Milton, a Poem

by Robert N. Essick

The core of William Blake's vision, his greatness as one of the British Romantics, is most fully expressed in his Illuminated Books, masterworks of art and text intertwined and mutually enriching. Made possible by recent advances in printing and reproduction technology, the publication of new editions of Jerusalem and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1991 was a major publishing event. Now these two volumes are followed by The Early Illuminated Books and Milton, A Poem. The books in both volumes are reproduced from the best available copies of Blake's originals and in faithfulness and accuracy match the acclaimed standards set by Jerusalem and Songs. These two volumes are uniform in format and binding with the first two volumes.The Early Illuminated Books comprises All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion; Thel; Marriage of Heaven and Hell; and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Milton, A Poem, second only to Jerusalem in extent and ambition, is accompanied by Laocon, The Ghost of Abel, and On Homer's Poetry. The Illuminated Books of William Blake will be completed by the publication of a fifth volume, containing six more books, early in 1994.David Bindman is Durning-Lawrence Professor of the History of Art at University College, London. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi are Professors of English at, respectively, University of Rochester, University of California at Riverside, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.From reviews of Jerusalem and Songs of Innocence and of Experience: "[Blake's] illuminated books, parables of earthly life, were peopled with fanciful creatures drawn from an elaborate invented mythology. Blake published theseworks himself, but his ambition to reach a wide audience was never realized. Now the William Blake Trust, in association with Princeton University Press, has initiated a five-volume facsimile series. . . . The first two volumes . . . are now available. Produced with meticulous care, each has a brief introduction. Each volume also contains exquisite reproductions of the original plates, a new transcription of Blake's text and scholarly but accessible plate-by- plate commentaries."--Andrea Barnet, The New York Times Book Review"The color printing is exceptional."--Lewis Segal, The Los Angeles Times Book Review"In every way this initial release is a triumph. The exquisite images and a lucid text of each volume endow not just Blake's work, but the relationships between word and image, with a crystalline clarity."--Eric Gibson, The Washington Times

Genres: Poetry, Romanticism, Classics, Mysticism, Art, Religion, Epic

234 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1810

Reviews

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read here: https://genius.com/William-blake-milt...

Slight alterations for the modern day, indulge me if you will, only please understand that not many will pity and forgive - and eternity gives naught a fig.

AND all the Writs of Mueller sounded comfortable notes
To comfort USA's lamentation, for they said:
Are you the Dotard Trump that late drove in fury & fire
The Brave Everyday Citizens down into Swampy dark,
Rending the Heavens of Mueller with your thunders & lightnings?
And can you thus lament & can you pity & forgive?
Is terror chang'd to pity, O wonder of Eternity ?

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another very long poem that mixes Blake's own mythos with some real world figures and places. It apes Dante's Divine Comedy in that the spirit (I think) of John Milton is Blake's guide through all these fantastical places and events.

Blake really was relying on his readers having read all his previous work (other than his juvenilia) as it really isn't new reader friendly. It assumes you already know who Los, Urizen and the like are. I did as I'm going through Blake's work in chronological order but I'm not sure how much sense somebody reading this as their first Blake would make of it.

The reason I've only given it 3 stars is because I found it a bit of a slog to get through. I even gave myself some 'days off' because I felt like I was getting bogged down in it all. It's the first time I've felt like this with Blake's stuff, so perhaps I need a few days away before I come back to his next book.

Los listens to the Cry of the Poor Man: his Cloud
Over London in volume terrific, low bended in anger.
Rintrah & Palamabron view the Human Harvest beneath.
Their Wine-presses & Barns stand open: the Ovens are prepar'd:
The Waggons ready: terrific Lions & Tygers sport & play:
All Animals upon the Earth are prepar'd in all their strength
To go forth to the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations...

[Connor Lougheed · Rating 3 out of 5]

MILTON - William Blake (1810): 6
One of Blake's so-called 'Prophetic Books,' 'Milton' is a fascinating epic poem based on the writer of 'Paradise Lost,' John Milton—although it is not centered around him entirely. This isn't Dante's 'Inferno,' although Milton does go to hell. Instead, half of the poem (Book The First), relates how Blake's personal mythological gods created humanity and spread religion. Only the second, much shorter half follows Milton's dive into the depths in any detail. This second half is as vivid as the first, if not more, considering it is less cluttered with references. The purpose of this book is simple, and obvious once finished: in the beginning, Blake criticizes Milton for debasing Christianity with his depiction of Satan; in the end, Blake's Milton has seen Blake's gods and Blake's Jesus, and comes to agree with Blake about Jerusalem returning to Albion—at effectively any cost. (This final vision is quite disturbing, considering current events . . .)

