------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 103 Today's Topics: Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia -Reply Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia -Reply Re: Poussin's "Et in Arcadia ego" Thel and Arcadia Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia -Reply Re:Re: Thel and Arcadia Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia -Reply -Reply Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia -Reply -Reply Thel and Arcadia -Reply Seeing many Blakes RE: unsubscribe Re: Seeing many Blakes Thel and Triel Re: Thel and Triel ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 20:02:12 MET From: "D.W. DOERRBECKER" To: Alexander Gourlay , blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia Message-Id: <36C3F3A0D5C@netwareserver.uni-trier.de> August 20th, 1996 Hi Sandy (and everyone else): I kinda like the contention in your message of August 5th, that the > vales of Har in the Book of Thel, whatever they are in > Tiriel, are a place where beings live and die, and love if > they're smart. It is a version of Arcadia, not heaven or > preexistence. [...] there is no question that Thel is > heading in the right > direction at the end. However, your mention of Arcadia, and especially of dying in Arcadia, immediately brings to mind the topos of ET IN ARCADIA EGO. In Poussin's famous painting (two versions, one of which would have been known to Blake through a reproductive engraving I should think) the shepherds trace the incised inscription on a sarcophagus and thus learn about the presence of Death (the wrong pit?) *in* Arcadia. (Neither Worm, nor Cloud are involved in Poussin's picture story, but a `Muse of Temporality' apparently is needed to teach them Grecian shepherds some Latin.) Instead of the sarcophagus and the inscription Domenichino's (slightly earlier) painting "Et in Arcadia Ego" has a skull which is found by two Arcadian shepherds, reminding them of mortality. But in Poussin's composition (including the narrative of the foremost shepherd's pointing finger and the shadow that this finger casts on the inscription) the slowly measured process of understanding (just who is it, who's present *even* in Arcadia?) appears to be the painter's central concern. And a similar process seems to be Blake's theme in *Thel*, too. If indeed the vales of Har are "a version of Arcadia", then isn't Thel refusing to learn the (rationalist) lession of the ET IN ARCADIA EGO [SUM] of Death? And isn't this just what the `Hazard-ous' reading states? (See Bruder 1994 for a full list of all the others favouring such a reading.) At the end, Thel is running away, back to Arcadia -- but can that be the "right direction" if, all things considered, the mortality rate in Arcadia is probably more or less the same as in "Experience"? All of which is to say that the myth of Arcadia may not be the ideal analogy for the vales of Har if indeed one intends to follow either Helen Bruder's feminist reading of *Thel* (which--at the Strawberry Hill conference we both attended--I thought was witty and dangerously intelligent, fully convincing as an exposition of the chauvinism inherent in much Blake criticism, but not necessarily convincing as an interpretation of Blake's visual/verbal text) or Pamela van Schaik's reading of the poem in the light of the Kabbala (which I'd prefer to see in print before commenting on it). Hope all's well in Providence! -- DWD ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 01:45:17 -0400 From: TomD3456@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia Message-Id: <960821014515_506394649@emout07.mail.aol.com> Detlef- Thanks for your contribution to the Thel discussion, which continues to evolve in interesting directions. Since I have always found the poem puzzling, I am glad to see how differently it can be read. But right now, my main question is: Could you tell me where the phrase "Et in Arcadia ego" comes from? Is it a tag in some famous Latin poem, or did Domenichino (or some earlier artist) invent it? Or where would one look to find out? --Tom Devine ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 09:08:51 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, agourlay@risd.edu, DOERRBEC@uni-trier.de Subject: Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia -Reply Message-Id: I found what you said on Poissin and Arcadia very interesting. I shall try to find specific things I've written on Thel and put them up here or on the Website -when I get a chance to get further with that. I would still like to hear how those who read Thel differently account for Oothoon's lament - what vision of love is arousing her nostalgia and deepest yearning if not the divine vision of love in Innocence? And what of the Sunflower? Then there are the many lamentations of the fallen emanations, all of whom are recalling the divine humanity of sleeping Albion and begging Urizen to return and awaken, and Blake's own appeals to rebuild Jerusalem. All of these are related, not