Blake's tractates and The Marriage together convey the development of his metaphysics from panpsychist panentheism to monist pantheism. In this and the following chapter I examine how these ideas manifest in several of his narrative, illuminated poems created between 1788 and the end of 1795. We have already seen how the Memorable Fancies of The Marriage afford Blake an opportunity to anecdotally, dialogically and visually expand on his metaphysical principles; he moves beyond simply stating propositions, as he does in the tractates, to creatively depicting how ontology and epistemology affect one's lived interactions with particular beings. As this chapter shows, the illustrated narrative poems that dominate Blake's output during this early period engage with the same philosophical questions that drive the works already discussed, and in each poem Blake recasts the metaphysical issues that are central to his art. Although a monist materialism can be discerned in each of the illuminated books examined here, Blake poetically dramatizes what he sees as the negative consequences of his age's embrace of its dualist competitor: the “Philosophy of Five Senses” as it is called in The Song of Los. In essence, this philosophy is no different from the empirical deism attacked in the early tractates, and in the dystopian continental prophecies and Urizen books Blake contrasts natural religion with a pantheist metaphysics that celebrates the divine world of infinite sensory delight, which Blake introduces even before The Marriage, in The Book of Thel (1789).

This chapter focuses on Blake's first illuminated narrative poem, The Book of Thel, and two of the three continental prophecies, Europe A Prophecy (1794) and The Song of Los (1795), discussing them in relation to the philosophical principles in the works examined in the first two chapters, as well as to the work of a popular contemporary of Blake's who was also working through natural-philosophical ideas via the medium of narrative poetry: Erasmus Darwin. In his best-selling The Loves of the Plants (1789) and The Economy of Vegetation (1791), which were published together as The Botanic Garden (1791), Darwin also exhibits an eclectic materialism verging on panpsychism and pantheism.