Tiriel (poem)


Tiriel is a narrative poem by William Blake, written c.1789. Considered 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 Tiriel was unpublished during Blake's lifetime and remained so until 1874, when it appeared in William Michael Rossetti's Poetical Works of William Blake.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, although three of them are considered lost as they have not been traced since 1863.

Synopsis

Many years before the poem begins, the sons of Har and Heva revolted and abandoned their parents. Tiriel subsequently 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 their father. Upon his demise, Tiriel refused their offer of refuge in the palace, and instead went into exile in the mountains with his wife, Myratana. Five years later, the poem begins with the now blind Tiriel returning to the kingdom with his dying wife, as 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". Soon thereafter, Myratana dies, and Tiriel's children again ask him to remain with them but he refuses and wanders away, again cursing them and telling them he will have his revenge;
After some time wandering, Tiriel eventually arrives at the "pleasant gardens" of the Vales of Har, where he finds his 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. Tiriel lies about who is he is, claiming that he was cast into exile by the gods, who then destroyed his race; "I am an aged wanderer once father of a race/Far in the north. but they were wicked & were all destroyd/And I their father sent an outcast". Excited by the visit, Har and Heva invite Tiriel to help them catch birds and listen to Har's singing in the "great cage". Tiriel refuses to stay, however, claiming his journey is not yet at an end, and resumes his wandering.
He travels into the forest and soon encounters his brother Ijim, who has recently been terrorised by a shapeshifting spirit to whom he refers as "the Hypocrite". Upon seeing Tiriel, Ijim immediately assumes that Tiriel is another manifestation of the spirit;
Tiriel assures Ijim that he is in fact the real Tiriel, but Ijim does not believe him, and decides to return to Tiriel's palace to see the real Tiriel and thus expose the spirit as an imposter; "Impudent fiend said Ijim hold thy glib & eloquent tongue/Tiriel is a king. & thou the tempter of dark Ijim". However, upon arriving at the palace, Heuxos informs Ijim that the Tiriel with him is indeed the real Tiriel, but Ijim suspects that the entire palace and everyone in it is part of the spirit's deception; "Then it is true Heuxos that thou hast turnd thy aged parent/To be the sport of wintry winds. is this true/It is a lie & I am like the tree torn by the wind/Thou eyeless fiend. & you dissemblers. Is this Tiriels house/It is as false as Matha. & as dark as vacant Orcus/Escape ye fiends for Ijim will not lift his hand against ye". As such, Ijim leaves, and upon his departure, Tiriel, descending ever more rapidly into madness, curses his children even more passionately than before;
Upon this declamation, 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 and only surviving daughter, Hela, lead him back to the Vales of Har. She reluctantly agrees, but on the journey she denounces him for his actions; "Silence thy evil tongue thou murderer of thy helpless children". Tiriel responds in a rage, turning her locks of hair into snakes, although he vows that if she brings him to the Vales of Har, he will return her hair to normal. On the way through the mountains, as they pass the cave wherein lives Zazel and his sons, Hela's cries of lamentation awaken them, and they hurl dirt and stones at Tiriel and Hela, mocking them as they pass; "Thy crown is bald old man. The sun will dry thy brains away/And thou wilt be as foolish as thy foolish brother Zazel". Eventually Tiriel and Hela reach the Vales of Har, but rather than celebrating his return, Tiriel condemns his parents, and the way they brought him up, declaring that his father's laws and his own wisdom now "end together in a curse" ;
Upon this outburst, Tiriel then dies at his parents' feet; "He ceast outstretch'd at Har & Heva's feet in awful death".

Characters

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 believed that up to page 8, line 4, the poem is a fair copy, transcribed from somewhere else, but at 8:4 the quantity of corrections and alterations increases, and the writing becomes scribbled and in a different ink to the rest of the poem. This difference has led Erdman to argue that the later part of the poem was not transcribed, but was worked out in the manuscript itself, and may have been 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.
A considerable amount of material has been deleted by Blake in the manuscript. For example, when Tiriel initially arrives in the Vales of 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". 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", to which Tiriel responds "Tiriel I never saw but once I sat with him and ate". Between these two lines were 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 the Vales of Har. 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". However, originally, Ijim begins
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". Originally, however, between these two lines was
A major question concerning the manuscript is whether or not Blake ever intended to illuminate it. Whether he had devised his method for 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. Peter Ackroyd suggests that the illustrations, "conceived in the heroic style," were inspired by the work of James Barry and George Romney, both of whom Blake admired and were intended for illustration rather than illumination. Most scholars agree with this theory and it has been suggested that Blake abandoned the project when he discovered the technique to realise his desire for full integration of text and image. His first relief etching was The Approach of Doom, and his first successful combination of words and pictures were All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion, but they were experiments only. His first 'real' illuminated book was The Book of Thel and it is possible that he abandoned Tiriel to work on Thel after making his breakthrough with All Religions and Natural Religion. 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

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." Elements of his later mythology are thus manifested throughout the poem.
Although Northrop Frye speculates that the Vales of Har are located in Ethiopia, due to the pyramids in the illustration Tiriel supporting Myratana, S. Foster Damon believes the poem to be set in Egypt, which is a symbol of slavery and oppression throughout Blake's work. For example, in The Book of Urizen, after the creation of mortal man,
Similarly, in The Book of Los, Urizen is imprisoned within "Coldness, darkness, obstruction, a Solid/Without fluctuation, hard as adamant/Black as marble of Egypt; impenetrable". Many years later, in On Virgil, Blake claims that "Sacred Truth has pronounced that Greece & Rome as Babylon & Egypt: so far from being parents of Arts & Sciences as they pretend: were destroyers of all Art." Similarly, in The Laocoön, he writes "The Gods of Greece & Egypt were Mathematical Diagrams," "These are not the Works/Of Egypt nor Babylon Whose Gods are the Powers of this World. Goddess, Nature./Who first spoil & then destroy Imaginative Art For their Glory is War and Dominion" and "Israel delivered from Egypt is Art delivered from Nature & Imitation."
Another connection to Blake's later mythology is found in The Vales of Har, which are mentioned in The Book of Thel. It is in the Vales where lives Thel herself, and throughout the poem they are represented as a place of purity and innocence; "I walk through the vales of Har. and smell the sweetest flowers". At the end of the poem, when Thel is shown the world of experience outside the Vales, she panics and flees back to the safety of her home; "The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek./Fled back unhinderd till she came into the vales of Har".
The characters of Har and Heva also reappear in the Africa section of The Song of Los, which is set chronologically before Tiriel. Disturbed by the actions of their family, Har and Heva flee into the wilderness, and turn into reptiles;
Damon refers to this transformation as turning them into "serpents of materialism," which he relates back to their role in Tiriel.
Har and Ijim are also briefly mentioned in Vala, or The Four Zoas, where Har is the sixteenth son of Los and Enitharmon, and Ijim the eighteenth. Har's immediate father is Satan, representative of self-love in Blake, and his children are Ijim and Ochim.
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, embodiment of tradition and conformity, and a central character in Blake's mythology, appearing in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America a Prophecy, Europe a Prophecy, The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los, The Song of Los, Vala, or The Four Zoas, Milton a Poem, and Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion. 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; "all imaginative activity based on the senses disappears except automatic sexual reproduction. Even this proves too much for his moral virtue." As Damon elaborates, "Hela's Medusan locks are the torturing thoughts of suppressed lust." The corruption of the senses plays an important role throughout Europe a Prophecy, The Book of Urizen, The Song of Los, The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.
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." In The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem, after the Fall of the primeval man, Albion, he is divided fourfold, and each of the four Zoas corresponds to a point on the compass and an aspect of Fallen man; Tharmas is west, Urizen is south, Luvah is east and Urthona is north.
Another subtle connection with the later mythological system is found when Tiriel has all but thirty of his sons killed; "And all the children in their beds were cut off in one night/Thirty of Tiriels sons remaind. to wither in the palace/Desolate. Loathed. Dumb Astonishd waiting for black death". Damon believes this foreshadows The Book of Urizen, where Urizen brings about the fall of the thirty cities of Africa; "And their thirty cities divided/In form of a human heart", "And the thirty cities remaind/Surrounded by salt floods".
Another minor connection to the later mythology is that 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?" is found as the final line of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ; "One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression."

Critical interpretations

Tiriel has provoked a number of divergent critical responses. For example, according to G.E. 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." Making much the same point, W.H. Stevenson argues that "the theme is not clearly related to any political, philosophical, religious or moral doctrine."
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 believes the poem illustrates 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; "in France the people in motion were compelling the King to relax his grasp on the spectre. In England, the royal grasp had suddenly failed but there seemed nothing for the people to do but wait and see when the King's recovery was celebrated, a bit prematurely, in March 1789, "happiness" was again official. Popular movements did exist, but except for the almost subterranean strike of the London blacksmiths for a shorter workday, they were largely humanitarian or pious in orientation and in no immediate sense revolutionary." He also feels the poem deals with "the internal disintegration of despotism," and finds a political motive in Tiriel's final speech, which he sees as inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, or On Education.
Anne Kostelanetz Mellor also reads the poem as a political tract, although from a very different perspective than Erdman. She argues that the poem engages with "Blake's increasing uncertainty about both the social and the aesthetic implications of a closed form or system" and concludes with the edict that Tiriel's "repressive reign of deceit, slander, discontent and despair enslaves not only the ruled but the ruler as well his closed mind, chained to closed palaces and legal systems ends by destroying both itself and everything over which it gains power. In this sense, she reads Tiriel's final speech as "reflecting the agony of a self trapped in the repressive social mores and intellectual absolutism of eighteenth century England."
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."
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."
Alicia Ostriker believes that the poem deals with "the failure of natural law."
Perhaps the most common theory, however, 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" 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 and painting." Additionally, Har sings in a "great cage", which to Damon suggests the heroic couplet, which Blake abhorred. Hilton believes the phrase "great cage" recalls the poem 'Song: "How sweet I roamd from field to field"' from Poetical Sketches, which also deals with oppression and failure to achieve fulfillment. Similarly, in this same line of interpretation, Ostriker argues that "our singing birds" and "fleeces" suggest neoclassical lyric poetry and pastoral poetry, while Erdman argues that "To catch birds & gather them ripe cherries" "signifies triviality and sacchurnity of subject matter", whilst "sing in the great cage" "signifies rigidity of form."

Adaptations

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

Citations