separate , issues - surely? If not, then a new Blake has to be created for every occasion - reinvented to give scope to whatever reading has gained vogue. Pam ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 08:40:05 -0400 (EDT) From: "Avery F. Gaskins" To: Subject: Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia -Reply Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Content-Type: Text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Sandy Gourlay and I have been chatting privately working on some problems relat ed to this question. I hope he won't mind if I make some of my "take" on the situation public, and I invite him to post his as well. Has anyone ever mapped the geography of Har? If not, somebody could do us all a great service by doing so. Here's why. I can't tell if "The Vales of Har" constitute all of Har, or are merely a region of Har (as in The Lake District of England). Thel's en- counters with the Cloud, Pebble etc. are outside the vales, but do they take place outside Har? Are we to consider all the residents of Har eternals? If so, how can there be death in Har? I think you can see where I am going. My reading of BOT has depended on seeing the vales as all of Har and a place where there is no death. Once she leaves the vales, she is in a place where mortality is a possibility. I have always read it as being the mundane world. In that, I can see now that I could be wrong, if Thel is still, indeed, in Har. I confess I have not read all the refereces to Har in Blake's work. Has anyone found an incidence of death in Har in any of the poems? If so, all my questions become moot. Avery Gaskins ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 15:03:31 MET From: "D.W. DOERRBECKER" To: TomD3456@aol.com, blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Poussin's "Et in Arcadia ego" Message-Id: <37F4566110A@netwareserver.uni-trier.de> WARNING: THIS MESSAGE CONCERNS A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTER (whom Blake respected and thought of with some admiration); HIGH CHURCH LOVERS OF BLAKE'S ART AND POETRY NEED NOT BOTHER ABOUT WHAT FOLLOWS! Earlier today, on August 21st, 1996, Tom Devine asked one > main question [...]: Could you tell me where the phrase "Et in > Arcadia ego" comes from? Is it a tag in some famous Latin > poem, or did [Guercino] (or some earlier artist) invent it? > Or where would one look to find out? To start with, a *captatio benevolentiae* seems in place. Though I've looked intensely at many Poussin paintings over the past twenty years or so, I'm definitely not a specialist in the field of seventeenth-century Franco-Roman Baroque painting. As proof for this statement, I'm obliged, unfortunately, to begin with the following correction of my previous communication: Whereas I attributed the Roman Baroque painting which antedates Poussin's two versions of the subject at Chatsworth, Devon. and in the Louv' to Domenichino, it was actually painted sometime between 1621 and 1623 by Domenichino's contemporary, Francesco Barbieri, detto il Guercino; today, this *memento mori* can be seen at the National Gallery in Rome. But now, let me try to provide a few hints which may help to answer Tom Devine's "main question": The standard art historical introduction to the iconography of ET IN ARCADIA EGO is, to the best of my knowledge, Erwin Panofsky's 1936 discussion of Poussin and "the conception of transcience", reprinted in his *Meaning in the Visual Arts* (New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955/many subsequent impressions). In his opening paragraphs Panofsky usefully draws attention to Reynolds's use of the phrase in a portrait of Mrs. Bouverie and Mrs. Crewe (1769), to King George III.'s "correct" interpretation of the concept in Reynolds's design, to Dr. Johnson's bewilderment (ah, the Doctor again!), and to Felicia Hemans's rephrasing (which identifies the speaker of that EGO [SUM] not with Death, but with an Arcadian shepherdess and thus inaugurates a modern understanding of the quotation which has also been attributed to Goethe as the motto for his *Voyage in Italy*). Among the possible literary sources examined by Panofsky are, of course, Theocritus's *Idylls* and Vergil's fifth *Eclogue*. Closer to Poussin is Jacopo Sannazaro's *Arcadia*, a poem first published in Venice in 1502. However, the phrasing of ET IN ARCADIA EGO does not seem to date back to antiquity or the Italian Renaissance; apparently, it is the inscription in Guercino's painting where the phrase was used for the very first time. Panofsky has suggested that it was invented by the humanist poet and then future Pope Clement IX., Giulio Rospigliosi, who commissioned Guercino's painting in the early 1620s. According to Panofsky, the two versions of ET IN ARCADIA EGO painted by Poussin have to be "read" quite differently; in the earlier Chatsworth version Poussin is said to have adopted Guercino's (and/or Rospigliosi's) understanding by interpreting an ET IN ARCADIA [SUM], whereas