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Blake's Europe as a Satire of Milton's On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
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For all his respect for Milton as a poet-prophet, Blake considered him a fallen prophet who is responsible for corrupted Christianity. He reflected his criticism in early prophetic poem, Europe, which he intended to be read as a satire of Milton’s Nativity Ode. To begin with Milton shows nature to be in awe to child Jesus, while Enitharmon, Blake’s counterpart of nature, did wanton with the sun, Los. Brooding over European history, he concluded that it had been a history dominated by Enitharmon, who declares “Woman’s love is sin”, thus ushering in the age of moral chastity and sexual oppression, which in turn, Blake believed, can be traced back to the avenging God in Paradise Lost. He also repudiates Milton’s orthodox ideas of creation and fall. Nativity in the Ode brings about universal peace and the retreat of all pagan gods, while in Europe it inaugurates Armageddon since Christianity is to be corrupted into a state religion, another form of idolatry Christ came to destroy. Blake’s description of Enitharmon’s roll-call of her children is also satirizing and travestying all the exotic names of pagan gods enumerated in the last six stanzas of the Ode. Finally Milton marginalizes desires for truth and justice as impatience. Blake, however, perceived bourgeois egoism lurking in his complacent deferral of justice until the Second Coming, which, he believed, is one and the same with the Nativity. He satirizes and inverts Milton in almost all points so that Europe anticipates Milton.
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