Deconstruction and Communion in the Prophetic Voice

The Prophetic voice in both Blake and Shelley's works calls out for their listeners to "hear" the vision of what is to come, but each have a different vision and the quality of the voice becomes attached to that vision.

In "America a Prophesy" and the "Introduction" to Songs of Experience there is a dismantling of the established order, an order that could only exist due to the complacent state of a "lapsed soul" (pg. 71 line 6) or fallen man. Blake's prophetic voice, with its mangling, angry tone, demands an awakening. It is a voice of uprising and revolution, more desperate to grasp the attention of its audience as if to shake them into a different perceptive consciousness: "Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening! / Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds and bars are burst." One is left with the empowering sense of rejecting something and feeling the first moments of freedom.

Blake's voice finds energy by defining itself against things. The voice rages and spits out color and fire with its own harsh sensibility, telling of the apocalyptic removal of old religious bonds:

Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood
And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o'er the Atlantic sea;
Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace.

The violent imagery tears at the scene, jagged and disrupting. A figure is rising up out of the ground, as if to reject his pervious slumber. The prophetic voice stamps down the words "Intense! naked!" with the authority of setting things apart, wiping away something past and orderly, and demanding the start of something new.

Unlike Blake's voice of destructive uprising, Shelley's prophetic voice, in its melodious roll, delivers redress against the chains of Christendom through the communion of elements. It is a new beginning, not one in which man necessarily awakens to a higher perception by rising up from a fallen state, but one in which man communes with a larger, universal life force, the "Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere" (pg. 859 line 13). There is an atmosphere of rebirth and reconnection as the voice describes seeds "like a corpse within its grave" (pg.859 line8) ready to bloom and resume life. Shelley's prophetic voice finds a future in connection, not apocalyptic removal: "Be though, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be though me, impetuous one!" (pg. 861 lines 61-2). There seems to be a freer, higher floating character, a song quality to this voice; one that is moved with a force, rather than raging against one; "Make me the lyre" (pg 861 line 58). The voice wants to be part of the harmonious chorus of all things.

Although the two prophetic voices differ on levels of tone and vision, it is interesting to note that they each use the natural world as their medium in which to work through the experience. The idea that the natural world shifts and writhes as it accompanies man on his journey to a new state of being is important in both works and expresses the need for human beings to establish some sort of relationship with the physical as part of the spiritual.

Anne Wullschlager