for the second painting in Paris Panofsky wants us to see Poussin as musing about an ET IN ARCADIA [VIXI or FUI]. Whatever you make of this distinction, both paintings certainly address the presence of Death (even) in Arcadia. My own favourite exegesis of Poussin's painted Arcadian discourse is by Oskar Baetschmann (see his *Dialektik in der Malerei von Nicolas Poussin*, ["Jahrbuch: Schweizerisches Institut fuer Kunstwissenschaft"; 1978-1979], Munich, W. Ger.: Prestel, 1982: 64-70; Baetschmann's book has been translated, revised, and expanded in an English-language version; you can probably find the respective references quite easily in *Books in Print*). Among more recent "readings" of the painting(s) are David Carrier's critique of Panofsky in *Poussin's Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Method* (University Park, Penn. and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993: 29- 35, 169-172, and passim) and Pierre Rosenberg's account in the "monumental" catalogue for the retrospective exhibition *Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665*, shown at the Grand Palais in 1994-1995 (Paris, Fr.: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1994: ##11 and 93, with extensive references to the earlier literature on both works and pretty good colour reproductions). A brief discussion of these two works, and references for the earlier catalogues of Poussin's paintings by Grautoff, Blunt, Thuillier, and Wild, can also be found in Christopher Wright's *Poussin Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonne* (New York, N.Y.: Hippocrene Books, 1985: ##54 and 104), a volume which in most respects (and compared to the information provided by Blunt or Wild) I think is rather disappointing. -- DW Doerrbecker ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 11:51:54 -0400 (EDT) From: Alexander Gourlay To: Blake Online Subject: Thel and Arcadia Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I see that Detlef has lately posted a review of some of the following, but this isn't exactly the same information, though I cover matters raised in both of his posts -- Dear Detlef and others interested in Thel and Arcadia: Don't get me started. Actually . . .too late! now I am started. Needless to say, I think that the best source for discussions of Thel and versions of Arcadia is an article I wrote with Jack Grant when I was a pup, in _Bulletin of Research in the Humanities_ 85:2 (Summer 1982) -- (also an addendum in 86:2), which takes two versions of the motif -- a Reynolds portrait and Blake's title page for _Thel_ -- and treats them together (along with the imaginary or misattributed "Poussin" described in Du Bos's influential essay on the subject, a wierd tableau vivant recreation of it by George Keate, and others). Panofsky's essay in _Meaning in the Visual Arts_ is the place to start on "Et in Arcadia Ego," the subject in which ignorant but not necessarily innocent Arcadian shepherds (at first male, but later both sexes) stumble upon something that shows that Death is even in carefree Arcadia -- their variously mystified, shocked, remorseful, and melancholy reactions to the discovery are supposed to edify modern sophisticates for whom familiarity with death has bred contempt. "Et in Arcadia Ego" probably meant "I [am] even in Arcadia" to Guercino when he put it on a pedestal with a Death's Head, and it was to be understood as the voice of Death. Because the Arcadians aren't big readers, they often don't quite get it, but the implication is that they will do so in spite of small Latin. As the subject was used by later artists like Poussin the reminder of Death became a tomb, and in Du Bos a woman's tomb, and people began to read the phrase as something like "I [was] also in Arcadia," and to attribute it to a dead shepherdess (and to focus on the response of a female Arcadian). Louis Marin has argued in _The Reader in the Text_ that the phrase is elaborately ambiguous in spite of Panofsky's insistence that it can only be understood as the voice of Death. Jack and I claimed that the sentimental, female-centered version of the motif that developed in response to Du Bos was further (and independently) transformed by Keate, Reynolds, and Blake into a subject in which a maiden shepherdess contemplates sex/death. In the Reynolds a pretty portrait shepherdess leans on a monument with a sarcophagus-style bas-relief showing a loosely draped collapsing woman (derived from the sacrificed "Iphigenia" on the Medici Vase) being stabbed by Cupid (derived from Giulio Romano's Cupid in the Palazzo del Te). We claimed (and have been shat on from various heights for this) that Reynolds was subtly introducing a surprising reference to the recent early death in childbirth of the first wife of the man the "shepherdess" was about to marry -- that after a dark night of worrying about whether or not she would meet the same fate, she was turning away from the tomb at right and deciding (like Hercules in the Choice of