The works of William Blake, poetic, symbolic and critical/2/Milton
ABOUT "MILTON."
Of the "Milton" wo only know that it was planned as a work in twelve "books," and finished in two. We surmise that this was due to the events of the years succeeding Blake's Felpham period. We know that such books as "Milton" and "Jerusalem" were not written all at once, or engraved all at once. Whichever of these two was actually the great poem suggested by the acts of the enemies of Blake's "spiritual" life alluded to in his letters from Felpham, dated April 25th and July 6th, 1803, what he says about the printing being "progressive" was true of both works, and the date on the title-page does not apply to every page of the one any more than of the other.
Both should belong to 1804, were this the case, but he alludes obscurely to one of them in the passage from the Public address which refers to the Examiner attacks that did not begin till August, 1808. Even then the poem is said to bo one which he "would soon publish."
It may possibly be that the poem referred to in the letters was "Milton," and that intended to be understood in the sentence from the "Public Address" was "Jerusalem." It is almost certain that a great deal of matter intended for Milton was never used in that work, and some of it may have gone to "Jerusalem." "None can know," Blake wrote to Butts, "the spiritual acts of my three years' slumber on the banks of the ocean unless he has seen them in the spirit or unless he should read my long poem." The most interesting part of the allusion in the letter is the phrase — "Unless he has seen them in the spirit." This matter-of-course reference to what is still a rare faculty, sometimes called Thought-reading, says more for the peculiarly clairvoyant quality of Blake's mental organism than many allegories. In alluding to the mortals who represented the States of Spiritual Enmity with which he struggled, he would often write regardless of their date. Thus, in 1803, he made a poem about these enemies. They included Titian, Rubens, and Hayley, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds, all viewed as states and all included in "the state called Satan." Then in 1808 he added Leigh Hunt to them, and referred to the poem written in 1803 as being {by anticipation, though he does not think it necessary to explain this) an extirpation of the nest of villains of whom Leigh Hunt was one.
The exact point in the poem at which the idea of twelve books was abandoned must be left to conjecture, until more biographical material comes to light. The letter printed here after the postscript to the "Memoir" is of some help in the matter.
At the end of the facsimile some extra pages will be found which are reproduced from tracings of a copy in America in the Lennox Library. These were made some years ago for Mr. Muir, the able and enthusiastic facsimilist, some of whose reproductions in colour of Blake's works, already becoming scarce, are still in the hands of the publishers of the present work. We are indebted to Mr. Muir's courtesy for their appearance here. They are of great help for the explanations they contain of some of the symbols, — notably the harrow of Palamabron (on p. 3), called the Harrow of Shaddai (or the "Almighty"), and its linking together with the Plough of Rintrah on the first line of that page/ Fore here may be found the hint of a companion incident or vision, nowhere related in full? and only alluded ti in "Jerusalem," p. 93, l. 10.
The plough is one of the scarce symbols most difficult to trace in its fourfold meaning, as a comparison of other places where it is introduced will show. For example, Satan (reason) drives the team in Jerusalem," p. 33, l. 9. A physical symbol is suggested in "Jerusalem," p. 34, ll1. 12, 13, and the same occurs in "Vala" I, 124. The plough is distinguished from the harrow in tf Jerusalem," p. 46, l. 14 ; in p. 55, l. 39 (line 38 is mis-numbered 33), and ll. 54, 67 on the same page. On p. 57, ll. 2, 13, 14, 15 the symbol recurs, and in p. 63, l. 3, and p. 64, l. 30. These references are elsewhere referred to, but are collected here as important to "Milton," and the connection between Rintrah as the Reprobate in whom Ore lived again, the Satanic Luvah, the Naturalistic Satan, the fire of vegetative generation and decay, and so forth.
To a certain degree the character of the mild "Satan" in "Milton," who seemed a brother while he was "murdering the just," was partly suggested by Hayley with his depressing action on Blake's art, afterwards forgotten and forgiven in view of his assistance at the trial for treason. But the furious Satan is Blake's own "Spectre," always States are "combinations of individuals," and another constituent of the complex Satan will be found in Blake's notes to Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses. The suggestion is explained in the chapter on I Make's critical opinions where the notes are printed entire. Without them the full meaning of the myth of Satan and Palamabron in the early pages of "Milton" cannot be understood.
In "Milton" it is easy to see that page 4 is an interpolation of late date, and that from p. 25 to the end of Book I. all was engraved after the matter up to the end of p. 24 had been done and laid aside. Much of Book II. is earlier than these pages. The very long page 35 seems to be of their period, and to indicate a desire to force in more matter than in a twelve-book poem would be required on a page, though the subject of it recalls Felpham days, and it was probably written at Felpham before the engraving of the work began. The same may be said of pp. 37, 39 and 40, while the hasty and poor illustration on p. 41 seems also a late engraving. In fact, all the remainder of the poem after 35, except 36, and the illustration on 38, is evidently printed after the change of plan.
In "Milton" Canaan, 1st and 2nd, appear to be used with the same significance as Cainan 1st and 2nd. But it would be unfair to Blake to take this for granted, as in the Bible Canaan, always the fourth son of Ham, or his land, is used in two senses, a broader and a narrower, and cannot be taken as equivalent to Cainan I., son of Enos, and Cainan II., son of Arphaxad, any more than the term Canaanite applied to Simon Zelotes in Matth. vi. 4, and Mark vii. 26, means that he was an Old Testament character. MILTON.
The Preface to Milton springs from Blake's central idea, namely, that Imagination is common to all, is the future basis of brotherhood, is inspiration, heaven, and Christianity. But there is true and false imagination and much that pretends to be of the true, notably classic art and myth, has only been stolen from it, and perverts what was once visionary creation of states of mind into allegoric reference to the changes of matter. Matter, or the lower mind of the fine senses, should be used as symbol for the higher mind, and not vice versa.
In "ancient time" visionary freedom and the conduct of life were one. Christ, the Imagination, stood with Albion, the ancient Man. He shall return again aided by the Bow, sexual symbolism, the arrow, desire, the spear, male potency, the chariot, joy. The mental weapons shall build Jerusalem in England, that is to say, shall give mental freedom to man, once more.
Book I.
P. 1, ll. 1 to 5. Blake bids the daughters of Beulah, the beautiful forms of mental life, to descend through his right arm, and so on to the paper before him, that is to say through the executive portion of his mind, so into manifestation as poetic utterances.
The labouring inspired man, as Los, faces towards the east; his right arm is therefore southern and mental.
They are to tell the history of Milton's journey through the realms of thought and dream, and also of that sensuous world below or outside the realms of Beulah which makes Jesus, that is the Imagination, its prey, for it is the sense of touch which gives the delusive power to Nature and nails Imagination on the stems of vegetation, and makes it an atonement for the sins of matter. The higher portion of mind is sacrificed to the lower, but in the end triumphs by spiritualizing it.
P. 3, ll. 16 to 24. He bids them tell what caused the spirit of religious poetry — symbolized by Milton — to leave its world of silent inner mood and come forth as manifest utterance. They answer it was the song of a bard or the creative imagination still dwelling in the natural man which persuaded Milton's poetry of supernatural mind to descend. (A Druid is the reasoning — a bard the creative side of Nature's life, before the various coverings or churches have developed.)
P. 3, l. 25, to p. 4, l. 7. The daughters of Beulah, now speaking through Blake, bid the reader note well these things, for they tell of his salvation from the body, or the non-mystic and temporary doctrines of art and poetry.
