‘Self-Imposition’, Alchemy, and the Fate of the ‘Bound’ in Later Blake

Abstract

Figures derived from the concepts of outline and ‘the bounded’ are to be discovered in every period of Blake’s work. I have suggested elsewhere how important is a certain ambiguity about this, especially in the period before about 1800 (Larrissy, 1985). On the one hand, ‘The bounded is loathed by its possessor’ (There is No Natural Religion [b], E2), on the other, ‘Truth has bounds. Error none’ (Book of Los, 4: 30, E92). One thing that can be inferred from this is that Blake feels an ambivalence about his own activity as an artist. He is committed to definiteness and firm outline, and to the idea — for which he finds some Neoplatonic support — that the Infinite can be apprehended through definite form. At the same time he rejects the more essentially Neoplatonic idea that the Infinite is, in the last analysis, incompatible with boundedness. But he is concerned lest he become a priestly Druid rather than a Bard; lest his influence should set bounds to the Infinite for himself and his readers, becoming the cause of ‘imposition’ — an idea about which he was more concerned than The Marriage of Heaven and Hell passages (plates 12 and 20) might suggest.