Hercules) to take a hint from the sunrise and the lambs playing in the background at left -- that is, to get married and take her chances with death. I still think that all this was in Reynolds's mind, but I doubt that Blake ever saw the picture (_Anne Dashwood_, now in the Metropolitan in New York). Blake's version, in the title page of _Thel_, shows a sad shepherdess under a weeping willow in contemplation of a scene that we can recognize as the rape/murder of a female anemone-spirit by an impetuous flying male, which David Erdman and others have shown to be a response to Erasmus Darwin's account in the Botanic Garden of the rape of the maiden Anemone by Zephyr. But Thel's listless response suggests that she knows only what chastened Arcadians know about death -- that she sees anemones merely as emblems of short-lived beauty and early death -- and that she is oblivious to the sexual dimension of the death of these famously ephemeral flowers. To get back to Avery's and Detlef's remarks, I think that _Thel_ is a dialogue of the deaf, or at least partly so, in that Thel just can't hear what the voices of Nature are telling her -- that Death is not just a nasty rotting process as it appears to ignorant Arcadians, but that it is both sexual and transcendental (and at least temporarily brutal and nasty in some cases). She never responds to anything the voices say about sex or transcendence because she is so focussed on what happens to the mortal part in the pit, the locus of Death for her. I do think that the Vales of Har in _Thel_ are a special place -- not Arcadia -- in that there are no human males in them. That suggests that we should understand "femaleness" in the poem as a metaphor, and that the universal male Luvah and divinely inspired males in nature are represented as divine energy leading cold, low, weak material "females" -- brides of the Luvah/Christ -- to transcendence. In the world of _Thel_ to be a "female" virgin is to be "unopened" in the Swedenborgian sense, and the rending of the virgin veil is compared to the rending of the temple veil, the rupture of all material and materialistic impediments to the divine. But Thel has to persist in her folly before she can even start to get over it, which means that she has to go down into the hole -- like the young folks in Rasselas -- before she finds out that there is nothing there in that fine and private place, and certainly not wisdom, only the echoing voice of her own maiden fear. Like Mary Lynn Johnson I don't think that Blake was trying to say that the moral of _Thel_ is that you should go marry God and make babies. And I don't know exactly where Thel is headed when she leaves the Grave, only that the Grave is something to get out of. And that's why I find Helen Bruder's clever reading to be largely irrelevant to the poem and its pictures, since she wants Thel to be an admirable young feminist and I think gender is largely metaphorical here. There's lots of room for feminist analysis of the way sexual metaphor is played in the poem, and it should certainly be discussed in combination with _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_, where gender is decidedly not metaphorical. Enough and too much Sandy Gourlay ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 11:49:22 -0400 (EDT) From: Benson Smith To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia -Reply Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Avery Gaskins asks how there can be death in Har if all its inhabitants are "eternals". In _Urizen_ (I think in the plate which is not included in all copies) doesn't Blake have Urizen say: Why will you die O Eternals Why perish in unquenchable burnings ? Benson ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 19:24:13 -0400 From: WaHu@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re:Re: Thel and Arcadia Message-Id: <960821192412_506959716@emout10.mail.aol.com> Tiriel is also a Har resident, so I don't quite understand what Sandy means when he says only women reside there. (Maybe all the men are away at the front with Tiriel? England France and Germany: 1916?) Har-Heva would be a more accurate rendering of the place name--like Minneapolis-St.Paul. Buda-Peth. And it has always seemed to me to be analogous to Eden after the expulsion of....Har & Heva. Welcome to Ex-Paradise. The woods of Arcady are dead. Need firewood? I reccomend everyone take a look-see at Frye again, he is really very intriguing at just this point in Fearful Sym. If you drop the H's from Har-Heva, and they are just transliterations of faux-greek aspirant marks, you get Areva(derci)-- Bye-Bye Land! Whoa, what have I been smoking? Obviously I suffer from Postlapsarian Tremens. (PTs). Hugh Walthall wahu@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 09:32:08 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, GASKINS@WVNVM.WVNET.EDU Subject: Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia -Reply -Reply Message-Id: Dear Avery, I don't know if absolute answers