Before they relate the descent of Milton they describe the World into which he had to descend. Los and Enitharmon— time and space — make these classes of men. Space weaves them out of the mental unity of man, symbolized by London, various suburbs being mentioned to represent its zoas and "London Stone" expresses its most "natural" portion because of the association of London stones with Druidism. The corporeal portion of mental space — "the weights of the loom" — play alluring music to overpower the souls.
P. 4, ll. 18 to 23. Time — the eternal present — "eternal mind," labour making, not only the three classes but "schemes of conduct," of art and literature, which are mental conduct, "the plough" to prepare the way for the souls' journey and "the harrow," to wrap it round as in a close furrow. His four sons, or forms of action corresponding to the intellectual, emotional, instinctive and energetic powers, work with him, and their labours go on in all parts of mind symbolized by districts of London and of the world, when Babel — or war of man upon man, thought upon thought — has taken the place of imaginative unity, Jerusalem, southward, the least corporeal portion of mind, "Lambeth," glows with aspiration, though it has been so long given over to demonstration and the sacrifice of mind to body (" oak groves " and " druid temples"). All things, he says, are contained within man, " Albion," although he be now given over to demonstration (become "rocky").
P. 4, l. 27, to p. 5, l. 14. When the spectral forms of life have been burnt in the mental furnace the emotional side of the eternal mind weaves them into affections and soft moods. The masculine side makes out of materialistic faculties which are too individual to become ashes, the force of the mind, " the sinews of life." The result of this double labour is to make the three classes, the elect, those who are wholly given over to reason and its god " the redeemed," those in whom imagina- tion struggles with reason, "the reprobates/' those who sin against law whether for selfish or for high motives, while mental space weaves their affections together. Corporeal space, "Targum," drags their emotion into purely physical life or into mere length and breadth, and separates them one from another, that they may be destructive of each other's existence. The regions of the mind where these three classes dwell, are symbolized by Western and Eastern portions of London to show that they are all three confined, the first willingly, the last unwillingly in "length and bread the" Blake bids the reader consider his scheme of expression or "follow his plough."
P. 5, ll. 5 to 17. After this warning Blake begins the true action of the poem by describing Satan the opaque non-imaginative, who belongs to the first class. He pities imaginative emotion, Palamabron, and wishes to give it rest by taking its place, that is to say rule and method; and the generalizing, analytical and formal allegories of classic models or nature, each to do the work of imaginative impulse, as Hayley tried to help Blake, regulating both his art and his life for him. The creative mind permits him to do so, wearied out by his repeated offers. P. 5, ll. 18 to 31. After again warning the reader to attend to his words — for they deal with the salvation of his soul from opaque reasons — Blake tells how the secondary or elementary powers through which the arts, whether of life or literature, work, rebel against this rule of the generalizing reason of the opaque and become egotisms ("madder") and strive for their own life against the power of Satan. The imaginative impulse, hearing their complaints, grows angry. He calls on the eternal mind to judge what has occurred.
P. 5, ll. 32 to 41. Impulse calls mind into action by its destructive vehemence, but the opaque rules and laws make it appear as if imaginative impulse was itself the means of breaking them, and mind is made believe that imaginative impulse is their enemy.
P. 5, ll. 42 to 47. Mind bids Impulse work at the Arts free from the rules of the opaque, or bids the powers of the opaque do their own work by themselves. Again Blake bids the reader mark his words.
P. 6, ll. 1 to 10. Satan excuses himself with inner speech for rules, and corporeal reasonings are always mild or without that chafing of the spirit with limitation which is wrath. Here is this insidious quality. When he returns to his mills, that is when he, leaving the work of impulse, returns to his own work of mechanical drudgery and mechanical arguments, he finds all in disorder. He had persuaded Palamabron to do his work as the easier task, as Hayley had set Blake to the drudgery of miniature paintings, and the like, and impulses had set all in confusion. Two days — of a thousand years a-piece — equivalent to the first two days of creation, and corresponding to the eyes of God, Lucifer, and Moloch, have now been described. Impulse has sought the "mills" as light fell in the beginning, and on the second, corresponding to Moloch, the flame-filled idol, the power of "mills" and "harrow," are alike enraged. The next three days, needed to carry us to birth, are passed over without special mention, and we are about to reach a sixth day when, water will cover the earth, and "the rains of Jehovah" — the sixth eye — contend with the fires of Moloch. Another correspondence associates the present story with the Churches. "The rains of Jehovah" close the history of the first church with the flood of time and space.
P. 6, ll. 11 to 15. The mind, Los, has to choose from labour of imagination, and covers itself with the external world symbolized by Los placing his left shoe above his head. The feet are the lower and most outward part of the mind, and the left foot means that part of the mind nearest to the Northern darkness, for Los has his face to the East. The lower mind is placed above the higher. This is not done because Los has become enamoured of matter, but as a "solemn mourning," or period of repentance spent in mere outward life, that the confused mental powers may return to themselves. The powers of the mill of reason rest, also the Imaginative well — Reuben — and ideal's space.
P. 6, ll. 16 to 26. Mind speaks of the power of rule, and tells them that it is itself to blame, for it should have known that the rest offered to the spirit by mechanical assistance — "pity" — "divides the soul" into two contending parts, one of imagination, one of reason, and "man unmans," that is, contracts him down from the universal, and imaginative, to the limitations of his life of the moment. He bids them therefore rest for this day from their labours, following the track of his thought — his "plough" — passively, for this day will be "a blank in Nature," that is a period without creative effort. They follow mind and its will accordingly, and the Elect, who belong to rule, and the Redeemed, who belong to imaginative impulse, tormented by mechanical reason, mourn, that is, remain inactive. (It is as though an artist having tried to do the creative part of his work by mere reason and patience, and to do the mechanical part with the impulsive side of his mind, got all into such confusion that he had to cease from his work and merely observe.)
P. 6, ll. 27 to 33. We now find this blank in nature identified with the flood. The tears become "Jehovah rain," and its object is revealed by its contending with "the fires of Moloch." (Tears are formative in the corporeal sense, and they are now shed in order that corporeal order may bo substituted for mental disorder — physical vitality and sensuous life are to save man from dead reason — the persuasions of Satan. It is the same story as that told in America when the Atlantic mountains — purely imaginative life — arc submerged in the contest of reason with passion, &c. It is also the flood which sweeps away the first churches, and prepares the way for the substitutes of the second Canaan, the physical world for the first Canaan, this mental world.) Blake's vision now changes, and he sees the story in the form of a contest of the imagination and the opaque. The side of mind most allied to instinct, Theotormon, and that most allied to pleasant energy, Bromion, are persuaded by the fascination of the opaque "Satan" to take his side. Michael, of whom we hear nowhere else in Blake, and who is evidently spiritual fire, contends against "Satan," and Thulloh, also mentioned nowhere else, but almost as certainly, procreative instinct, reproves his friend "Satan." (The word Thullius, the female Leviathan, in the Kabala closely resembles Thulloh, and like him is "first slain" or first enclosed in corporeal function. The female Leviathan is the procreative side of opaque existence in the Kabala, and is "slain," lest it should overrun spiritual life , with its offspring. Imagination is alone permitted to create mental forms. Reason can but copy them from the external. Thullius is wife to Satan, the male Leviathan is the Zohas, but Thullah is here merely his "friend," friendship being a symbol for mental life that does not deal with the sexual thing — argument, or contradiction. Even Satan has such a state, and therefore a "friend." He is made masculine because the male is the creation in Blake's philosophy, and this involves the dropping of the feminine "in" at the end of this word. (See chapter on the names.) He reproves Satan because he, too, objects to the rule of reason. Both Michael and Thulloh reprove the faculty for the "tears" of outer natures have weakened their impulse.
