The Poet 203
but a warrior who sends his enemies tumbling into the fi ery abyss.
The only sweet- natured fi gure in the poem is Eve, whom Milton
draws with genuine tenderness. But then, quite unfairly, he makes
her almost entirely responsible for Adam’s fall and for the fall of
humanity.
To marry Ololon, which Milton has to do if he’s to be saved, is
in a sense to merge with Jesus as Blake took him to be. Embracing
Ololon means leaving behind Urizen and Nobadaddy, Blake’s harsh
versions of Yahweh, and affi rming the Gospels, where forgiveness
and understanding are preeminent. As the critic Laura Quinney
says of Ololon, “She is in part the Divine Voice he had forgotten, and
in part a feminine ‘mildness’ he had exiled from his personality”
(148). The conjunction of Milton and Ololon is the conjunction
of love and wisdom, the two qualities that Blake’s Jesus so amply
possesses.
Having burned through his Self hood, serving his own active time
in purgatory, Blake can stand forth as the man who has thrown off
the rotten rags of memory and the past and lives in pure inspiration.
He’s passed over the fear of being mad, or considered mad. He’s
thrown out the Idiot Questioner— the skeptic within who cannot
commit himself to the faith that Blake has in the Savior. He’s cleared
away Locke and Newton with their appalling reductions— he’s
fl own free. He’s bathed, he says, “in Self- annihilation & the grandeur
of Inspiration” (142). And he has embraced his beloved— without
whom none of these marvelous changes could come to pass. He is
free—or so he believes.
Is Blake’s drama of self- remaking in Milton akin to the transfor-
mation of self that psychoanalysis off ers? Freudian therapy is akin
to Blake’s self- anatomizing in that its objective is to purge the indi-
vidual’s disabling illusions. The patient is often someone who is
prey to idealizations: he invests more hope and energy in love or
religion or god or country than those allegiances can repay. The