The Book of Thel
By William Blake
III
Then Thel astonish'd view'd the Worm upon its dewy bed.
"Art thou a Worm? Image of weakness, art thou but a Worm?
I see thee like an infant wrapped in the Lily's leaf;
Ah, weep not, little voice, thou can'st not speak, but thou can'st weep.
Is this a Worm? I see thee lay helpless & naked, weeping,
And none to answer, none to cherish thee with mother's smiles."
The Clod of Clay heard the Worm's voice, & raisd her pitying head;
She bow'd over the weeping infant, and her life exhal'd
In milky fondness; then on Thel she fix'd her humble eyes.
"O beauty of the vales of Har! we live not for ourselves;
Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am indeed;
My bosom of itself is cold, and of itself is dark,
But he that loves the lowly, pours his oil upon my head,
And kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast,
And says: 'Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee
And I have given thee a crown that none can take away.'
But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know;
I ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love."
The daughter of beauty wip'd her pitying tears with her white veil,
And said: "Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep.
That God would love a Worm, I knew, and punish the evil foot
That, wilful, bruis'd its helpless form; but that he cherish'd it
With milk and oil I never knew; and therefore did I weep,
And I complaind in the mild air, because I fade away,
And lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot."
"Queen of the vales," the matron Clay answered, "I heard thy sighs,
And all thy moans flew o'er my roof, but I have call'd them down.
Wilt thou, O Queen, enter my house? 'tis given thee to enter
And to return: fear nothing, enter with thy virgin feet."

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researches and criticism
"THE BOOK OF THEL" BY WILLIAM BLAKE: A CRITICAL READING
BY MARJORIE LEVINSON
That "the name Thel is derived from a Creek root meaning 'desire' " is no news to any serious reader of Blake. The above quotation appears in David Perkins' textbook anthology, where it Is given as a footnote to the title, "The Book of Thel." Yet the suggestive identity between Thel and Desire is largely ignored. When W. j. T. Mitchell describes the poem's action as "the story of a young woman who questions her own usefulness and purpose in a world where everything dies or fades away,"2 he expresses a critical consensus. In the main, "The Book of Thel" is read as a Little Girl Lost/Found poem writ large. The personification (Thel) is naturalized into character and the "character's" psyche is analyzed, its parts and processes used to support statements about Blake's view of human development. Thel is treated as a psychological construct having ontological density; she is seen to figure either as the true subject of the poem or as a "surrogate for the reader," that is, a character who feels, thinks, and behaves as we might. We read of "her desire" for Wisdom and Love as if Desire—the thing personified—were not synonymous with Thel but a motivation impelling a rounded character. When Desire is thus regarded as the "young woman's" defining characteristic, or as the object of her investigations, the poem presents itself as an allegory of psychosexual development. Although the Little Girl and Little Boy Lost and Found poems of the Songs of Innocence and Experience tend toward assuming this form, they are saved in the end from achieving allegorical fixity. The Songs exist within a symbolic frame of reference; they appear under the aegis of a major symbol (Innocence or Experience) and a minor one (Piper or Bard)! We cannot abstract event or character from idea because the symbol intervenes, preventing the two levels from disengaging. "The Book of Thal," lacking this context, offers no obvious resistance to allegorization. Blake's notorious disdain for allegory'—specifically, for the dualistic ways of thinking it encourages--did not, evidently, pre-vent him from writing one. His remarks, however, should temper
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2
Thel is a poem in which the sceptical enquiries of a determined young woman thoroughly unmask patriarchal ideology, an ideology which promised women that heterosexual romantic and maternal roles equalled heavenly fulfilment, but which Thel discovers amount to nothing less than death.
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3
Section 7 (pp. 65-6). The opening quotation from Blake's poem refers to the weak-willed sexuality of the timid Thel, who can never move out of her fantasy world of unborn innocence. Wright changes the context of the "little curtain of flesh" entirely. His curtain is one drawn back and then opening onto the memory of his mother's death in 1964. He was in Rome as a Fulbright student at the time and because of travel complications was unable to return for her funeral. He imagines the eight years his father spent as a widower in "the cave of cold air." The final half-line, from the familiar hymn, serves as a benediction for these two "lost" souls, in the sense not of defeated or hopeless but of no longer present. The "still small voice of calm" also expresses a desire for the tranquil voice of God to quiet the maniacal honking in the Roman streets below.
