Pardon the gap, I spilled coffee on my keyboard and had to take it apart to clean it and it took two days. I still don’t have a “” key so I’ll have to do this uickly. This is the 14th entry in my series on William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” see this post for context.
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
Some good old fashioned time division device, but as someone who writes the bulk of these over my morning coffee and edits late in the night, maybe I shouldn’t be commenting. I do think there is a lot of value in dividing your day into simple and easy chunks that can serve as the bedrock for a solid routine. I just have yet to participate.
To take a sphinx approach to it, this could be seen as a recommendation to always Think, then Act, then Eat, then Sleep. When the usual hustle culture recommendation is: Act, Sleep when dead. Keeping a solid knowledge that each act should be its own discrete time with plenty of space allotted without rush is always a nice thought, your mileage may vary on its level of helpful.
He who has suffer’d you to impose on him knows you.
There’s a common piece of advice, I think I first read it in the original “How to win friends and influence people,” that if you want someone to like you, have them do a small favor for you. Contrary to popular cranks, people like doing things for others. It’s a naturally rewarding experience and it takes the one asking very little effort to repay someone for even whole weekends of “helping out.”
Except it’s not literally having someone “like” you. You’ve established a sort of community with them. You’ve introduced a balance, a relationship, and if you’re asking for a favor, you are starting in what approximates to, but I hate calling, debt. The easiest way to “sell” someone on being in exchange/community with you is to give them an easy leg up.
In other words, the friendliest conversation you can have with a bank is asking them to loan you money. I’m tempted to make a joke about how English translations of the Bible use the verb “know” with that context, but I think the point Blake was making was gentler than that.
If someone has done you a favor, they know you, you have been identified and sorted and you will probably forget them before they do, unless they also ask for a favor. Those are the people who will also be responsible for your reputation, as their perceptions of you will become much more important now that you have this connection. Naturally your behavior and theirs can reflect on each other for better or worse now. What is family/friends/community but the people who will help when there isn’t a motivation outside of them knowing you and you knowing them? As a great show says: When a friend needs help you help em.
As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.
Basic simile to take us away for the evening. Direct one to one to one to one. The basic construction is such that you need to know the end before the beginning. There is no reason a plow should follow words, so you wait for the resolution like a joke, but in early modern English poetry the punchline is always God.
God rewards prayers in the same way a plow follows words. So it’s a system of direct promises to fulfillment. But with the twist of the plow symbolism, which as far as I know has never not represented hard manual labor in poetic language, it implies that the way God answers prayers is the labor that follows words.
Okay I’ve stretched that out as long as I can, it’s fairly clear here that Blake is claiming that God fulfills prayers through our hard work, our prayers give us the focus in themselves just as the words would if we promised someone else we would do it. It seems to track. When we pray for something, we naturally bend our wills towards it, and whether supernatural or not, I find that people looking for things tend to find them.
Music:
Wheeler's Place 
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