When Klopstock England Defied - Analysis

Mock-epic bravado as a national spell

This poem stages a ridiculous, noisy miracle in order to make a pointed claim: Blake’s imagination, not official religion, is the power that can shake a nation and its gods. The opening reads like a parody of heroic history: When Klopstock England defied, the response is not an army or a king but William Blake rising in his pride. The tone is instantly comic and combative, as if political crisis and poetic rivalry belong to the same mythic register.

Nobodaddy: a god reduced to a coughing tyrant

The poem’s central target appears almost at once: old Nobodaddy aloft, who belch’d and cough’d and then swears an oath that makes Heaven quake. Blake collapses the sacred into the bodily; “God” (or a godlike authority) becomes a wheezing, blustering father-figure whose power is mostly noise. That contradiction matters: this figure can rattle Heaven with an oath, yet he is also grossly physical and petulant, a cosmic boss calling for English Blake like a subordinate.

Lambeth ease becomes apocalyptic action

The poem’s hinge is deliberately absurd. Blake is not in a temple or on a battlefield but giving his body ease beneath the poplar trees at Lambeth. From that resting place, he performs the key act: he turn’d him round three times three. The joke is that an almost childish motion becomes an esoteric ritual, and the world reacts as if a new law of nature has been announced.

Cosmic embarrassment: moon, stars, devils

After the “intripled” turning, the poem erupts into theatrical consequence: The moon blush’d scarlet red, the stars drop their cups and flee, and the devils in hell answer with a ninefold yell. The universe behaves like a crowd caught in scandal—blushing, spilling drinks, running away—while hell responds like a chorus line. The tension is sharp: Blake’s act is both a cosmic revelation and a cosmic prank, exposing how easily the grand machinery of Heaven and Hell can be made to look like slapstick.

Klopstock’s “bowels”: rivalry turned into possession

The poem then makes the rivalry grotesquely intimate. Klopstock felt the turn at a distance, and all his bowels began to churn, until they are lock’d in his soul with a ninefold key. The spiritual and the digestive are forcibly fused: Blake’s turning doesn’t merely defeat Klopstock intellectually; it invades him, rearranges him, and seals the effect inside. That image suggests a darker edge beneath the comedy—imagination as an invasive power that can rewire another person from the inside out.

History reduced to a string of “since”

In the final surge, Nobodaddy tries to regain authority by appealing to origins: Since Noah, Since Eve, Since ’twas the fashion to go naked, Since the old Anything was created. But the repeated “since” doesn’t restore dignity; it turns sacred time into a running gag, a pile of half-mythic benchmarks that can’t compete with what Blake just did in Lambeth. The poem ends with authority looking backward and sputtering, while Blake’s strange, bodily ritual keeps its forward momentum.

A sharper question the poem forces

If a simple three times three turn can make the moon blush and Klopstock’s insides whirl, what does that imply about the world these figures live in? The poem seems to dare us to admit that Heaven, Hell, and history might be less stable truth than stage scenery—easily shaken by whoever knows the trick.