P. 6, ll. 34 to 44. The Imaginative Will, "Rintrah," however, is full of anger against the opaque, and it flames above the tracks of thought, "the ploughed furrows," and slays Thullah, watery or instinctive naturalistic conception, with its own fiery creative power, "its spear," thereby confining procreative instinct to physical function by driving it out with the energy of the mind. He compels Michael, who had grown weary, to begin again his contest with Satan. He then weeps, becoming himself infected with corporeal life by the law that makes us "become what we behold." Mind — "Los" — hides new corporeal procreative instinct from the sight of the purely mental emotions and affections, "Enitharmon," lest they beholding it might "die of grief," that is, become opaque also. The mental emotions and affections weave a world for rest and peace about the contending states, and shut man out from war and contest by Love, "a tender moon." Amid this world, woven by the affections, buries Thullah.
P. 6, l. 46, to p. 7, l. 6. All the corporeal side of the mind is now becoming unvital, non-mental, and in order to make it live again, imaginative impulse calls the mental faculties to descend into the corporeal, that it may become vital once more, even though that vitality be only "to defend a lie." The corporeal functions may thus be "grown" and "caught" and "taken "by mental life. The powers of vision, "All Eden," descend into the dwelling Imaginative Impulse has made for itself, among the forces of unimaginative life. Imaginative Impulse prays that God may protect it from the powers that pretend to be its friends, like generalizing reason and mechanical labour. It can protect itself against its avowed negations. (The descent of "All Eden" reminds us that we are now in the Second Church, the church of redemption, and invites comparison with the descent of "the Divine Family," of Los, and the Divine Vision in the second book of "Jerusalem," and of the formation of Urizen into personality in the fourth book of "Urizen and Vala.")
P. 7, ll. 8 to 12. Imaginative Will — Rintrah in order that the enemies of Imaginative Impulse may be open and not pretended friends, and in order that those who will not defend truth may defend a lie — namely, assert the existence of corporeal life separated from mind, descends into Satan, or the opaque, so that he appears to be among the reprobate, instead of more passive and lifeless matter, as he really is. (Now is seen the meaning of the Reprobate. They are those who sin imaginatively or enthusiastically, either by indulgence or by fierce strictness. Among these Blake would perhaps have put his "brother John, the evil one," reserving for James a place in the "elect," who surrender themselves to the opaque without enthusiasm. It was in contrast to this latter class that he spoke to Mr. Crabb Robinson of "the vices" as "highest sublimities.")
P. 7, ll. 13 to 19. Mind rises against the opaque, and in its struggles collections of mental "states," or nations, and collections of mental "spaces," or continents, are moved aside from their old positions, and the vegetative sensations, "oceans," are compelled to give way before him, and the Zoas revolve. But he keeps mental space separate from all other things which happen in corporeal and reasoning spaces.
P. 7, ll. 19 to 29. The reason of his rage is that Imaginative Will, which has now entered into Satan, accuses Imaginative Impulse of making disorder, and invents a punitive law of the mind and a bodily law of restriction, and the war of bodily forces and the diseases of mind and body, and by their means perverts the divine voice, which is its own enthusiasm, and cries that it rends away the divine families of loves and emotions, and will belong wholly to the covering cherub or nature.
P. 7, ll. 30 to 35. By thus making a law against imaginative freedom, Satan is shut off wholly from imagination, and becomes utterly dark. The fires of Rintrah are within him, but the stones or reasons of which he is built up darken wholly. A deeper Ulro — Or Ulro that is — da now formed. (The Third Church has now developed — the Church in which the soul no longer remembers even that natural laws and objects are but symbols.)
P. 7, ll. 36 to 48. For a time sadness and silence — uncreative life — fills the mind, and Satan accuses the creative power for shutting imaginative impulse in the mind. Rintrah creates entrenchments of philosophy and law about Satan ; but Satan, being essentially uncreative and without enthusiasm, at last tears them asunder, and sinks down absolute death and negation, for he now no longer lives with the borrowed life of Rintrah. He is now merely mechanical force — whether of the mind or the body — and not the enthusiastic denial of the earlier stage. (The opaque Reason sooner or later destroys the impulse that gives it the power to think at all, as Tiriel, growing old and feeble, curses his own sons and daughters. Impulse is always of the imagination.)
P. 7, ll. 49 to 52. He sinks down to the "spaces" especially associated with the cherub — to Rome, Babylon, and Tyre, the Loins, Heart, Head. (The Third Church is now complete, and the world is ready for redemption.) For Rome, compare Song of Liberty after "Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Here the "extra page," numbered 8, is fortunately rejected by Blake. It helps the interpretation if read in this place, but not the continuity of the myth, as it does not read on into the beginning of p. 9. It connects Analogy with the moving space.
P. 9, ll. 1 to 15. Satan will destroy the spiritual identity — the core — of humanity, unless help comes. The spiritual emotion, Enitharmon, is hid from all these things by the imaginative mind in a pleasant region of mental space.
P. 9, ll. 6 to 14. A special region of material or maternal — "moony" — space receives the logical and mechanical part of the mind, and thus the emotions — human victims — are sacrificed, and Satan is proclaimed God within these boundaries.
P. 9, ll. 15, 16. It is asked by the assembled thoughts of the higher mind, why the innocent emotions are sacrificed thus as an offering for the Satanic faculties ? (Why tho spiritual nature is compelled to be intermixed, with and imprisoned by the lower?)
P. 9, ll. 17 to 26. The answer is that if the imaginative and innocent life did not descend into, "die for", the guilty life, then the condemnation would fall upon the guilty unimaginativeness itself, and it would be cut off wholly from the imaginative, and become "an Eternal Death." The Satanic life has to be constantly "recreated," or reorganized by this descending life, or it would cease to be life. The class of living things that belong to it are called " the elect," those of wrathful Rintrah — the imaginative energy entangled in physical things — the Reprobate, and those of Palamabron the Redeemed, because he is outside of Satan's law — material restraint — being of the obedient mental life alone. Palamabron, fearing that the condemnation might have fallen on him for being other than assertive, convinced imagination, does not dare to assemble the thoughts together to consider the state of man until Satan had put on the anger and assertiveness of Rintrah, and so drawn off the condemnation. As against pure imagination Palamabron is material, as against pure matter asserting its separate life in spectral "pride" he is imaginative. The spiritual state, who tells this, confirms it by "an oath," or by the assertion of his own unity with God or pure imagination.
P. 9, ll. 28 to 31. When the sexual formation — Leutha — sees Satan condemned, she, who is essentially imaginative, descends into corporeal life, takes on her the sin of Satan ; for sexual love is the last outpour, as it were, of imagination in the bodily life. Again the reader is bid to mark that the story is the story of his salvation.
P. 9, ll. 32 to 38. Leutha tells how she loved Imaginative Mind — Palamabron — but was repelled by his purely mental emanation, the formation of the internal emotions, as Leutha herself is of the external sensations.
