The Poet 205
As the layers of the Selfhood peel away in Blake’s self- analy sis,
more possibilities open up for him. He comes to understand what
is happening in the cultural world at large. Satan has taken the
harrow away from Palambron: the bureaucrat has displaced the
artist. Blake knows who his enemy is and must be. He sees that he’s
in a real fi ght, that his side is losing culture (and culture is everything
to Blake), and that he had best join battle. But as the poem deepens,
Blake sees that it is not simply himself against the world. The world
has also colonized William Blake: witness his friendship with
Hayley. Blake now sees that he is his own foe, as well as his own
champion. That perception brings strength. Every time Blake cracks
through an illusion in this poem, he grows more potent. He is able
to see further, to love, and to experience joy. The victory of insight
does away with homosexual investment in Hayley and makes the
generative love for his wife and his Emanation more potent. Peel
away illusion: become stronger. Become stronger: be able to em-
brace more plea sure, beauty, and joy. Exorcize paranoia and be
happier and more responsive to being.
What Blake depicts as Urizen, Freud might think of as a coldly
oppressive superego. Freud might see the strug gle against that agent
of oppression as a critical part of therapy. But Freud believed
that only the smallest change in the superego could take place— and
that it might require years to happen. (“Where super- ego was, there
ego shall be,” might be a fi tting slogan for Freud’s late career ap-
proach to therapy. In other words, where unconscious, cruel judg-
ment was, reasonable self- evaluation will be.) Freud could never
believe that in that pro cess of change love could play an au then tic
part. Freud often speaks disparagingly of the “cure through love,”
which is something very diff erent from his own cure through self-
knowledge. Freud believed that patients often try to evade the rigors
of therapy by falling in love and achieving temporary happiness— a
happiness they take to be a cure. Blake wants to free himself totally