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4
The creatures Thel meets repeatedly urge faith and self-sacrifice, doctrines with clear biblical and Christian antecedents. Each of her temporary companions can be considered as articulate emblems in a Book of Nature from which Thel is meant to learn the same lessons presented in the books of the New Testament. The Bible - or, more precisely, its contemporary interpreters - may have also played a role in determining Blake's meter in The!, the iambic septenary or fourteener that soon became his standard line for illuminated poetry (Ostriker, Vision 87-8). Robert Lowth, in his verse translation of Isaiah (1778) and Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (English translation 1787), claimed that the books of the Old Testament were originally delivered as oral poetry with variable line length, including fourteener (Bogen is; Essick, Language of Adam 144-5). Other influences, including Macpherson's rhythmic prose and George Chap-man's translations of Homer, probably helped shape Blake's long line, but he may have believed that he was writing in a measure authorized by the original form of the Bible.
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5
(Thel). An even closer bond joins TM and Ecclesiastes, the most likely source (12.6) for the 'silver rod' and 'golden bowl' of the Motto. Both works make extensive use of the interrogative and, like Thel, the speaker of Ecclesiastes journeys in search of the meaning of life, ends at the grave (man's 'long home', 12.5), and learns lessons only of mortality. He too had tried to learn from the creatures of nature, 'for that which befalleth ( = to happen especially as if by fate) the sons of men befalleth beasts; ... so that a man bath no preeminence above a beast' (gag). Like Thel's instructors, the 'Preacher' in Ecclesiastes knows that 'One generation passes away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever' ( = to remain stable or fixed in a state a love) (14 Yet, more like Thel than the Lilly or Clod of Clay, the Preacher takes no solace in this knowledge but seems burdened by it. In several significant ways, The Book of Thel is Blake's version of Ecclesiastes, with an innocent young woman substituted for the melancholy patriarch for whom 'all is vanity.
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Har
وادي الكذب يأتي بهذا الوصف ,أو أسم جبل كما ترجمته
Har and Heva = Jewish origin
ادم وحواء تعبير عن خطيئة الإنسان (عبرية )
Confronted by approaching extinction, Tiriel retreats to his conception of an earthly paradise, the vales of liar. As Har means "mountain" in Hebrew, the very phrase "vales of liar" is an irony, possibly in deliberate contrast to the prophetic cry that "every valley shall be exalted". Blake's vales of Har were to be transformed later into the lower level or limit of the state-of-being he called Beulah or Innocence. Here, in Mid, this state is exposed only in its aspect of natural ignorance. of perpetual infants aging into idiocy in the persons of Har and Heva. the Adam and Eve of this barren paradise. They are guarded by Mnetha, tutelary genius of their state. Her name is evidently founded on an amalgam of Athena and Mnemosyne, Urizenic =( wisdom) and memory as mother of the Classical muses. Damon (p 307) allegorizes Mar and Heva as eighteenth-century poetry and painting, but that seems too narrow an interpretation. Har is natural man, the isolated selfhood that can avoid death only as Swift's Struldbrug avoid it. He can also be compared to Tennyson's Tithonus and Eliot's Gerontion, ( little –old man) for they also age without being reborn in the imagination. liar was the creator of Tiriel, even as man entrapped in a state of nature invents Urizen as his god
The meaning of STRULDBRUG is one of a class of imaginary persons who can never die but who are declared dead in law at the age of 80 and live on wretchedly ...
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Life of William Blake
CHAPTER X
IN the same year that the Songs of Innocence were published, Blake profited by his new discovery to engrave another illustrated poem. It is in a very different strain, one, however, analogous to that running through nearly all his subsequent writings, or Books,' as he called them. The Book of Thel is a strange mystical allegory, full of tender beauty and enigmatic meaning. Thel, youngest of 'the Daughters of the Seraphim' (personification of humanity, I infer), is afflicted with scepticism, with forebodings of life's brevity and nothingness :—She in paleness sought the secret air To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day ; Down by the river of Mona her soft voice is heard, And thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew.