O Earth, O Earth, Return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;

Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous Mass.

"Songs of Experience" - 1794

When the mythic voice of the Bard cries for the earth to return, he is calling for a grounding of human consciousness through the reestablishment of a reverent relationship to the earth below and the heavens above. This relationship is the most basic prerequisite for a valid ecological awareness.

When it is flouted, disregarded, and even shattered, then the extremes of human degradation and terrestrial pollution become possible.

These were the consequences Blake, the inhabitant of the world of eternal imagination, saw resulting from the new industrialization surrounding him.

Y wander thro' each charter'd street
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe

In every cry of every Man
In every Infant's cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban,
The Mind-forged manacles I hear.

Modern civilization ruled by reason alone is a prison, a true age of darkness:

Every house a den, every man bound: the shadows are fill'd
With spectres, and the windows wove over with curses of iron:

Over the doors "Thou shalt not" & over the chimneys Fear is written:
With bands of iron round their necks fasten'd into the walls

The citizens: in leaden gyres the inhabitants of suburbs
Walk heavy: soft and bent are the bones of the villagers.

A plate engraved by Blake shows, "The Plague" walking through the darkened streets of modern Europe; a wailing woman drags herself beside the striding plague, who rings his somber bell. The woman is anima, the psyche or spirit principle bound in the jail of reason. Not surprisingly, Blake saw Sir Isaac Newton as one of the chief symbolic creators of the modern human condition.

To Blake, Newton represented the enthronement of reason; he was the mythic author of the mechanistic universe that gave rise to the tyranny of materialism, which spread from England to the rest of the world.

I turn my eyes to the Schools & University's of Europe

and there behold the Loom of Locke,
whose Woof rages dire,
wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton :

black the cloth in heavy wreathes folds over every Nation.

...What is singular about Blake's critique is that already in the early stages of the industrialized state he so penetratingly and comprehensively perceived the actual nature of the religion of technological progress.

Marxist criticism, which does not really step out of the dualistic and materialistic mainstream - in fact, embraces it more openly and less hypocritically than capitalism does-- Blake's critique is from a state beyond materialism; and in this lies its greatest value.

All critiques of the present civilization will fail and even become absorbed by that civilization as long as they remain rooted in its basic assumptions, which are those of a dualistic materialism (or spiritualism).

Though Blake would not necessarily deny a dialectical understanding of reality, he would declare dialectical materialism to be false for denying a return to the spirit.

Blake's dialectic is that of heaven and hell, which he conceived to be a unity
- hence the marriage of heaven and hell:

Without Contraries there is no Progression.
Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate,
are necessary to Human existence.

From these Contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil
Good is the passive that obeys Reason.
Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven, Evil is Hell.

Chapter 8. Transformative Vision. page 1..2..3..4..5

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