4. My initial reaction to A Memorable Fancy was complete
frustration. Most English majors boast about being able to find some
sort of theme, no matter how far fetched, in any literary work; but
for me, A Memorable Fancy was absolutely impossible to
comprehend, especially without having previously discussed it in
class. A major frustration was that I couldn’t even decipher
what the form or genre was. It was formatted like prose, yet the
words were highly poetic. Without being able to “divide and
conquer” through examining stanzas and typical poetic devices,
the attempt to understand a Memorable Fancy was further complicated.
Perhaps while we talk about Blake in class we should not only discuss
Blake’s poetry, but how to read Blake’s poetry to any
useful end. My personal reaction to Blake remains one of utter
mystification. While I do enjoy the themes and simple patterns of the
poem in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, his
other works, like A Memorable Fancy and The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell leave me not only clueless to his purpose and
themes, but also suspecting these pieces were not written by someone
entirely coherent.
5. I think Blake could be inferring something about religion
being the unification of good and evil. That perhaps he saw them as
contrasts within the “poetic imagination” and he believed
religions do the “ideas” of heaven and hell injustice by
tying them together. For example, in this line “That God will
torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies” Blake seems
to be expressing his understanding that God is the one doing the
punishing in hell. Even though this is a misconception of the
Christian view of eternity (the truth being that hell is the result
of a choice and God really has little to do with punishment since it
is Satan’s only realm) it might provide a clue that Blake
believed God’s role in eternal punishment somehow united the
realms of heaven and hell and Satan and God were somehow bonded in
that cross over- thus provoking the idea of heaven and hell being
married.
