Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/88

A SONG OF LIBERTY. The " Song of Liberty," though issued from Blake's press under the same cover with the " Marriage of Heaven and Hell," is really a separate book. It begins with birth, whose pang is made known by the groan of the Eternal Female in the first line. She is identical with what is called the Eternal Hell in the first lines of the " Marriage." . The Eternal Female groaned. She is Enitharmon in particular, and all the other females in her, not excepting the "Delusive Goddess Nature." Her groan was heard overall the earth — that is to say, it was known in every region of the Natural Man, beginning at the North, the ear, the "Earth of Eden." (" Yala," first lines.) . The east and the west, the heart and the loins — Albion and America — centre and circumference, — felt in sickness and silence and faintness that a new birth was near. . 4, 5, and 6. Shadows of prophecy — emotions ready to become inspirations if set free — shiver along by the lakes and rivers and mutter across the ocean ; for these lakes and rivers are symbols for nerves, in their spiritual, not corporeal form (compare "Jerusalem," p. 98, 1. 16), and this ocean is the Atlantic, the symbol for the spiritual reservoir to which all joys go. France, Spain, and Rome mentioned in succession, after Albion, show that Albion is in his Urizen- aspect, and though East, as contrasted with America, is