are possible to the questions you raise. Perhaps all that is necessary is to allow that Blake sees the Fall into matter as a progressive darkening and contracting - thus, there are MANY intermediate stages (27 heavens, he mentions at one point, through which the soul descends, into the 28th thus suggesting lunar connections). Where exactly to place Har's Vales doesn't remain a problem if one visulaises a spectrum of light - from brightest to dark enough to sustain matter on earth. There is so-called `death' throughout the spectrum - but `death' is illusory everywhere since everything ultimately participates (and never ceases to participate, even in the fallen world) in the Eternal Divine Humanity. Thus, it becomes clearer why Blake can say with such conviction: Truly my satan, thou art but a dunce And dost not know the Garment from the Man. Constant self-annihilation and transience- in which the self is continually renewed and recreated rather than frozen in fixed form) is truly the key to Innocence which Thel has not yet understood, being still so `young'. Read as a spiritual allegory, I think The Book of Thel is a total success. Moreover, Near-Death-Experiences (about which much is published nowadays) all confirm what Blake is saying. Those who have passed over often speak of weaving their own visions in the shifting patterns of supernal colour and light they encounter on the other side. Pam van schaik ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 09:43:28 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, brsmith@husc.harvard.edu Subject: Re: Thel and Death in Arcadia -Reply -Reply Message-Id: Dear Benson, Yes, Urizen does say these words....but I have always taken him to be making his grand mistake at precisely this point. In forsaking the divine vision of love in which all Eternals can live in mutual harmony ( precisely because they continually annihilate self when becoming totally one in God's fires) he perceives his Eternal brothers and sisters as indulging in sinful and `unnatural consanguinities'. He is being parodied somewhat , having fallen into the delusions which can afflict any Eternal when he/she ceases to be entirely wakeful. For me, Blake's continual theme is Remember that all of us were once in Eternity's (Arcadian) vales and will return there. Et in Arcadia fui, et saro ? (can't remember the Latin for: I shall be) . Pam van Schaik ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 10:07:12 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, agourlay@risd.edu Subject: Thel and Arcadia -Reply Message-Id: Dear Sandy, You raise a number of issues and problems which are of the kind I have never been abe to understand the need for very well. First, the reason why there are mainly females in `The Book of THel' is that perhaps Blake visualised the action as taking place in the lower reaches of Beulah where the light is sufficiently muted for those wandering there to be tempted to fall into the `Sleep' which Thel finds alluring??? There are male forms though, like the male Cloud who tries to explain the holy unions of Innocence, albeit in images derived from nature ( since all that appears in vegetable form on earth has its equivalent in Beulah). But I do not understand what you mean by `the universal male Luvah'. Is Luvah not only one of the Zoas of one of the Universal males, Albion? Who are what you call the `divinely inspired males in nature'? Surely, once incarcerated in Nature, the divine inspiration of most of ALbion's Children becomes occluded? If by `down in the hole', you are referring to death, then the `moral' of the poem is surely that there is nothing to fear from mortal death, since it leads us all back to Eternity - that is why even the worm has a sacred function and should not be scorned - since it releases us all from the limiting prison of the body. (Incidentally, in a Near-Death- Experience book I've jsut been reading, the person who was granted a brief glimpse of Eternity, specifically mentions that flowers were picked, and immediately new ones grew in their place.) Lastly, I think that to import feminist criticism into poetry which deals with such profound spiritual matters as learning to accept our transience is a reductio ad absurdem. I do, however, like the interdisciplinary approach of adducing Poissin and Arcadia as having a tangential bearing if one is looking at the historical background to the possible genesis of Blake's poem. This, however, should not, surely, influence a literary reading of it? Pam van Schaik ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 12:46:00 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, GASKINS@WVNVM.WVNET.EDU Subject: Seeing many Blakes Message-Id: An example of the type of criticism which necessitates seeing many Blakes is referred to by Jeanne Moskal in "Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness" , p. 17: ....Ostriker's Blake Number One ... believes sexuality should be unfettered. ...Ostriker's Blake Number Four ... contends that the proper study of woman is the happiness of her man.... I'd like to hear from others what they make of such distinctions. I personally find them abhorrent, but Jeanne Moskal would appear to find them `useful' . She says: `Ostriker presents four sets of Blakean attitudes toward women and sexuality, and usefully expalins that Blake sometimes held contradictory attitudes simultaneously, not simply sequentially.' (p. 17) How does so schizoid a Blake foster any respect among all those students studying his poetry, I wonder? Pam van Schaik ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 10:00:49 -0400 From: fact440@radix.net To: blake@albion.com Subject: RE: unsubscribe Message-Id: <199608221400.KAA04038@news1.radix.