Tiriel (poem)

"Tiriel supporting Myratana"; the illustrated text is: "The aged man rais'd up his right hand to the heavens/His left supported Myratana shrinking in the pangs of death" (1:19-20). Three of Tiriel's sons are opposite, including his eldest, Heuxos (with the crown). The pyramid, river and columns are not mentioned in the text, which instead describes a "beautiful palace" (1:1).

This article is about the William Blake poem. For the character of Tiriel, see Tiriel. For the opera of the same name, see Tiriel (opera).

Tiriel is a poem by William Blake written c1789, and is the first of his prophetic books. It is also the first poem in which Blake used free septenaries, which he would go on to use in much of his later verse. Tiriel was unpublished during Blake's lifetime and remained so until 1874, when it appeared in William Michael Rossetti's Poetical Works of William Blake. Although Blake did not engrave the poem, he did make twelve sepia drawings to accompany the rough and unfinished manuscript, however three of them are considered lost as they have not been traced since 1863.

Characters

• Tiriel – deposed tyrant; as the former king of the west, Tiriel is of the body in Blake's mythological system, in which the west is assigned to Tharmas, representative of the senses. However, Tiriel falsely claims to be from the north, which is assigned to Urthona, representative of the imagination. Tiriel's name was probably taken from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia libri tres (1651), where the name is associated with the planet Mercury. David V. Erdman believes that Tiriel is at least partially based on King George III, who suffered bouts of insanity throughout 1788 and 1789. Erdman suggests that the poem is "a symbolic portrait of the ruler of the British Empire. [Blake] knew that the monarch who represented the father principal of law and civil authority was currently insane", and with that in mind, Erdman argues that "the pattern of Tiriel's "madness and deep dismay" parallels that of King George's."
• Har – Tiriel's father; S. Foster Damon believes that Har represents both the "decadent poetry of Blake's day" and the traditional spirit of Christianity. Northrop Frye argues that although Har and Heva are based on Adam and Eve, "Har is distinguished from Adam. Adam is ordinary man in his mixed twofold nature of imagination and Selfhood. Har is the human Selfhood which, though men spend most of their time trying to express it, never achieves reality and is identified only as death. Har, unlike Adam, never outgrows his garden but remains there shut up from the world in a permanent state of near-existence." Harold Bloom agrees with this interpretation, arguing that "Har is natural man, the isolated selfhood." "Har" is Hebrew for "mountain", giving an inherent irony to the phrase "Vales of Har".
• Heva – Tiriel's mother; Frye believes she is "a reduplicate Eve", who also represents neoclassical painting.
• Ijim – Tiriel's brother; lives in the wilderness, having been banished by Tiriel, and represents the power of the common people. Alicia Ostriker believes he represents superstition. Ijim's name could have come from Emanuel Swedenborg's Vera Christiana Religio (1857). The word is also found in the Book of Isaiah, 13:21, where it is translated as "satyrs". According to Harold Bloom, "The Ijim are satyrs or wild men who will dance in the ruins of the fallen tyranny, Babylon. Blake's Ijim is a self-brutalised wanderer in a deathly nature [...] The animistic superstitions of Ijim are a popular support for the negative holiness of Tiriel."
• Zazel – Tiriel's brother; imprisoned in the mountains, Zazel represents the outcast genius. Zazel's name was probably also taken from Agrippa, where it is associated with Saturn. The name could also be a modification of the Hebrew word Azazel, which occurs in the Book of Leviticus, 16:10, and tends to be translated as "scapegoat".
• Myratana – Tiriel's wife; her name may come from Myrina, Queen of Mauretania, who was described in Jacob Bryant's A New System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1776). Blake himself had engraved plates for the book in the early 1780s, so he would have been familiar with Myrina.
• Heuxos – Tiriel's eldest son.
• Yuva – another son
• Lotho – another son
• Hela – Tiriel's daughter; represents touch and sexuality. She is probably named after the Scandinavian goddess of Hell in Thomas Gray's "The Descent of Odin" (1768).
• Mnetha – guardian of Har and Heva; represents the spirit of neoclassicism, which Blake felt encouraged inferior poetry and painting. Damon points out that Mnetha is "almost" an anagram of Athena, goddess of wisdom. Frye suggests that the name is an amalgamation of Athena and Mnemosyne, the personification of memory.
• Clithyma and Makuth – sons of Tiriel mentioned in a deleted passage
• Four unnamed daughters
• One hundred and twenty-five unnamed sons

