenty of other forms of misery in London -- referenced in other poems). On the other hand, the context of "Jerusalem" is about various qualities of England itself (and the poem has become something a national anthem, which seems odd to me):

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills?

So he could be talking about actual dark satanic mills. On the other other hand, this England doesn't seem to have much to do with the actual England but is yet another projection of Blake's elaborate system of meaning.

While googling around I found this verse from Blake's Jerusalem (not the same as the song which is actually the preface to Milton) which interested me:

I turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire, Wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.

Interesting because it once again takes a swipe at Newton, and mentions "cogs tyrannic" which are presumably what run the dark satanic mills. Apparently Blake has a theory of machinery, in which some cogs are tyrannical and others revolve in harmony and peace. Since many of us here are builders of mental machinery (software) I wonder what Blake would think of how our cogs revolve?