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WILLIAM BLAKE.
169
of the bodily life now divided from him—this pestilent nature in bondage to the dæmonic deity, which thought to consume him by dint of death:
An ever-devouring appetite
Glittering with festering venoms bright;"[1]
puts it off and devours it in three nights; even as now also he feeds upon it to consume it; being made perfect in pride, that he may overcome the body by spiritual and "galling pride:" eat what "never was made for man to eat," the body of dust and clay, the meal's meat of the old serpent: as "the white parts or lights" of a plate are "eaten away with aqua-fortis or other acid, leaving prominent" the spiritual "outline" (Life, v. 1, ch. ix., p. 89). This symbol, taken from Blake's own artistic
- ↑ This is so like Blake's style of design that one can scarcely help fancying he must somewhere have translated it into colours perhaps more comprehensible than his words: have given somewhere in painter's types the likeness of that bodily appetite, serpentine food of the serpent, a lithe and strenuous body of clay, fair with luminous flakes of eruptive poison, foul with cold and coloured scales as the scales of a leper in grain; with green pallor of straining mouth and bloodlike expansion of fiery throat; teeth and claws convulsed with the painful lust of pain, eyelids cloven in sunder with a dull flame of desire, the visible venom of its breath shot sharp against the face and eyes of the divine human soul: he, disembodied yet incarnate in the eternal body, stripped of accidental and clothed with essential flesh, naked of attribute that he may be girdled with substance, wrestling silent with fair great limbs, but with calm hair and brows blanched as in fire, with light of lordship in the "sunclear joyful eyes" that already absorb and devour by sweet strength of radiance the relapsing reluctant bulk of body, that foulest ravenous birth begotten of accident or error upon time; eyes beautiful with the after-light of ancient tears, that shall not weep again for ever: "for the former things are passed away": and by that light of theirs shall all men see light. Behind these two, an intense and tremulous night stricken through with stars and fire; and overhead the dividing roof and underfoot the sundering floor-work of the grave; a waste place beyond, full of risen bones that gather flesh, and springing roots that strike out or catch at light flying flames of life. Decidedly the design must exist somewhere; and presumably in "Golgonooza." We have the artist's prophetic authority for believing that his works written and painted before he came upon earth do in effect fill whole chambers in heaven, and are "the delight and study of archangels:" an apocalyptic fact not unnaturally unacceptable and inconceivable to the cleverest of Scotch stonemasons.