"Har blessing Tiriel while Mnetha comforts Heva"; the illustrated text is: "Then Har arose and laid his hand on old Tiriel's head" (2:35)

Synopsis

Long before the poem begins, the sons of Har revolted and overthrew their father. Tiriel set himself up as a tyrant in the west, driving one of his brothers, Ijim, into exile in the wilderness, and chaining the other, Zazel, in a cave in the mountains. Tiriel then made slaves of his own children, until eventually, led by the eldest son, Heuxos, they too rebelled, overthrowing Tiriel. Upon his demise, Tiriel refused their offer of refuge in the palace, and instead went into exile in the wilderness with his wife, Myratana. Five years later, the poem begins with the now blind Tiriel returning to the kingdom because Myratana is dying, and he wants his children to see her death, believing them to be responsible and cursing them for betraying him five years previously; "Come you accursed sons./In my weak arms. I here have borne your dying mother/Come forth sons of the Curse come forth. see the death of Myratana" (1:7-9). Soon thereafter, Myratana dies, and is buried, and although Tiriel's children ask him to remain in the palace, he refuses and returns to the wilderness, again cursing them and telling them he will have his revenge;

There take the body. cursed sons. & may the heavens rain wrath
As thick as northern fogs. around your gates. to choke you up
That you may lie as now your mother lies. like dogs. cast out
The stink. of your dead carcases. annoying man & beast
Till your white bones are bleach'd with age for a memorial.
No your remembrance shall perish. for when your carcases
Lie stinking on the earth. the buriers shall arise from the east
And. not a bone of all the soils of Tiriel remain
Bury your mother but you cannot bury the curse of Tiriel

(1:42-50)

After some time wandering, Tiriel eventually comes to the "pleasant gardens" (2:10) in the Vales of Har, where he finds his own parents, Har and Heva. However, they have both become senile and have regressed to a childlike state to such an extent that they think their guardian, Mnetha, is their mother. Despite being recognised by Har, Tiriel lies about who is he is, saying he was cast into exile by the gods, who then destroyed his race. Excited by the visit, Har and Heva invite Tiriel to help them catch birds and listen to Har's singing in the "great cage" (3:21). Tiriel refuses to stay however and resumes his wanderings. He then encounters his brother Ijim in the forest. At first Ijim threatens to kill him, but upon seeing Tiriel's weakened state, he declares "Ijim scorns to smite thee in the form of helpless age & eyeless policy" (4:16-17). Instead, Ijim captures him and carries him back to the palace. Disgusted that Tiriel's children have betrayed him despite his decrepitude, Ijim leaves; "Is this Tiriel's house/It is as false as Matha. & as dark as vacant Orcus/Escape ye fiends for Ijim will not lift his hand against ye" (4:75-77). Upon Ijim's departure, Tiriel descending ever more rapidly into madness, curses his children yet more passionately;

Earth thus I stamp thy bosom rouse the earthquake from his den
To raise his dark & burning visage thro the cleaving ground
To thrust these towers with his shoulders. let his fiery dogs
Rise from the centre belching flames & roarings. dark smoke
Where art thou Pestilence that bathest in fogs & standing lakes
Rise up thy sluggish limbs. & let the loathsomest of poisons
Drop from thy garments as thou walkest. wrapt in yellow clouds
Here take thy seat. in this wide court. let it be strewn with dead
And sit & smile upon these cursed sons of Tiriel
Thunder & fire & pestilence. hear you not Tiriel's curse.