P. 10. ll. 1 to 15. She asks why it is that the spectral life issues from her to seize the children of the mind. To prevent this, sexual love enters into the brain of pleasant life or into the lower mind and fills it with that apparent love for the higher mind which made it attempt the work of the imagination and so cause the confusion already described. Instead of imagination, hater of corporeal mind and sexual lore, — she makes them have a feminine or passive love for this love. Thus Hayley was fascinated by the mind of Blake, through the least corporeal part of his own mind — its desire for sensations. Leutha having thus entered the imaginative world, through Satan driving the horses of Palamabron. Leutha, now the emanation of Satan, tries to do the work of Elynitria, the emanation of Palamabron, that is to say, to give rest (in emotional life) to the horses, or unfeeling thoughts. They are, however, maddened by the corporeal fascination, bodily beauty, ll. 16 to 30. Satan filled with a power, reflected from the internal life, controlled the harrow and tried to stay its maddened course by the observations of generalized reasons — banks of sand — and all the classifications of external things. " Chaos and Ancient Night," the life of mere memory, came from under the harrow, and the lower mind filled with egotistic pride drives the harrow of personal emotion among "the stars of Jehovah," the once creative centre of the intellect. It was then that Leutha made the serpent of corporeal life — the deceiving bodily activity that crawls upon its belly, and through length and breadth, not from Nadir to Zenith, or Zenith to Nadir, ll. 31 to 40. The gnomes, the forces of the energetic life of thought, answered the creation of the deceitful serpent by an egotism of the imagination which attacks the corporeal. They refused to labour more in the harrow now that Satan drives it, and to fascinate them into obedience, Leutha says that
VOL. II. 18 she revealed herself beforo them, coming out of the mind of Satan. She is now corporeal emotion separated from corporeal reason, and her name is Sin. Leutha, Rahab, Vala, are the Female counterparts of the Head, Heart, and Loins of Satan. (LI. 40 to 50.) Now that Leutha has separated from Satan, Elynitria, the emotional mental nature, enters into Satan, and fills him with, a perverted prophetic power under the influence of which he assumes holiness, and drives Leutha from him. (As soon as corporeal emotion separates from corporeal reason they become contending powers, and instead of uniting to draw down the imaginative mind, they war with each other.)
P. 11, ll. 1 to 11. But separated emotion acknowledges the source of all things in God, whereas the low-born reason believes only in itself. Emotion asks how Reason is to be saved, and then becomes silent for a moment, only to cry out the next instant that she is the spectral side of Luvah — love. She began in the eternal life of the mind, and cannot end until "two eternities" — the spectral and emanative — meet in one.
P. 11, ll. 12 to 29. In order that Satan may be saved from eternal death or enters separation from spirit, he is formed into a symbolic body corresponding to the internal spiritual body, the imagination or the lamb, every one of the six stages of creation passes over him, and is under an especial mental state (see "Work of Urizen," also the chapters on the Cherub). Leutha "hides," or clothes herself with organized form — the fascination of corporeal life finds a dwelling-place in corporeal beauty. The Imagination is now "punished" to save Satan, by its taking on his sin. (The incarnation into the midst of the Third Church has taken place.)
P. 11, ll. 30 to 35. The self-righteous see that they only live from God, and lament in, or grow "creative" in bodily sensations, in the region of vegetative fruitfulness. The bodily life is changed into a symbol of the bodiless, and so brings the fallen mind back to the universal perceptions. P. 11, ll. 36 to 44. The purely mental emotions now no longer war on the bodily, but lead the bodily emotions into the presence of the creative energy of the mind, and from the bodily attraction and the inventive energy are born the organization of the corporeal mental condition. Death, the recurring period of unimaginativeness, is made, that death may be separate, a part to be learned and refused, and the bodily restriction is given a place apart and called Rahab, that she may be known as other than Jerusalem, and so cast out when the time comes. Oothoon, spiritual beauty, is made the guard of heathen corporeal beauty to protect it from the destroyer, force of reason. (Palamabron, though he is the inventive mental personality in general, is, in a special sense, the writer in Blake himself, his harrow being the pen. Oothoon is the spiritual beauty whereby Blake seeks to win the corporeal beauty and fascination of merely natural things.)
P. 11, l. 45 to 50. Having been told the stages whereby the personal Blake was made, and the personal method of his philosophy invented, the history of thought and life carried on from the creation to modern times, the poet in Albion ceases to speak for a moment, or from being creative becomes possible. Some say that Pity — corporeal creation— Love, or Leutha, are too high to be charged with this guilt of unimaginativeness. Others say his words are true, and ask where he had his song.
P. 12, ll. 12 to 19. He replies that he knows it is truth because he speaks from the poetic genius which is good. The bard takes refuge in Milton — Religious poetry — from the confusion of many speculations caused by his revelation.
This "refuge" in Milton's bosom is a symbol occurring elsewhere. Later on, we find it revealed as "repentance," p. 19, l. 50, and the symbol of nature's and analogy's period, six thousand years, enables us to trace it once more in "Vala," Night VII., l. 395, where it appears as "self-denial and bitter contrition," and Los is found as larger than the symbol Milton, for only a portion of him goes to eternal death.
VOL. II. 18 * Going to the extra page, numbered 3, intended to be placed where the later and interpolated p. 3 stands before it was written, and after Blake had concluded not to fill that space otherwise (presumably with a full-page illustration), allowing the book to read on so that l. 1 of p. 5 followed the last line of p. 3 as now numbered, (p. 3 was p. 2, p. 5 was p. 4, and the extra page 3 was designed as the first of two afterthoughts to come between them,) we find a hint of the biographical correspondence or personal meaning below the myth almost as plainly as in the scene between Los and Enitharmon in "Vala," Night VII.
Compare all this with the letters, and especially verses, written to Butts from Felpham, quoted in the explanation of the ballad "William Bond" and with that of "Mary," not forgetting that Enitharmon stands for the lovable side of Naturalism in life and art, just as Satan is its dangerous side, and the story of Blake's personal and emotional experiences at Felpham stands before us, from the time when he was "very much degraded" by Hayley, who even sought to act on his art by arraying the needs and the opinions of his wife against him, to the reconciliation before the Examiner period, and a fourfold vision indeed is given to the reader of "Milton."
It will then be easily understood that although the above explains to a certain degree the coherence of the symbolism, the mystic framework of the "Bard's prophetic song," it does not exhaust the relations between this and other portions of Blake's books and life. It hardly touches the artistic symbolism, a counterpart which may be considered in relation to each part separately, and it only indicates faintly the biographical suggestions.
It is impossible to work out in full extent each of these forms of comment. None of the books can in anything short of a whole bookshelf full of commentary be paraphrased three or four times over. In treating all it has been necessary to select some stream of interpretation and follow it from source to sea, only glancing here and there at the other roads that lead the same way, and carry freights of meaning by other means of transport.
The book of "Milton," however, demands more than any to be read in several meanings at once. The comment may, therefore, go backwards for a moment and very slightly trace the companion methods.
In "Vala," Night VIII., l. 345, Los, in the same words as are found in "Milton," p. 20, l. 15, speaks to the delusive female forms who are Eahab, and identifies himself with the Bard, and Blake, and by a single quality. The Bard taking refuge in the bosom of Milton, and Milton in the foot of Blake, are seen all to signify phases of the one great Spirit, whose sacrificial side is perfect in Christ, and whose prophetic voice was called Elijah before it was named Los.
Los conversing with Rahab is, in her, conversing with Milton's wives and daughters through the first of them. ("Milton," p. 16, l. 11.) Thus he is, in a degree, Milton telling the myth of Satan and Palamabron to the triple form or division of the twenty-seven heavens when he relates it to Rahab.
