Where It All Goes Down
"This is hell," you might have heard someone say when they're not having much fun. Think Algebra test or insurance seminar. When Blake's speaker says that, though, he literally means it. Call it what you like—the inferno, the abyss, the devil's digs, H-E-double hockey sticks—the vast majority of this book takes place in Hell.
Before we dive into why that's the case, it's interesting to note that Hell is only one half of the setting that the title promises us (check out "What's Up With the Title?"). What happened to Heaven, then?
Clearly, Blake's not feeling that locale. Maybe it's too boring for him. It's definitely too restrained for him (check out "Themes" for more on that). What's worse, it's filled with angels who "have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise" (7.13). He thinks that they're a bunch of arrogant windbags.
Nope, Blake (through this speaker) is more of a devils' type of guy. At first, this seems a bit off-putting. Is Blake a Satanist? Is he pure evil? The answer to questions like this is both "yes" and "no." Blake's argument is not that devils are great because they're evil. It's that our definition of evil as, you know, bad is all wrong. Instead, as he puts it, "Evil is the active springing from Energy" (1.25).
What that means is that Hell is the place for creative expression, artistic indulgence, freedom, freedom, and more freedom. It's a place where he can find "the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity" (3.1). It only looks like a bad place when there are angels around to ruin it for him.
Check out, for example, the scene in which the angel takes the speaker to show him his fate. There they are, sitting in the roots of a tree that's suspended over a black abyss. Talk about a dramatic setting. Then things get worse. After checking out the fearsome spiders that will be torturing Blake's speaker in the afterlife, a terrible purple-and-green Leviathan emerges from the deep to swallow him up.
After the angel next to him takes off, though, the Leviathan instantly disappears: "then this appearance was no more; but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight, hearing a harper who sung to the harp" (7.7). Once the angel is gone, the Hell that the speaker was experiencing changes from a full-on nightmare to a full-on daydream.
The message of the setting, then, is tied to the message of the book as a whole. The conventional perspectives of Heaven and Hell are totally off base. Good—as we've come to define it—is really not that great. Evil—as we call it—is really pretty rad. At the end of the day, we need both things to be human: "Without contraries is no progression" (1.24). Since we're typically focused on Heaven and goodness, the speaker takes us with him on these visits to Hell in order to make sure that get a fuller, truer picture.