(5:4-13)

With that, four of his five daughters and one hundred of his one hundred and thirty sons are destroyed, including Heuxos. Tiriel then demands that his youngest daughter, Hela, lead him back to the Vales of Har. She agrees, but denounces Tiriel for his actions, and in a rage he turns her hair into snakes. On the way through the mountains Tiriel and Hela pass the cave in which lives Zazel, who, together with his sons, hurls dirt and stones at Tiriel and Hela, mocking them as they pass. Eventually Tiriel and Hela reach the Vales of Har. In a final speech, Tiriel condemns his parents, his children and all society, and explains how his father's laws and his own wisdom now "end together in a curse" (8:8). He then dies at his parents' feet;

Such was Tiriel
Compell'd to pray repugnant & to humble the immortal spirit
Till I am subtil as a serpent in a paradise
Consuming all both flowers & fruits insects & warbling birds
And now my paradise is fall'n & a drear sandy plain
Returns my thirsty hissings in a curse on thee O Har
Mistaken father of a lawless race my voice is past

He ceast outstretch'd at Har & Heva's feet in awful death

(8:22-29)

Manuscript

Tiriel survives in only a single manuscript copy, located in the British Museum. An eight-page document written in Blake's hand, the manuscript is inscribed "Tiriel / MS. by Mr Blake". It is written in fair hand up to page 8, line 4 ("Lead me to Har & Heva I am Tiriel King of the west"), at which point the writing becomes scribbled, and is in a different ink. This difference in ink and handwriting has led Erdman to argue that the later part of the poem was rushed. Additionally, many of the handwritten corrections, emendations and deletions in the parts of the poem prior to 8:4 are in the same ink as the lines after 8:4, suggesting Blake went back over the manuscript and revised earlier parts of it when he returned to finish it, thus suggesting at least two periods of composition.

A considerable amount of material has been deleted by Blake in the manuscript. For example, when Tiriel initially arrives in Har, he lies about his identity. In the poem as Blake left it, the scene reads "I am not of this region, said Tiriel dissemblingly/I am an aged wanderer once father of a race/Far in the north" (2:43-44). However, in the original manuscript, between these two lines is contained the line "Fearing to tell them who he was, because of the weakness of Har." Similarly, when Har recognises Tiriel he proclaims "Bless thy face for thou are Tiriel" (3:6), to which Tiriel responds "Tiriel I never saw but once I sat with him and ate" (3:7). Between these two lines was originally the lines "Tiriel could scarcely dissemble more & his tongue could scarce refrain/But still he fear'd that Har & Heva would die of joy and grief." The longest omissions occur during the encounter with Ijim and when Tiriel returns to Har for the second time. When Ijim arrives at the palace with Tiriel, he begins by saying "Then it is true Heuxos that thou hast turned thy aged parent/To be the sport of wintry winds" (4:72-73). However, originally, Ijim begins

Lotho. Clithyma. Makuth fetch your father
Why do you stand confounded thus. Heuxos why art thou silent
O noble Ijim thou hast brought our father to our eyes
That we may tremble and repent before thy mighty knees
O we are but the slaves of fortune. & that most cruel man
Desires our deaths. O Ijim tis one whose aged tongue
Deceive the noble if the eloquence of Tiriel
Hath worked our ruin we submit nor strive against stern fate

He spoke & kneel'd upon his knee. Then Ijim on the pavement
Set aged Tiriel, in deep thought whether these things were so.

The second large deletion occurs towards the end of the poem, when Tiriel asks Har "Why is one law given to the lion & the patient Ox/And why men bound beneath the heavens in a reptile form" (8:9-10). Originally, however, between these two lines was

Dost thou not see that men cannot be formed all alike
Some nostril'd wide breathing out blood. Some close shut up
In silent deceit. poisons inhaling from the morning rose
With daggers hid beneath their lips & poison in their tongue
Or eyed with little sparks of Hell or with infernal brands
Flinging flames of discontent & plagues of dark despair
Or those whose mouths are graves whose teeth the gates of eternal death
Can wisdom be put in a silver rod or love in a golden bowl
Is the son of a king warmed without wool or does he cry with a voice
Of thunder does he look upon the sun & laugh or stretch
His little hands into the depths of the sea, to bring forth
The deadly cunning of the flatterer & spread it to the morning