The account in "Vala" slightly differs from that in "Milton," but is essentially the same. (Night VIII., 1. 362, &c.) We are able to follow the artistic thread, and to a certain extent the biographical thread, by remembering that Hayley was occupying Blake with painting a head of Homer in his library at the time, as well as with the attempt to persuade him to study the classics, and by enforcing on him the duty of following any and every branch of art except symbolic design.
Satan — or the Greek Apollo (see conversations with Crabb Robinson), or classicality, as explained in the Preface to "Milton," and naturalism in art — accused Palamabron before his brethren. These were sons of Los belonging to the group whom Los refused to coerce, though their liberty caused him to go in fear of his own life. ("Vala," Night VII., l. 476.) To realize who Rintrali and Palamabron are, we must look a few lines higher up for their origin (ll. 451, 458 and 470).
Rintrah. and Palamabron, both "flames" or inspirations, cut Satan or naturalism off from Art, or Grolgonooza. Satan in tears is equivalent to the soft side of Tharmas, whose spectre was eternal death.
Enitharmon (who has a right to tears, being Pity, and female) made him a moony space as he rolled down beneath those "fires of Ore" (Night VIII., 1. 366), who were Rintrah and Palamabron, to whom Ore was a father as well as brother (Night VII., ll. 474, 475), just as Schofield was, in his turn, in "Jerusalem," p. 7, ll. 43. Schofield isaFelpham name, and here stands for Adam (also a gardener).
Ore, it will be noticed, had been the means, in his serpent-form, of Luvah's entry into the state called Satan (Night VIII., l. 377), who is, in a sense, his irredeemable human remains. Thus a clue is found in the following table : —
Spirit of Opacity ... ... Limit of contraction. Satan ... ... ... ... Adam. Orc (father of his brethren) ... Schofield (father of his brethren) .
The Satan of Milton has lost the fire of Ore through the great Separation or Division alluded to in "Jerusalem," p. 65, ll. 1 to 5, where it is connected with Albion whose Eon was to have been destroyed by Satan, "Milton," p. 9, l. 1, as the spectrous Luvah, ibid. p. 11, l. 8, and in "Milton," p. 7, l. 46 to 48, where we have the "sinking down" of Satan that brings the story to the incident of the "rolling down" of Vala, VIII, 366.
Then Ore as the father of his brethren who wanted to chain them to the rock, "Vala," Night VII., l. 475, becomes identified with Satan, who tempted them to flee away. The flight, which is out of the prophetic into the vegetative region, is only the action of the chain disguised in suavity. It is Vala's veil, the net, and so forth ("Milton," p. 22, l. 61). Los only just contrived that four sons of his, (and Jerusalem's) sixteen, should not "flee," — namely, the four "unvegetated," Rintrah, Palamabron, Theotormon and Bromion. Enitharmon breathed Satan into Golgonooza (VIII., 377), though Rintrah and Palamabron had cut him off. It was her "moony space," and when he rolled down he rolled down in it (l. 388).
Jerusalem there who was created in Golgonooza from the very spectres who were Satan in the aggregate (Night VIII., l. 136, aud elsewhere), wove them mantles of life and death (VIII., 391), being herself a building of Human Souls, — "Milton," p. 4, l. 19, actuated by Pity. Thus Jerusalem aud Enitharmon grow one, and have the good aspect of Pity, which joins what wrath has rent asunder, while its bad aspect being the "false pity," ("Milton," p. 5, ll. 27 and 43, p. 6, l. 19,) "divides the soul and man un-mans."
"Driving the harrow in Pity's paths " ("Milton," p. 10, l. 28,) has an artistic reference also. Driving inspiration in realism's paths is one of the equivalents.
"Divine Pity" supports Leutha, ("Milton, p. 11, l. 7,) the feminine self-sacrifice, or Christ. She is a daughter of Los and Beulah (Vala, VIII., 357, and "Milton," p. 9, l. 28). Here, examples may cease. The usual truth that everything has two aspects, according as it is used to serve God, — the true imagination, or mammon, the matter-believing intellect of the five senses, must needs apply to pity as to other things.
It has been noticed that Ore and Schofield were on a level by being father of their brethren. It will be remembered how Reuben "enrooted" and Hand "absorbed" their brethren. This gives them all a quality in which they resemble one another in a degree that suggests that missing fragments of the story of any one of the four may be restored by consulting the story of another and using it appropriately.
This leads to an understanding of the contradiction that Satan (Orc's human remains) was cut clear off from Golgonooza, for both accusation of sin and mere naturalism are cut from symbolic art, yet he rolled down in it with his companions. Golgonooza is not only delineative art but interpretative art iu its milder, passive, or feminine aspect. It is the moony space of Enitharnion, and it is where Los's furnaces stand, but it is also Divine analogy, into which wandering Reuben was led at last ("Jerusalem," p. 85, l. 1, &c).
Reuben's symbolic equivalence to Satan is through Hand and Albion, not through Orc and Los, though every spectre when alone and "ravening" is Satanic and of the Eating Cancer, or evil aspect of the Polypus.
One aspect of Divine analogy is the "body" or system of Moses ("Jerusalem," p. 49, l. 58). In the passage where this is told several other suggestions containing the explanation are to be found.
Beth Peor, the mountain whose counterpart is the valley where this body is built, is in the loins of Los, place of war. Compare "Vala," Night I., 1. 442, and "Jerusalem," p. 67, l. 29. War reaches the valley also, — having its own male and female aspect, as told in "Jerusalem," p. 43, l. 7. A little way above in the same page, l. 31, a line will be recognized as also belonging to "Milton," p. 35, l. 2. The whole page 67 of "Jerusalem" is closely woven into the subject of "Milton," the struggle of classic with symbolic art.
P. 12, ll. 10 to 14. Milton takes off the robe of promise and ungirds himself of the oath of God. This is presumably the "oath of the covenant" — the covenant being that referred to in "Jerusalem," p. 61 (a very late page written during the time when "Milton" was being printed), 1. 25, — "If you forgive another so shall Jehovah forgive you." When he goes to self-annihilation he ceases to seek forgiveness, or any- thing else ; on the contrary, he fulfils the covenant, and thus is no more bound by it, for self-annihilation and the forgiveness of sins are the same thing ("Jerusalem," p. 98), l. 23. He passes out of pure or passive spiritual existence into spiritual labours, in order to lift corporeal into spiritual life. The last thing he takes off when he does this is the covenant of truth. He puts on the twenty-seven heavens instead, — all of them belonging to Rahab, being, as they were poisonous modifications of truth, mixed with realism and moralism (compare "Jerusalem/' pp. 1 to 22). That is to say, when the religious impulse of poetry assumed the form of Milton's works it put on sin, as Christ put on death in the Virgin's womb. — It also, as will presently be seen, put on repentance.
The act may be, and has been, considered as also a passing of the power here called " Milton " from the narrower spiritual life that condemns the bodily life, and entering into that larger form of the same that accepts all. In this secondary sense the girdle and the robe are the "covering" (see chapter on "Christ") of the life and that which holds it together. The covering is the man of tradition, dogma, custom, &c., which any idea or emotion gathers round it in the course of time. It is held together by the resolve of men to serve that idea, hence Milton, God himself in one aspect, has to ungird himself of his oath to himself or to his self -hood, before he can get rid of the mass of religious traditions which make it impossible for him to expand beyond himself." (Now begins again in another aspect that story of the churches which Blake is for ever dwelling upon. Milton, religious impulse, descends and will in time become again tradition and rule.)
