healed." Next or equal in hatefulness to the division of qualities into evil and good (see above, Marriage of Heaven and Hell) is the separation of sexes into male and female: hence jealous love and personal desire, that set itself against the mystical frankness of fraternity: hence too (contradictory as it may seem till one thinks it out) the hermaphroditic emblem is always used as a symbol seemingly of duplicity and division, perplexity and restraint. The two sexes should not combine and contend; they must finally amalgamate and be annihilated.[1] All this is of course more or less symbolic, and
- ↑ One may fear that some such symbolic stuff as this is really at the root of the admirable poem christened by its editor with the name of Broken Love: which I gravely suspect was meant for insertion in some fresh instalment of prophetic rhapsody by way of complement or sequel to Jerusalem. The whole tone of it, and especially that of some rejected stanzas, is exactly in the elemental manner of the scenes (where scene is none) between Albion, Jerusalem, and Vala the Spectre of Jerusalem (books 1st and 2nd):—
Thou hast parted from my side—
Once thou wast a virgin bride:
Never shalt thou a true love find—
My Spectre follows thee behind.When my love did first begin,
Thou didst call that love a sin;
Secret trembling, night and day,
Driving all my loves away."These two stanzas (recalling so many other passages where Blake has enforced his doctrines as to the fatal tendency of the fears and jealousies, the abstinence and doubt, produced by theoretic virtue and hatched by artificial chastity) stood originally as third and fourth in the poem. They are cancelled in Blake's own MS.; but in that MS. the poem ends as follows, in a way (I fear) conclusive as to the justice of my suggestion; I mark them conjecturally, as I suppose the dialogue to stand, by way of helping the reader to some glimpse of the point here and there.
When wilt thou return and view
My loves and them to life renew?
When wilt thou return and live?
When wilt thou pity as I forgive?"
