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Creator:
Print made by William Blake, 1757–1827
Title:
"It is easier to forgive an enemy..." (Plate 91)
Part Of:

Collective Title: Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Copy E

Date:
1804 to 1820
Materials & Techniques:
Relief etching printed in orange ink, with watercolor and pen and black ink on moderately thick, smooth, cream wove paper
Dimensions:
Sheet: 13 1/2 x 10 3/8 inches (34.3 x 26.4 cm), Plate: 8 3/8 x 5 7/8 inches (21.2 x 15 cm)
Inscription(s)/Marks/Lettering:

Inscribed in orange ink, upper right: "91"

Lettered inside image: "It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend! | The man who permits you to injure him, deserves your vengeance: | He also will recieve it: go Spectre! obey my most secret desire, | Which thou knowest without my speaking ; Go to these Fiends of Righteousness, | Tell them to obey their Humanities, & not pretend Holiness, | When they are murderers: as far as my Hammer & Anvil permit. | Go, tell them that the Worship of God, is honouring his gifts | In other men: & loving the greatest men best, each according | To his Genius, which is the Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other | God, than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity. | He who envies or calumniates, which is murder & cruelty, | Murders the Holy-one; Go tell them this & overthrow their cup, | Their bread, their altar-table, their incense & their oath ; | Their marriage & their baptism, their burial & consecration. | I have tried to make friends by corporeal gifts but have only | Made enemies: I never made friends but by spiritual gifts, | By severe contentions of friendship & the burning fire of thought. | He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children, | One first, in friendship & love : then a Divine Family, & in the midst | Jesus will appear; so he who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole, | Must see it in its Minute Particulars: Organized, & not as thou, | O Fiend of Righteousness, pretendest: thine is a Disorganized | And snowy cloud, brooder of tempests & destructive War. | You smile with pomp & rigor: you talk of benevolence & virtue; | I act with benevolence & Virtue & get murder'd time after time. | You accumulate Particulars, & murder by analyzing, that you | May take the aggregate: & you call the aggregate Moral Law: | And you call that swell'd & bloated Form a Minute Particular. | But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars: & every | Particular is a Man : a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus. | So Los cried at his Anvil in the horrible darkness weeping. | The Spectre builded stupendous Works, taking the Starry Heavens | Like to a curtain & folding them according to his will, | Repeating the Smaragdine Table of Hermes to draw Los down | Into the Indefinite, refusing to believe without demonstration. | Los reads the Stars of Albion ! the Spectre reads the Voids | Between the Stars: among the arches of Albion's Tomb sublime | Rolling the Sea in rocky paths: forming Leviathan | And Behemoth; the War by Sea enormous & the War | By Land astounding: erecting pillars in the deepest Hell, | To reach the heavenly arches; Los beheld undaunted, furious, | His heav'd Hammer: he swung it round & at one blow, | In unpitying ruin driving down the pyramids of pride, | Smiting the Spectre on his Anvil & the integuments of his Eye | And Ear unbinding in dire pain, with many blows, | Of strict severity self-subduing, & with many tears labouring. | Then he sent forth the Spectre: all his pyramids were grains | Of sand & his pillars, dust on the fly's wing: & his starry | Heavens, a moth of gold & silver mocking his anxious grasp. | Thus Los alter'd his Spectre, & every Ratio of his Reason | He alter'd time after time, with dire pain & many tears, | Till he had completely divided him into a separate space. | Terrified Los sat to behold, trembling & weeping & howling. | I care not whether a Man is Good or Evil; all that I care | Is whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool. Go, put off Holiness | And put on Intellect: or my thund'rous Hammer shall drive thee | To wrath which thou condemnest: till thou obey my voice. | So Los terrified cries; trembling & weeping & howling: Beholding."

Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1992.8.1(91)
Classification:
Prints
Collection:
Prints and Drawings
Subject Terms:
leaf | literary theme | men | nudes | religious and mythological subject | sinews | star | sun | text | vines
Access:
Accessible in the Study Room [Request]
Link:
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:3527
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William Blake (Tate Britain, 2000-11-02 - 2001-02-04) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

The Human Form Divine - William Blake from the Paul Mellon Collection (Yale Center for British Art, 1997-04-02 - 1997-07-06) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

Peter Otto, Multiplying worlds, romanticism, modernity, and the emergence of virtual reality , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, pp. 208-14, fig. 8.5, PN769 R7 O77 2011 (YCBA) [YCBA]


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