P. 12, l. 14 to 32. The states and moods of man are still given to the worship of natural fact and of mere brute force. He will enter into this evil world lest he becomes a self-hood by being separated from his emanative portion. He has constructed but a narrow tradition, and so becomes wholly masculine and repulsive, and must now redeem the feminine and attractive portion. He must leave memory and enter inspiration, which is born of the union of memory (the spectre) and hope (the emanation) .
P. 12, ll. 33 to 35. He takes the corporeal journey (the outside course) among the unimaginative (the dew), and the eternal wave of imagination within hint shadowed at the opaque world he was entering.
P. 12, ll. 36 to 42. He enters into the body (the covering cherub) and the seven angels of the Presence, or the seven-fold light of the mind, wept over this body.
P. 14, ll. 1 to 7. The seven angels go with him and give him perception of the bodily life (the last five are the five senses — the first two are thought and feeling — the brain and the blood). He walks with them in Eden, in the beginning of vegetative life.
P. 14, ll. 8 to 1 6. The body grows, as it were, into the earth (like a polypus). To those in the spiritual world he seems asleep, but to himself he seems lost in night. The emanations of the spiritual moods feed him with beautiful emotions.
P. 14, ll. 17 to 20. His body journeys through the'satanic world, the spirit thoughts see the poet like a warning light — a comet.
P. 14, ll. 21 to 35. All we have yet to pass sucks us into it as into a vortex, while that we have left takes definite shape in the memory or in the perception which repeat experience and was moulded upon experience. (There can be no form without thought and no thought without experience.) The earth is not yet a form, because we have not yet made it intellectual and imaginative with our experience. It is a great plain (Blake alludes to the lower limit of man when he uses this term earth). The heaven we have already passed through (by heaven he means here the mentor's world), and it is accordingly full of images of beauty and truth.
P. 14, ll. 36 to 46. Milton sees sleeping Humanity asleep in matter, but sustained by the power of God — the " rock of ages " — from sinking wholly into that matter, " the sea of time and space."' Milton, in descending into this humanity, goes head-foremost, so that what is below " soon seem above," the lower vegetative life seemed to enclose him above as well as below, as the sensuous wave encloses us all. His body falls like a globe— a self-hood. P. 14. ll. 47 to 50. Blake changes the plain of the symbolism, and sees Milton descend unto himself — thus identified with humanity — as a falling star, or descending inspiration which enters the lower part of his mind, that portion which is towards the northern darkness, and which is symbolized by the left foot.
P. 14, l. 50. Milton's arising and going forth is seen to be his entrance into Blake's mythic system. From then, the part of that system called "Milton" understood itself and the meaniug of the story of its personage when he was a vegetated mortal, not yet perceived as a state. In this meaning is included a set of minor significances for his wives and daughters. For these, in their symbolic sense, as Rahab, i.e. the symbolic power, this form of religious poetry gives itself.
P. 16, ll. 1 to 20. The word Human must be noted as meaning "belonging to the imagination," — in this page. Milton as a thought perceives backwards himself as a man, and knows himself a symbol. He sees his wives and daughters symbols also, though, as such, they are not merely six, but numberless. His body (for now the fleshly idea of body definitely vanishes,) is the rock that Urizen shot at Fuzon, — his system is the law. (He would justify the ways of the God who was Satan misnamed, — the God of darkness, jealousy, and vindictive law, to men). His female symbols being named twice over, once for his system or shadow, and once for the symbolic or human element in his life.
P. 16, ll. 21 to 30. The mundane shell is described, and it is shown how Milton, as an influence, travels from erroneous morality towards eternal art, going to Golgonooza, that is, from the graves, or flesh, outside, by way of Midian, the desert, among the moral rocks of Horeb.
P. 16, ll. 31 to 36. It seems to the feminine portion of Los that he will surely let loose Satan from bondage in Analogy, and cause him to dominate mankind, Albion. So the masculine portion opposes him. P. 17, l. 5. And Los frowned, but it was not his true self but the personal spectre in him, the Satan, the accuser, the Urizen, the taskmaster who really opposed Milton.
P. 17, ll. 6 to 14. This Urizen who opposed Milton was the very same whom Milton had praised under the name of Jehovah — thus giving life to his opposer. The red clay of the Adamic man in Milton fills out the image, — for without it Urizen could assume only the appearance of age, not the beauty of even the most false and unforgiving ideal of God-head.
P. 17, ll. 15 to 26. The position of Golgonooza in the fourfold Humanity is explained, and the opposition of Urizen. Afterwards, at p, 32, is a diagram showing how Milton reached Golgonooza between the worlds of Urizen and Luvah and passed to Adam, the elementary Humanity, his best goal and highest ideal, having no power to terminate his mental journey otherwise.
P. 17, ll. 27 to 60. Rahab seeing this endeavours to divert him into entering her world of unideal life, not having Adam, but Satan for the goal of his journey, thus never escaping the rocks of Horeb but taking them with him. Then, indeed, Satan would have been unloosed on Albion. The beauty of Morality, Love, and Flesh in strange juncture allure him. She forms them all.
P. 18, ll. 1 to 6. These lines belong to the above account of Rahab.
P. 18, ll. 7 to 24. But Milton worked on as before. The poetry of his words idealised the dark God of Sinai. The words of his poetry were frozen into the rock itself of the law, the real Human, the symbolic influence inhabited the symbolic region where Blake by prophetic power has perception of him, as though he saw himself through the seven eyes of God.
P. 18, ll. 7 to 25. A fourth Milton,— the "elect" portion already satanic in idea, but continually saved through election and made a redeemer, — by inspiration that astonished and mistook itself — (Milton wrote of the Messiah under the idea that he was writing of Satan, — compare "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," p. 5) — came down to earth to Blake, who feels unable rightly to tell so strange and fourfold a story in mortal language.
P. 18, ll. 25 to 50. And Albion in Blake was aroused by his descent, which is re-described, and the gates referred to and partly explained. But many of the spiritual powers rushed into the arena of mortal effort and passed to Ulro.
P. 18, ll. 50 to 62. This grieved the prophetic spirit of poetry. But he, fixing his perceptions on the symbolic influence of Milton, saw, as by memory, that he had always known that it should do what Enitharrnon feared, only in a different sense, not letting loose Ore's Human remains in a Satanic sense, but in the sense of enthusiasm freed from restrictions of rule, especially in art and poetry, rule of dogmatism and realism, and classicalism, — the triple Tongue, all false ; the triple chain, all jealousy.
P. 19, ll. 1 to 3. So Los went down after Milton, passing the seat of Satan, who slept in Udan Adan, — the lake into which, as Blake's or Los's Spectre, he was cast.
P. 19, ll. 4 to 14. And Blake, by Los's power, being Los, and going down with him, saw the vast extent of the Human proportion of his mind, and where Milton's influence reached in his imagination, and where the influence of the world had power, — both in the nether regions of the imagination. Fearless of being controlled by either, he bound on experience as a sandal with which to walk through imagination.
P. 19, ll. 15 to 36. At this point a new poem practically commences. As at the entrance of Leutha, who claimed Satan's blame, a fresh view of the first myth was made perceptible, so now Ololon, the sorrowful feminine power, comes forth, and joins the story of Milton's journey.
