So I spoke, and struck in my wrath
The old man weltering upon my path.
Then Los appeared in all his power:
In the sun he appeared, descending before
My face in fierce flames; in my double sight,
'Twas outward a Sun, inward Los in his might.
"My hands are labour'd day and night,
And Ease comes never in my sight.
My Wife has no indulgence given,
Except what comes to her from heaven.
We eat little, we drink less;
This Earth breeds not our happiness.
Another Sun[1] feeds our life's streams, —
We are not warmed with thy beams;
Thou measurest not the Time to me,
Nor yet the space that I do see;
My Mind is not with thy light array'd,
Thy terrors shall not make me afraid."
When I had my Defiance given,
The Sun stood trembling in heaven;
The Moon, that glow'd remote below,
Became leprous & white as snow;
And every soul of man on the Earth
Felt affliction, & sorrow, & sickness, & death.
Los flam'd in my path, and the sun was hot
With the bows of my Mind and the Arrows[2] of Thought —
My bowstring fierce with Ardour breathes,
My arrows glow in their golden sheaves;
My brother & father march before;
The heavens drop with human gore.
Now I a fourfold vision[3] see.
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
- ↑ i.e. Los in his spiritual and not in his temporal aspect.
- ↑ cp. Milton, p. 2: "Bring me my Bow of burning gold! | Bring me my arrows of desire!"
- ↑ The state of fourfold vision occurs when the whole visible creation is transfigured before the visionary, who has put off" "the rotten rags of" sense and "memory" and put on Imagination, uncorrupted: when the symbol becomes the reality and nature is Imagination itself. In it are produced those "sublime" works of art
