What is Good? What is Bad?

To be honest I wasn’t that fond of Blake’s writing until I read “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” This piece was tastefully audacious and rebellious in numerous ways. Blake uses the Devil as a speaker which naturally makes the reader question the reliability of this narrator (it did for me at least.) When I read “The Voice of the Devil” I thought Blake was going to write about truly evils things and claim (as the Devil) that they were good. But when I was reading this section I found the speaker to be incredibly reasonable. This made me ask myself two questions:

1.    What kind of a person am I to think that the Devil sounds more like the voice of reason rather than the voice of...well, evil?

2.     How have society and religion shaped my perspective on what is good and what is bad?

 The fact that I asked myself these questions shows that Blake achieved what he was hoping to with this piece. The entirety of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” forces the reader to question their notions of what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad.’

As I continued to read “The Voice of the Devil” I started to trust the speaker and his claims. But when I read the last line, “3. Energy is Eternal Delight” I quickly changed my mind and again questioned the narrator. I felt like I was tricked into thinking the Devil could be a reliable and trustworthy speaker. I was surprised I felt tricked by this line and I again questioned myself and asked why I was. I think what caused my suspicion was the use of the phrase “Eternal Delight.” I easily pictured the Devil saying this with a very experienced smile that was very far from reliable. Although, I believe the only reason I read it this way is because I have been practically programmed to think that the word “delight” in any religious text is synonymous to sin- which only further proves Blake’s success in this piece. Blake constantly plays with society’s accepted notions of good and evil and persuades the reader that good and bad are equally needed to live a fulfilling life.

Another rebellious technique in this piece was Blake’s use of structure. Some of the pieces within this work look and sound like a conventional poem because there are line breaks, alliterations, repetition, etc. But there are other pieces that look entirely like prose which made identifying this piece very hard. Manipulating structures like this was very radical and also very interesting. Almost every aspect of this piece pushes the reader to question the way they have accepted the world and the things in it.