It appears at first as of both sexes, lamenting with its female tears that its male fires had driven Milton (the State called Milton) into Ulro, — the moral error that attributes sin and righteousness to individuals. P. 19, ll. 37 to 44. The multitudes that make up the State called Ololon called the Divine Family which appeared as four suns, then joined in one, and wept, as Christ over Lazarus. They grieved at Milton's going to this error, which is death, being opposite of the "only means to Forgiveness" ("Jerusalem," p. 49, 1. 75), which is life, and is the force of the hammer of Los himself. (Ibid., p. 88,1. 50.) In fact they grieved for the sacrifice of Christ (the portion of him in the State called Milton) to Tharmas, the false tongue seen on its moral, not sensuous or artistic, side.
P. 19, ll. 45 to 50. Then Ololon took refuge in Milton's bosom of sacrifice from the efforts of poetic creation, — the wars of eternity, even as the Bard did from outer wrangling.
P. 19, ll. 51 to 57. The Divine family made watchmen of the people of Ololon for the lower world's sake. Such is the best that imagination can make of contrition. It cannot restore poetry gone to error, even though it went there in one only of its fourfold phases as a sacrifice.
P. 19, l. 58. And the self-sacrifice of Ololon identified it with Christ also, though it be but a cloud, an outward thing of the life of instinct and blood.
P. 20, ll. 1 to 25. Blake tells what he felt in Lambeth when he saw with what and with whom his symbolic perceptions had identified him, (Here the tale touches "Vala," as above] noted, Night VIII., l. 345, and dates that portion of the poem, incidentally, as after 1803.) He tells us the temporary things of nature become permanent in the mind, the world being bound on as a sandal.
From here, l. 26, to the end of p. 23, the forces of imagination and contrition, of the sacrifice that turns itself into mental labour, and that which gives its ease away to suffer for what it deems to be moral truth, — a miracle in human nature, — and the attractions of all contraries and their dangers are sketched in reference to all the myths and mingled with the names of historic personages who illustrate. At the end, the classified symbols Bowlaboola and Allamanda, Los and Enitharmon, give imaginative purpose to blood and nerves, to Time and Space.
Then (pp. 24, 25 and 26) Los is allowed in the myth to assume his full stature of gigantic proportions; war is his wine-press and printing press, and the whole mental world is the place of his vintage and harvest. He calls all the forces that live, to be one with him, delighting in prophecy and despising all other pleasure. They are discontented. Then his sons are seen as stars above the sea, and as little flies dancing in the field. Then some towns of England are used to hint the regions, south or north, and show how the instincts of man become ideas as souls put on body. And the inner expansiveness of the symbolic body is asserted, and the great central truth declared that Natui'e has no cause or causes in her (unless in the word Nature we include the idea Spirit, — an over-straining perhaps), but that Spiritual force alone has. This awakes and will re-awake ideas when Memory itself has gone to destruction with the brain in which it dwells, both being perishing and vegetable.
P. 27. And Los has Other sons than those that wear the look of stars, flies, or flowers. — These are the spiritual forces themselves. They form the corporeal, and they divide Time into its divisions and unite it again like a healed wound till six thousand years are seen to be less than a moment, notwithstanding the tent of its minutes, the golden entrance to its hours, the adamantine gates of each of its days and nights, the pure terrace of the months, the high towers of the years, the deep moats around the ages, the all other work of Fairy hands, that do the bidding of the Spirit of Prophesy.
P. 28. And the unity of art with the source of time, and of nerves with their meanings and of all with one another in the great polypus is told, — in brief, Nature is sketched in a few architectural strokes as a mental fact, — the Science of the Elohim." Book II.
P. 30, ll. 1 to 20. In the second book it appears that Ololon, intending to enter into the pangs of repentance in Milton's bosom (see above, p. 19, l. 50) thinking such to be the refuge from the intellectual wars of eternity, found that she had entered Beulah, which, rightly viewed, is not repentance but innocence. It is sexual and is the "three-fold," but is not a place of war, but the exterior of Eden, the veil, so to speak, of the joys that belong to the wars of eternity, — a sort of Mundane Shell, not made of rocks and tears, bat sweet emotions. It is created by the wars, as contraries create one another.
P. 30, l. 32 to p. 31, l. 7. It is, like all the temporal world, of which it is a portion, a creation of inercy, and is the Mercy Seat itself. Therefore its symbol is the emotion of marriage, given to enable the weaker form of love to endure itself, and not be blinded by the light of the stronger form. It is the innocent Vala before she became Rahab.
P. 31, ll. 7 to 11. It is an emotion that ends in realism, — terminates in Rocky Albion.
P. 31, ll. 11 to 17. And as Beulah weeps with the sorrow of Ololon, all nations, all ideas feel with her, and the Zoas, the Los's halls, generation and regeneration, stand visible in all their relations and their contrasts. ("A tear is an intellectual thing.")
Once more at this point we see the story of the poet through the veil of his writings, we see the contrition of Los, and his reconciliation with Enitharmon in "Vala," and we read the "Truchsessan letter" over Blake's shoulder.
P. 31, ll. 17 to 63. We see also Blake's art reconciled to make some use of Nature, not hating nor fearing, for this is the wider meaning of the reconciliation of Los and Enitharmon. He finds wonderful things in the sandal which he has bound on his foot to walk forward through Eternity, he hears the birds and sees the flowers, and they form part of the harmless pleasures of the eye — (of sight, which is the "happy" realization of marriage — or Beulah (compare Visions of the Daughters of Albion) — and the lamentation of innocence over self-sacrifice turns to beauty. Here "extra page" 32 was to have come in. It is invaluable as explanation, but needs no comment. Extra page 17 can well be read here as a counterpart.
P. 32, l. 24. And the Divine Voice was heard in all the songs of Beulah, saying, ec When I first saw nature and married it, and in it married you, and I gave it, and you, my whole heart. But nature did not joy in the pleasures of the spirit, but was jealous of them and sought her own sower. It refused to allow corporeal life to be lived on the principle of spiritual life. Then it was Bahab, binding the red cord in the window, — crossing vision with the streak of blood. Therefore I, said the Divine Voice, show you my jealousy. It is seen as the death of Milton, who annihilated himself, which now means that he ceases to love nature, or to feel or claim self-righteousness, and so ceases all personal life. He labours, by this withdrawal from "female loves" or love of self-righteous holiness, to be able to enter into the moral and religious life of the exterior, and so redeem his own contrary, the twenty-seven heavens of Bahab. He praises the jealous and dark god, and gives life to Urizen. At this in fear, nature, who gives to those who ask nothing, places herself at the service of the new religious poet and both are happy. So sang the Divine Voice when Ololon repented for Bahab, and took on her fault, and so the voice of Imagination instructed Blake to sing, not as Milton.
P. 34, l. 7. Thus Beulah sounded " comfortable notes," terror being changed to pity. The reason is given where the first line of this page occurs in " Vala," Night VII., 1. 781. It is because the Divine Voice no longer suffered doubts to rise up from the Shadowy Female, who is the real driver-down of Milton into the Ulro.
P. 34, ll. 8 to 49. The divisions of Ulro and Beulah are explaiuod. All arc evil and satanic except when in repose. They are essentially female. Their "will" has no place in Imagination. They belong to Bowlaboola. Law, itself, is innocent in Repose. They are the "maternal humanity/' taken together. They unite spirit and body, and lower spirit, and are the bridge between mind and "matter," or lower mind, and digestion and gestation are their physical symbols, and law and morality their invention.