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" unsubscribe ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 10:04:47 -0500 From: jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu (J. Michael) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Seeing many Blakes Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >I'd like to hear from others what they make of such distinctions. I >personally find them abhorrent, but Jeanne Moskal would appear to >find them `useful' . She says: `Ostriker presents four sets of Blakean >attitudes toward women and sexuality, and usefully expalins that Blake >sometimes held contradictory attitudes simultaneously, not simply >sequentially.' >(p. 17) >How does so schizoid a Blake foster any respect among all those >students studying his poetry, I wonder? >Pam van Schaik I haven't read Moskal's book, but might "fourfold" be an alternative term for "schizoid"? In other words, does the insistence on a monolithic Blake verge on the single vision of Newton's sleep--"One God, One King, One Law"? Jennifer Michael ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 11:22:07 -0400 (EDT) From: "Avery F. Gaskins" To: Subject: Thel and Triel Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Content-Type: Text/plain; charset=US-ASCII I finally took down my Erdman text and reread "Tiriel," something I should have done sooner since I discovered my memory of what goes on and where in that poem is quite faulty. (Oops! I see I mispelled Tiriel on the subject line.) Perhaps I am reading the poem too literally, but some of the circumstances in the poem seems to clarify for me some of the questions we have been addressing in the exchange on "The Book of Thel." Tiriel and his family are not residents of the Vales of Har, as I thought I remembered. They are residents of "the western plains" (line 2), and death does come both to him and his wife. There is talk of in-ground burial when the wife dies (ll. 35-50), so I'm not sure whether or not they should be considered "eternals." Tiriel becomes blind and wanders until he comes to the Vales of Har (2.4) where he visits the tent of Har and Heva. I take from that the vales have their name because Har (lives? owns? rules?) there, and the vales constitute the full realm of Har. There are males in the vales, as Har is one. Tirel refers to him as a "weak mistaken father of a lawless race" (8.7) and Mnetha refers to "the sons of Har"(2.49). The vales appear to be part of a larger region of which the western plains are also a section. When Tiriel is asked to identify himself on first entering Har's tent, we are told: "I am not of this region said Tiriel dissemblingly." Although, Har is quite child-like in this poem, some of Tiriel's references to Har's past reign suggest that existence in the vales has been anything but Arcadian. Avery Gaskins ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 13:47:33 -0400 (EDT) From: "C. S. Beauvais" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Thel and Triel Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Thu, 22 Aug 1996, Avery F. Gaskins wrote: > I finally took down my Erdman text and reread "Tiriel," something I should have > done sooner since I discovered my memory of what goes on and where in that poem > is quite faulty. Incidentally, if anyone is interested in re-reading Tiriel or any other work by Blake, many of his shorter works are available online at: http://camel.conncoll.edu/ccother/csbea/blake/timeline.html I hope that to complete this timeline by December. Thanks Charles Beauvais csbea@conncoll.ed ---|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|----------|---------|--- -4-|---------|---------|---------|---p-p---|---------|----------|---------|--- ---|-p-------|-p-p-p---|---------|-p-------|-p-------|-p-p-p-p--|-----p---|--- -4-|---p---p-|---------|-p-p-p---|---------|---p---p-|----------|-p-p---p-|--- ---|-----p---|---------|---------|---------|-----p---|----------|---------|-o- .chip URL's HOMEPAGE>http://camel.conncoll.edu/ccother/csbea/ BLAKE>http://camel.conncoll.edu/ccother/csbea/blake/timeline.html ARTS & TECH>http://camel.conncoll.edu/ccother/north/at201/test.html -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #103 **************************************