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly one reading isn't enough :/

[alli · Rating 4 out of 5]

i couldn’t describe it even if i wanted to. everything an epic should be

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I basically discovered this work because a church minister brought up a William Blake hymn about ‘dark satanic mills’ during a Bible study I was attending on Matthew’s Gospel. It was during a discussion about the child labour rampant during the Industrial Revolution, something I would later read a lot about in Mother Jones’ Autobiography. Anyhow, I’ve only recently learnt about William Blake’s anti-colonial tendencies and his radical allusions to revolutionary politics. I was working on an audio piece on the Missinihe (Credit River) for the past couple months, and how the mills along the river destroyed the ecosystems indigenous communities relied on. So I was immediately interested upon hearing about these ‘dark satanic mills’. I ended up interviewing the minister about this hymn that uses the opening verses of this fairly long poem by William Blake. The conversation eventually led to him telling about how Dudley George’s family was a part of his congregation during the Ipperwash Crisis, and how horrifying it was for the indigenous community when Dudley George was shot and killed by police. I think it’s useful to connect the horror that unfolded under the colonization of Turtle Island with the atrocities committed against the poor and working classes back in Britain and even in the US. I have been reading Engel’s Conditions of the Working Class in England, and it was written just one year before the first mill opened in the Meadowvale Village area, a spot along the Missinihe I have been researching for my audio piece. I think Blake’s poetic rendering is very useful vis-a-vis a very concrete and direct documentation of the horrors that Engels saw all around him in his family’s mill in Manchester.

Now this poem was really weird. There were some parts I had to read multiple times, and I still don’t think I really know what this poem is about fully. I know there are contestations regarding the extent this poem is about the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. I think it is and I find it hilarious that Satan is a miller in this poem. Yet Blake certainly is not easy to pin down. I still don’t know what he’s trying to say about Calvinist predestination, Satan, nor the other characters in his mythological world. I am obsessed with the hymn Jerusalem now though. I sing it to myself all the time, often Billy Bragg style. Good tune.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Step nine on Benjamin McEvoy's William Blake reading path is where the road becomes genuinely difficult — and genuinely extraordinary. Milton: A Poem in Two Books (c. 1804–1811) is a different order of experience from everything that has preceded it on this journey. The Continental Prophecies were strange; The Book of Urizen was dense; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was provocative. Milton is all of these things at once, and then something more: a work of staggering formal ambition that fuses autobiography, literary criticism, theological argument, and prophetic vision into a single illuminated poem. I will be honest with you: I did not fully understand it on first reading. I went, unabashedly, to outside resources — Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry , Harold Bloom's The Visionary Company, and especially Mary Lynn Johnson's essay "Milton and Its Contexts" in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake — and I came back to the text substantially more illuminated, if you will forgive the pun. What a madcap, brilliant, beautiful work. Even where it confused me, it engrossed me.

The poem begins with what has become, through an extraordinary historical accident, England's unofficial national anthem. The preface opens with sixteen lines known today simply as "Jerusalem":

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?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

When Blake wrote these lines in 1804, they went largely unnoticed. In 1916 they were set to music by Sir Hubert Parry, who had been looking for a rousing tune to rally British troops — and Jerusalem was born. The suffragette movement subsequently claimed it; the labor movement sang it at rallies; it became the anthem of the Women's Institute; it is now sung at cricket matches and rugby grounds across England. Almost none of the people singing it have read the poem it introduces. This is fitting, in a Blakean way — the visionary's work perpetually misread and conscripted for purposes he never intended.

As Mary Lynn Johnson explains in "Milton and Its Contexts," the lines are not a simple patriotic poem but a call to spiritual and artistic warfare. The reference to "those feet" draws on the ancient legend that Christ visited England — specifically Glastonbury — and the "dark Satanic Mills" refers not only to the factories of industrialization but to the reductive mechanisms of Newtonian physics, Lockean philosophy, and established religion that Blake identified throughout his prophetic books as the forces of Urizen (Johnson, 2006, p. 237). "Mental Fight" is the poem's central term: the war Blake is calling for is imaginative, not military, and its object is not English nationalism but the building of a spiritual paradise on earth.

What the preface poem announces, the epic itself dramatizes — and in the strangest possible way. Blake's Milton is the only extended literary work in English, or perhaps in any language, that features a poet as protagonist and title character. John Milton (1608–1674), dead for over a century, has been in heaven for a hundred years and is, in Blake's mordant phrase, "unhappy tho in heav'n" (Johnson, 2006, p. 232) — trapped in the convoluted moral scoring system of the paradise he had imagined in Paradise Lost, mired in theological abstractions, separated from his emanation Ololon. When a Bard's prophetic song is sung at the eternal tables, Milton recognizes the worst aspects of himself in the song's villain — his own selfhood, his own Urizen — and makes his decision: he will descend back into the world to correct his errors. He announces, twice, "I go to Eternal Death!" (Johnson, 2006, p. 241), and falls.

