In the Wine Presses
In the Wine Presses - context Summary
Part of Blake's Mythology
This excerpt from Blake's unfinished epic The Four Zoas uses the wine-press as a nightmarish scene where erotic love becomes organized cruelty. Within Blake's personal myth, Luvah and his offspring enact violence: victims are tortured, their pain treated as sport and consumed as pleasure. The passage dramatizes Blake's view of love entwined with suffering and social injustice, a moral and mythic warning about destructive, acquisitive passions.
Read Complete AnalysesBut in the Wine-presses the human grapes sing not nor dance: They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming, In chains of iron and in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires, In pits and dens and shades of death, in shapes of torment and woe: The plates and screws and racks and saws and cords and fires and cisterns The cruel joys of Luvah's Daughters, lacerating with knives And whips their victims, and the deadly sport of Luvah's Sons. They dance around the dying and they drink the howl and groan, They catch the shrieks in cups of gold, they hand them to one another: These are the sports of love, and these the sweet delights of amorous play, Tears of the grape, the death sweat of the cluster, the last sigh Of the mild youth who listens to the luring songs of Luvah.----
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