William Blake’s illuminated mythology in Europe: A Prophecy

Enitharmon’s Eighteen-Hundred-Year Sleep

Europe gives Enitharmon a sleep measured in eighteen hundred years. Before that interval, she calls upon her children and commands them to tell the human race that woman’s love is sin and to forbid joy. The later sleeping passage describes a dream in which the night of Nature and her harps of wailing continue. Near the close, a mighty spirit named Newton takes up a trumpet and sounds a blast; Enitharmon awakens without knowing that she has slept, and the interval is said to have fled as though it had not been. Her subsequent call to her children moves towards the poem’s final vision of Orc and the fires of France. The dream provides a symbolic timescale for the poem, rather than an ordinary night’s rest.

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In the sources

Commands before the sleep

Documented

Enitharmon’s speech tells her children to proclaim that woman’s love is sin and to forbid joy.

[1]

An immense dream and an unrecognised awakening

Documented

The poem explicitly gives the sleep eighteen hundred years. The later trumpet passage says she wakes without knowing that she has slept.

[2][3]

Dreaming as a history of constraint

Interpretation

Read beside her earlier commands, the immense sleep can be understood as a poetic image of prolonged restriction. That reading remains an interpretation of the sequence rather than a date-by-date account of European religion.

[1][2][3]

Context & interpretation

This entry follows Enitharmon’s narrated sleep and awakening in Europe. The commands about women and love belong to the character’s speech; they are not offered as beliefs the Reader should adopt or as a universal account of women. The eighteen-hundred-year interval is part of Blake’s visionary narrative, not an independently measured historical period.

Original passages

Source 1

Europe: A Prophecy

William Blake

Go! tell the human race that Womans love is Sin!

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Passage & edition details

Location recorded at citation review: William Blake, Europe: A Prophecy, numbered leaf 7, Enitharmon’s commands; source scan leaf 13

Actual full scan inspected; the cited words and visible leaf number checked directly. Faint passages outside these citations are not treated as fully transcribed. The title bears1794; original-copy provenance not inferred.

Edition: IMJ-0273-E001
Reader page: IMJ-0273-E001-P0007
Original scan leaf: 13
Recorded leaf number: 13
Current Reader position: 8
Reader verification: Matches the reviewed Reader

Source 2