He falls into Blake's foot.

This is the moment that stops every new reader of the poem in their tracks, and rightly so. Milton descends as a falling star and enters Blake "at the tarsus" of his left foot — an allusion, as Johnson notes, to the Damascus Road conversion of Paul of Tarsus (Johnson, 2006, p. 243). Blake includes himself in the poem not as narrator but as participant:

But Milton entering my Foot, I saw in the nether
Regions of the Imagination; also all men on Earth
And all in Heaven, saw in the nether regions of the Imagination,
In Ulro beneath Beulah, the vast breach of Milton's descent.
(Plate 21:4-7)

The two poets are now fused. Milton moves through Blake toward the fallen world to correct his errors and reclaim Ololon; Blake moves toward his visionary city of Golgonooza. In cinema-style jump-cuts, flashbacks, flash-forwards, and speeded-up and stop-motion replays, each poet participates in the self-transformation of the other, and both gain insight into unresolved contradictions in the historical Milton's life, work, and critical reputation that have impeded the transmission of his prophetic legacy to Blake's generation.

Why Milton specifically, rather than Chaucer, Spenser, or Shakespeare? Johnson's answer is illuminating: Milton was the only one of Blake's great predecessors to align himself with the Biblical prophets, and to combine the roles of poet, prophet, and political radical. But Milton had also, in Blake's view, made a catastrophic error in Paradise Lost — an error Blake had identified as early as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Milton was "of the Devils party without knowing it." His Christ in Paradise Lost is a "coolly rational Governor," and his Satan carries all the genuine creative and revolutionary energy of the poem. Milton had "relegate[d] revolutionary energy to the realm of the diabolic" (Johnson, 2006, p. 234). The purpose of Blake's poem is to bring Milton back to correct this — to have him recognize his own Selfhood as Satan, annihilate it, and reclaim his full humanity and prophetic power.

The poem's formal ambitions are staggering. Johnson's essay is indispensable here, and I cannot recommend it too strongly to anyone who has read this far and intends to continue. She describes the "Bard's prophetic Song" that occupies much of Book I as involving a "titanic family brawl" among Los's sons Rintrah, Palamabron, and Satan, whose dispute recapitulates Blake's critique of predestination, the doctrine of vicarious atonement, and the Calvinist division of humanity into Elect, Redeemed, and Reprobate (Johnson, 2006, pp. 238–240). This is the hardest section of the poem, and Johnson is right to warn readers that it may require multiple passes.

The poem's most beautiful passages come in Book II, where Ololon descends in search of Milton and Blake records the natural world of his garden at Felpham, Sussex — where he and Catherine Blake lived from 1800 to 1803 — in verse of astonishing lyrical power:

Thou hearest the Nightingale begin the Song of Spring:
The Lark sitting upon his earthly bed, just as the morn
Appears, listens silent, then springing from the waving Cornfield! loud
He leads the Choir of Day: trill, trill, trill, trill,
Mounting upon the wings of light into the Great Expanse,
Reechoing against the lovely blue & shining heavenly Shell.
His little throat labours with inspiration; every feather
On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the effluence Divine:
All Nature listens silent to him, & the awful Sun
Stands still upon the Mountain looking on this little Bird
With eyes of soft humility & wonder, love & awe.
…This is a Vision of the Lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.
(Plate 31:28-40)

These lines are among the most beautiful Blake ever wrote. The lark ascending — every feather vibrating with the "effluence Divine" — is Blake at the absolute height of his lyric power, and it arrives in the middle of a poem so dense and strange it can leave you breathless. This is characteristic of Milton: passages of pure radiance opening suddenly in the midst of prophetic argument.

The poem closes on an apocalyptic convergence. Milton and Ololon finally meet in Blake's garden; Milton annihilates his Selfhood; and the Starry Eight merge into Jesus the Saviour, who enters Albion's Bosom to begin the awakening of England from its deathly sleep:

Then as a Moony Ark Ololon descended to Felpham's Vales,
In clouds of blood, in streams of gore, with dreadful thunderings.
Into the Fires of Intellect that rejoic'd in Felpham's Vale
Around the Starry Eight: with one accord the Starry Eight became
One Man, Jesus the Saviour, wonderful! round his limbs
The Clouds of Ololon folded as a Garment dipped in blood,
Written within & without in woven letters…
And the Immortal Four in whom the Twenty-four appear Four-fold
Arose around Albion's body: Jesus wept, & walked forth
From Felpham's Vale clothed in Clouds of blood, to enter into
Albion's Bosom, the bosom of death, & the Four surrounded him
In the Column of Fire in Felpham's Vale: then to their mouths the Four
Applied their Four Trumpets, & then sounded to the Four winds.
(Plate 42:7-22)

Blake then wakes — "my Soul return'd into its mortal state / To Resurrection & Judgment in the Vegetable Body" — and the poem ends with the world brought to the verge of "the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations." The apocalypse is imminent. One book remains.

