‘Drawing a third part’: Destruction and Redemption in Milton

Abstract

Audaciously, William Blake rewrites John Milton, his famous literary forbear. On the title page of Milton (see Plate 15), a muscular figure puts his hand into the name of the great English poet and divides it — it becomes MIL/TON. This act neatly figures the ambivalence around which the whole of Milton turns, for the poem performs an act of revision which is both a redemption of Milton as poetic father and a violence committed against him. Indeed, Blake’s Milton seeks both to save Milton from his orthodox errors and to expel him from the literary heaven which he occupies. In this sense, Blake’s hand ironically honours his famous progenitor with a dethronement, ousting him from his heaven in a fall. Thus Milton in Milton tumbles from heaven like a ‘falling star’ (15. 47) in an ironic re-enactment of Milciber’s fall in Paradise Lost: ‘with the setting Sun [he] I Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star’ (Book I. 744–5). As a radically revisionary text, Blake’s Milton usurps the authority of its poetic father’s truth, daringly reinventing him. But this re-invention also involves an act of disinventing, insubordination and violence, and the text gives Milton a new body in a move that, as the title page suggests, also disembodies and unnames him.¹ Insofar as it both celebrates and supplants its poetic father, Blake’s poem amounts to a literary homage and a literary parricide.

And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.

And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth …

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

(Revelation, 12: 3–4, 9)

The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder.

(Freud, Moses and Monotheism)