A major question concerning the manuscript is whether or not Blake ever intended to illuminate it? Whether he had devised his method for relief etching at the time of composition is unknown, although he did make twelve drawings which were apparently to be included with the poem in some shape or form. Most scholars, however, believe that the images were to provide illustration as opposed to illumination (i.e. they wouldn't be combined with the text, they would simply accompany the text) and it could be that he abandoned the project when he discovered the technique to realise his desire for full integration of text and image. His first relief etchings were There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One (both 1788), but they were experiments only. His first real illuminated book was The Book of Thel (1790) and it is possible that he abandoned Tiriel to work on Thel. According to David Bindman, for example, "Tiriel's clear separation of text and design is transitional in being an example of the conventional method of combining text with design implicitly rejected by Blake in developing the method of illuminated printing. He probably abandoned the series because his new technique took him beyond what had now become for him an obsolete method."

Blake's mythology

"Har and Heva bathing"; Har and Heva are shown naked in a shallow stream whilst Mnetha lies behind looking on. The picture is not a direct illustration of any part of the poem, but may be related to the following fragment: "they were as the shadow of Har. & as the years forgotten/Playing with flowers. & running after birds they spent the day." (2:7-8)

Although Blake was yet to formulate his mythological system, several preliminary elements of that system are present in microcosm in Tiriel. According to Peter Ackroyd, "The elements of Blake's unique mythology have already begun to emerge. It is the primeval world of Bryant and of Stukeley, which he had glimpsed within engravings of stones and broken pillars."

The Vales of Har are mentioned in The Book of Thel (1790), where they are described as a place of purity and innocence. The characters of Har and Heva both reappear in The Song of Los (1795), where their children rebel against them, and they flee into the wilderness and turn into reptiles (Song of Los, 4:5-10). Har and Ijim are also briefly mentioned in Vala, or The Four Zoas (1798), where Har is the sixteenth son of Los and Enitharmon, and Ijim the seventeenth, thus presenting them as brothers rather than father and son, as they are in Tiriel (The Four Zoas, VIII:360).

Although Tiriel himself is not featured in any of Blake's later work, he is often seen as a foreshadowing of Urizen, limiter of men's desires and embodiment of tradition and conformity, and who appears in many of Blake's later poems; America a Prophecy (1793), Songs of Experience (1794), Europe a Prophecy (1794), The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania (1795), The Book of Los (1795), Vala, or The Four Zoas (1798), Milton a Poem (1810), and Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1820). Tiriel is similar to Urizen insofar as "he too revolted, set himself up as a tyrant, became a hypocrite, ruined his children by his curse, and finally collapsed."

Other aspects of Blake's mythology also begin to emerge during the poem. For example, Damon argues that the death of the four unnamed daughters and the corruption of the fifth is Blake's first presentation of the death of the four senses and the corruption of touch, or sex; "Hela's Medusan locks are the torturing thoughts of suppressed lust."

Harold Bloom points out that the points of the compass, which would come to play a vital role in Blake's later mythological system, are used symbolically for the first time in Tiriel; "the reference to "the western plains" in line 2 marks the onset of Blake's directional system, in which the west stands for man's body, with its potential either for sensual salvation or natural decay."

Additionally, two lines from the poem are used in later work by Blake. The deleted line "can wisdom be put in a silver rod, or love in a golden bowl?" is found in the Motto from The Book of Thel, and a version of the line "Why is one law given to the lion & the patient Ox?" (8:9) is found in the prose work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1792); "One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression."

Critical interpretations

Tiriel has provoked a number of divergent critical responses. For example, according to Gerald Eades Bentley, "Tiriel has always proved a puzzle to commentators on Blake." Similarly, Kathleen Raine points out, "this phantasmagoria on the theme of the death of an aged king and tyrant-father may be – indeed, must be – read at several levels."

Northrop Frye reads the poem symbolically, seeing it primarily as "a tragedy of reason," and arguing that "Tiriel is the puritanical iconoclasm and brutalised morality that marks the beginning of cultural decadence of which the lassitude of Deism is the next stage, and Ijim is introduced to show the mental affinity between Deism and savagery."