I will be candid about my experience of Milton as a reader and as someone who approached this journey as a committed philosophical materialist and rationalist. Blake's worldview remains, for me, deeply problematic: his rejection of Reason, his subordination of women even in the act of appearing to honor them, his prophetic self-aggrandizement. Johnson closes her essay with a challenge that I found genuinely moving despite my reservations: she calls for a new generation of artist-prophets to do for Blake what Blake did for Milton — correct his errors, free his misdirected energies, and release what is genuinely liberating in his work. That is a generous and intellectually honest invitation. Whatever my objections to the system, the vision is real, and the art is extraordinary. The illuminated plates of Milton — on a whole other level of scope and ambition than anything in the shorter prophetic books — are among the most beautiful things Blake ever made.

One book remains on this journey. The road so far has been extraordinary. The last step is said to be the strangest of all.


Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
The Book of Thel (1789)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)
America: A Prophecy (1793)
Europe: A Prophecy (1794)
The Song of Los (1795)
The Book of Urizen (1794)
Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1804–1811)
Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–1820)



Citations:
Blake, W. (2013). Milton. In The complete illuminated books of William Blake (eBook, pp. 356–466). e-artnow. https://sackett.net/blake-illuminated... (Original work published 1811).

Blake, W. (2012). Milton. In Delphi complete works of William Blake (eBook). Delphi Classics. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00... (Original work published 1811).

Bloom, H. (1961). The visionary company: A reading of English romantic poetry. Doubleday.
Frye, N. (1947). Fearful symmetry: A study of William Blake. Princeton University Press.

Johnson, M. L. (2006). Milton and its contexts. In M. Eaves (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to William Blake (pp. 230–247). Cambridge University Press.

Title: Milton: A Poem in Two Books
Author(s): William Blake (1757–1827)
Year: 1804–1811
Genre: Fiction — Epic Poem
Date(s) read: 5/19/26–5/22/26
Book 104 in 2026

[Angela Randall]

Free ebook and audiobook available here.

[Gille Liath · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was Blake off his bonce? Was he a great spiritual teacher? Or was he just someone who had some fairly commonplace insights, but put them in very colourful, metaphorical, poetic form? This edition very much invites you to ponder the question, framing the poem Milton as a great prophetic, spiritual, classic - and to prove it they have offered 36 pages of commentary including a detailed analysis of the anatomy of the eye. Before that, the original illuminated book is reproduced in facsimile (fairly small, but then a lot of Blake's books were small) - and then the text given in ordinary print.

For me, this was a way to dip my toe in the waters of Blake's 'prophesy', which I feel does need the assistance of his own illustrations and design, without buying the large and expensive complete edition. But I don't believe he was truly a mystic or a prophet, or that one man can make up from scratch a mythology that resonates, or that this poem fulfils the visionary expectations aroused by the plates. It's interesting, but that's all. Actually his best work was done in service of Christianity, on the Book of Job and the Divine Comedy, and for me it would have been better if he'd concentrated on that. But - you pays your money, you takes your choice.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ll have to agree with the great American poet Louis Simpson who pooh-poohed the idea that Blake’s “prophetic” poems were necessarily poetry because Blake was a poet. Clearly they were extremely important to him, but to the rest of us?

[Hazelbautista · Rating 5 out of 5]

love it

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have about the same review for this as I did for Jerusalem (also by Blake)... except this book didn't keep me coming back for more. I'm not sure why, but I didn't really enjoy this one.

[Tuli Márquez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una autentica animalada.

[Bruce · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't like Blake. He seems to be intentionally abstract and confusing.

[Timothy Morrison]

This will take a long time to figure out

[Mollie · Rating 3 out of 5]

really fascinating but MY GOD i don't think i'll ever be able to understand this

[John Bleasdale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really loved reading this. Tough and dense but utterly his own

[joan · Rating 2 out of 5]

File this under Incommunicable Manic Nonsense.
If it’s too complicated, not only can I not understand it, but I suspect you don’t care to make it understood.

[Mitta Xinindlu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost done readıng ıt. Love ıt (:

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent presentation of Blake's Milton with useful commentary and annotations.