Of the Gates

by William Blake

My Eternal Man set in Repose

The Female from his darkness rose

And She found me beneath a Tree

A Mandrake & in her Veil hid me

Serpent Reasonings us entice

Of Good & Evil: Virtue and Vice

Doubt Self Jealous Watry folly

Struggling thro Earth's Melancholy

Naked in Air in Shame & Fear

Blind in Fire with shield & spear

Two Horn'd Reasoning Cloven Fiction

In Doubt which is Self contradiction

A dark Hermaphrodite We stood

Rational Truth Root of Evil & Good

Round me flew the Flaming Sword

Round her snowy Whirlwinds roard

Freezing her Veil the Mundane Shell

I rent the Veil where the Dead dwell

When weary Man enters his Cave

He meets his Saviour in the Grave

Some find a Female Garment there

And some a Male, woven with care

Lest the Sexual Garments sweet

Should grow a devouring Winding sheet

One Dies! Alas! The Living & Dead

One is slain & One is fled

In Vain-glory hatcht & nurst

By double Spectres Self Accurst

My Son! my Son! thou treatest me

But as I have instructed thee

On the shadows of the Moon

Climbing thro Nights highest noon

In Times Ocean falling drownd

In Aged Ignorance profound

Holy & cold I clipd the Wings

Of all Sublunary Things

And in depths of my Dungeons

Closed the Father & the Sons

But when once I did descry

The Immortal Man that cannot Die

Thro evening shades I haste away

To close the Labours of my Day

The Door of Death I open found

And the Worm Weaving in the Ground

Thou'rt my Mother from the Womb

Wife, Sister, Daughter to the Tomb

Weaving to Dreams the Sexual strife

And weeping over the Web of Life