The Voice of the Devil.

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.

2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

This passage is one of the weird little fragments or "plates" that make up Blake's book. It's the devil speaking, and he's telling us everything we've learned about the body and the senses is false.

This passage is a perfect example of the way that the Romantics liked to turn things on their heads. Blake is taking the very conventional view that the soul is more important than the body and insisting that we've been told wrong. Granted, his speaker is the Devil. But the Devil, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is a good guy. No, really. Blake likes the Devil and he wants us to listen to him because the Devil is a rebel (and we know how the Romantics felt about rebels).

The point is, in this excerpt, the body and the senses are given a whole lot of importance. "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul." "[T]he five Senses" are the "chief inlets" of the soul. What Blake is saying (via the Devil, granted), is that the body and the senses are important, and we shouldn't just ignore them or repress them.

How do we characterize this little excerpt? Is it a poem? Is it aphorism? Is it a list? We don't know—and that's the point. Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell is full of these unclassifiable snippets, which we can't characterize easily in terms of any genre. And this reflects the Romantic tendency to rebel against literary conventions by playing with genre (or throwing it out the window all together, as Blake does here).