Blake's mythic system being explained, we are able to look down into matter with Ololon.
P. 34, ll. 50 to 55. We see that while the wars of eternity give life, those of time and space give death, even if we include marriage among the wars, for mortal birth gives death.
P. 35, ll. 1 to 25. And female forms weave the woof of death, which is that of unforgiveness in the moral world, as in the physical, in all the quarters of humanity symbolised under portions of London, or of the world. But there is a spiritual life that cannot be had except by putting on the mortal and allowing it to destroy you. This is G-olgonooza. Christ only can be both mortal and spiritual, alive and dead at once.
P. 35, ll. 26 to 30. Ololon's multitudes expressed their contrition to the starry eight — Milton and the seven eyes.
P. 35, ll. 30 to 35. They rejoiced, for they saw that the contrition of Ololon had opened a road to eternity, just as morality of Rahab closes the road.
P. 35, ll. 42 to 47. There is a moment in every period of time which cannot be found by the powers of external nature, and in this moment the Divine influx descends into man to make beautiful the other moments also. It is in the symbolic morning, just at the time when the sun reaches the point midway between Zenith and Nadir (see chapter on the Zodiacal symbolism of the Cherub) at the point of the commingling influences of reason (Urizen) and love (Luvah) where masculine influx had already descended (see diagram on page 32 of present poem), and makes the beauty (the wild thyme) of the earth send up its aspirations towards the Zenith, P. 35, ll. 48 to 53. In this moment a fountain of influence flows from the mind of man outward into the external physical, and inward into the external mental, worlds, into the world of sensation and the world of custom and dogma, awakened by the inspired moment this purifying stream from the mind, and in this final union is in art (Golgonooza), the union of symbol and thought.
P. 35, ll. 54 to 61. The Wild Thyme is the messenger o the formative mind to length and breadth. He is not greater because he would overpower the world with his merely earthward tendency if he were. This Thyme covers the rock or individualized tendency, which is over the abode of the Divine aspirations (the lark), and beside the source of the two streams of influence already described.
P. 35, ll. 61 to 67. The aspirations — the lark — mount upward to the place in the symbolic Heavens which is called Leutha (see chart of symbolic Heavens in chapter on the Zodiacal symbolism of the Cherub). (This Heaven named last, when the Heavens are enumerated, is now named first, for it is considered in its capacity as a gate where influx can enter, rather than as the place for the removal of accumulated abstractions of dogma and symbol). Adam is now the second, and so on. The aspiration — the lark — is the messenger that keeps the eyes of God — the Divine senses descended into formalism and dogmatism and materialism — from forgetting their office. It rises from the side of imaginative life or Art, which faces to the East or towards Love.
P. 36, ll. 1 to 12. When the lark reaches the gate of Leutha he meets another lark, that is to say he meets and becomes one for a moment with his own symbol or external expression. They both then descend to their different abodes — the first lark to his home in imagination pure and simple, the second lark to his place in symbol and dogma. Each Heaven is not only a sub-division of the day that is made up of all the Heavens, but contains within itself the twenty seven-fold Heavens on a smaller scale, and is a complete day in itself, and
VOL. II. 19 * in every one of these smaller days, at the moment when the sun reaches Leutha, the lark ascends, and so the message is carried from Heaven to Heaven one after another, until the twenty-eighth lark, that is to say the lark that rose when Luther had come round again, met the Divine feminine influence, Ololon, descending. (Milton — the Divine man — descended in the first moment, and when the circle is completed again, Ololon — the Divine woman — follows him.)
P. 36, ll. 13 to 32. Here direct autobiography mingles with the poem. The contrition of Ololon was an experience of Blake's. When it came to put on a natural or feminine form he sent it into his cottage to comfort his wife, who was sick with fatigue, — presumably much worried both by rheumatism and by Blake's " absences in Eden," which she said once were the only faults for which she ever had to blame him, all other reports and gossip notwithstanding.
P. 37 presents a new appearance. It was not done directly after page 36. What we have lost between them is unknown.
Lines 1 to 3 gives an answer of Ololon. She has come to seek Milton.
Lines 3 to 60. She finds him, he has entered into the accuser of sins and destroyer of joys. The whole symbolic connection between the Churches, Spectres, Cherub, and Mundane Shell is then declared. Read with the other parts of the myth and commentative chapters, it explains itself.
P. 39, l. 8. The number of the starry regions explains why Los first opposed Milton with forty-eight fibres. Milton appears in visionary form as historically known.
P. 39, ll. 9 to 27. Satan is seen both within and without, and further explained.
P. 39, ll. 27 to 49. Milton in Eastern porch, — place where the lark mounts, — speaks as a State and identifies Satan, as Los does in Jerusalem, as his spectre, his self-hood, selfrighteousness, and utters Blake's own manifesto upon the purposes of his poetry. P. 39, ll. 50 to 57. Satan claims to be the Messiah, — as in Milton's poems.
P. 40, l. 1. Milton is seen on Blake's path with the starry-seven whose words are forms.
P. 40, ll. 10 to 52. The appeal to Albion to awake. This seems to have been written for a page of "Jerusalem," perhaps to follow l. 83.
P. 40, ll. 53 to 61. Urizen's struggles with Milton continue, notwithstanding the presence of the visionary Milton on Blake's pathway.
P. 42, l. 3. Milton and Ololon perceive each other, but Blake only imperfectly perceives what they do. The naïveté of this and the manifest honesty of the vision as narrative, are here so evident as to form the best of excuses for the fragmentary nature of this and all Blake's later poems viewed as literature.
P. 42, ll. 3 and 4. Ololon tells Milton all she sees of him and admits herself to be "Natural Religion," an absurdity. She weeps lest the little ones of Jerusalem should be lost, because the Satanic Milton who was annihilated, is the moral personage, the "wicker man of Scandinavia," to and in whom they are sacrificed.
At her words Rahab is revealed within Satan, whose regions are a mingling of city and desert — Babylon and Midian. Milton tells Ololon the secret of annihilation, which is the putting off of the "false body" or incrustation.
P. 43, l. 28. It is in fact the not-human. With all his faults Milton at least tended against the classic and in favour of the symbolic, and as such is allowed to be a State, — that of self-annihilation, — and now he comes to awake Blake and retire or vanish while a more purely mystical Christianity than his own is put forward. The result is to be the swallowing up of generation in regeneration, of the symbol in the symbolized.
P. 43, ll. 29 to 38. Then Ololon declares herself as the contrary of Milton, who is masculine Hope. She is feminine Despair. (She is like Theotormon, he like Oothoon.) She enters into the void outside existence and finds it to be Milton's shadow. She enters as a dove, thus counterpai-ting the Annunciation as Satan counterpartcd the coming again.
The covering cherub is revealed as Luvah's l^obe of blood. The starry seven become one man, and the clouds of Ololon, which were the heavens, are put on by him and the clouds are seen as the literal expression of Scripture, — the word of the Word.
Then the vision of the four Zoas, who included the twenty- four cities, is seen as they arose into Albion's bosom, — as in the last pages of "Jerusalem," Blake falls on the path, his soul returning to his body, and sees Mrs. Blake beside him trembling. Then Time and Space arise over them, and all their physical powers (animals) are made ready to go forth to gather into poetry the truths that they have learned, the great vintage and harvest of the nations.
Such are the last words of the last prophetic book that Blake eft to us. Merely to measure his power is a task. Who will emulate it now ?
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