A different reading is given by S. Foster Damon, who argues that it is "an analysis of the decay and failure of Materialism at the end of the Age of Reason. Similarly, arguing that Har represents Christianity and Heva is an Eve-figure, Damon argues that "by the end of the Age of Reason, official religion had sunk into the imbecility of childhood."

David V. Erdman looks at the poem from a political perspective, reading it in the light of the commencement of the French Revolution in July 1789, with the Storming of the Bastille. He believes the poem deals both with pre-revolutionary France and "unrevolutionary" England, where people were more concerned with the recently revealed madness of George III than with righting the wrongs of society, as Blake saw them. Erdman also feels the poem deals with "the internal disintegration of despotism."

Harold Bloom, however, is not convinced of a political interpretation, arguing instead that "Tiriel's failure to learn until too late the limitations of his self-proclaimed holiness is as much a failure in a conception of divinity as it is of political authority."

Yet another theory is suggested by Peter Ackroyd, who argues that the poem is "a fable of familial blindness and foolishness – fathers against sons, brother against brother, a family dispersed and alienated – which concludes with Blake's belief in the spiritual rather than the natural, man."

Perhaps the most common theory as to the poem is summarised by Nelson Hilton, who argues that it "suggests in part a commentary on the state of the arts in an age which could conceive of poetry as a golden structure built with "harmony of words, harmony of numbers" (John Dryden) [...] exchanging the present for the past, Tiriel views late eighteenth-century English artistic material and practice as an impotent enterprise with nothing left but to curse its stultifying ethos of decorum and improvement." Hilton is here building on the work of Damon, who argued that Mnetha represents "neoclassical criticism, which protects decadent poetry (Har) and painting (Heva)." Additionally, Har sings in a "great cage" (3:21), which to Damon suggests the heroic couplet, which Blake abhorred. Similarly, Alicia Ostriker believes that "our singing birds" (3:20) and "fleeces" (3:21) suggest neoclassical lyric poetry and pastoral poetry, while Erdman argues that "To catch birds & gather them ripe cherries" (3:13) "signifies triviality and sacchurnity of subject matter", whilst "sing in the great cage" (3:21) "signifies rigidity of form."

Adaptations

Tiriel (Russian: Тириэль) is a 1985 opera with libretto and music by Russian/British composer Dmitri Smirnov partially based on Blake's text. The opera also incorporates material from several of Blake’s other poems; the "Introduction", "A Cradle Song" and "The Divine Image" from Songs of Innocence (1789), and "The Tyger" from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794).

Bibliography

• Ackroyd, Peter. Blake (London: Vintage, 1995)
• Bentley, G.E. (ed.) Tiriel: facsimile and transcript of the manuscript, reproduction of the drawings and a commentary on the poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967)
• ———. Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of William Blake's Writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
• ———. William Blake's Writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)
• ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
• Bindman, David. "Blake as a Painter" in Morris Eaves (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 85-109
• Bogen, Nancy. "A New Look at Blake's Tiriel", BYNPL, 73 (1969)
• Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Hanover: University Press of New England 1965; revised ed. 1988)
• Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954; 2nd ed. 1969; 3rd ed. 1977)
• ———. (ed.) The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Anchor Press, 1965; 2nd ed. 1982)
• Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947)
• Hall, Mary S. "Tiriel: Blake's Visionary Form Pedantic", BYNPL, 73 (1969)
• Raine, Kathleen. "Some Sources of Tiriel", Huntington Library Quarterly, 21:1 (November, 1957), 1-36
• ———. Blake and Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1968)
• Hilton, Nelson. "Blake's Early Works" in Morris Eaves (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 191-209
• Ostriker, Alicia (ed.) William Blake: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1977)
• Ostrom, Hans. "Blake's Tiriel and the Dramatization of Collapsed Language," Papers On Language and Literature, 19:2 (Spring, 1983), 167-182

External links

• Poem Meanings article
• William Blake Dreamer of Dreams article