The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Opening of the book

THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN
AND HELL
THE MARRIAGE OF
HEAVEN AND HELL
BY
WILLIAM BLAKE
Logo
BOSTON
JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY
1906

THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN
AND HELL
THE ARGUMENT
Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air,
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
Once meek, and in a perilous path
The just man kept his course along
The Vale of Death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.
Then the perilous path was planted,
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth:
Till the villain left the paths of ease
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.
Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility;
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air,
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three
years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And lo!
Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb: his writings
are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of
Edom, and the return of Adam into Paradise.—See Isaiah
xxxiv. and xxxv. chap.
Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and
repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary
to human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call
Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil
is the active springing from Energy.
Good is heaven. Evil is hell.
THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the
following errors:—
1. That man has two real existing principles, viz., a
Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body; and
that Reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment man in Eternity for following
his Energies.
But the following contraries to these are true:—

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