Edwin Ellis

“ When he pities he propagates, and in the North his progeny are always unimaginative demonstrations. But Albion's spirit of Obedience and Law, his Angel, compels the youth, as they curse the pained heavens, parental potencies of Urizen, to submit to his ideas. The serpent-temple shadows the island, until Albion's angel in the flames of the desire for a more complete tyranny of literal over spiritual law, howling with a yearning like Orc's fiery passion, seeks the trump, the arousing instrument of the last mood of man, and therefore of the last doom. ”

“ A cold leper thou shalt be, Though thou wast so pure and bright That Heaven was not clean in thy sight; Though thy oath turned Heaven pale, Though thy covenant built Hell's jail, Though thou dost all to chaos roll With the serpent for its soul. Still the breath Divine does move, And the breath Divine is love. Mary, fear not. Let me see The seven devils that torment thee. Hide not from my sight thy sin, That forgiveness thou mayst win. Has no man condemned thee?" "No man, Lord." ”

“ 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.) ”

“ They were not the inspired light fires of prophecy.
6. And Urizen rushed into this region to hide himself in the contemplation of temporary mental states of the lower or sensuous plain. He would hide himself as the seed in the earth that he might bring forth harvest. But all he gained was that he fell under the curse of the unprophetic, non-eternal senses, and though eternal himself, tasted the bitterness of age and despair.
7. And his world became manifest to the prophetic eye of eternals outside it, as a black globe, and finally as a dark heart. ”

“ An aged shadow, soon he fades, Wandering round an earthly cot, Full filled all with gems and gold Which he by industry has got. 9. And these are the gems of the human soul, The rubies and pearls of a lovesick eye, The countless gold of the aching heart, The martyr's groan and the lover's sigh. 10. They are his meat, they are his drink, He feeds the beggar and the poor ; To the wayfaring traveller Forever opens his door. 11. His grief is their eternal joy, They make the roofs and walls to ring, Till from the fire upon the hearth A little female babe doth spring. ”

“ Thought — the power of Albion's angel at night, of the stars, the demons of futurity — in fact, the sons of Urizen and of Albion — changed the infinite into a serpent when the symbol of productivity seemed nothing but a physical instrument. The fires of prophecy — of pitying Los — were changed into the sons of Orc, the devouring and tyrannic passions. Man attempted to hide from them in sorrows, in instincts, in forests. ”

“ Already my roots are within, in the heavens, the region of passion, my fruits outside in the cold earth, region of experience. Destructive experiences that consume imagination are the progeny of marriage with Orc. Why shouldest thou, the spiritual essence of Space, bring me, by nature a mere cloud, temporary contrast of the great fire, into life ? (8-11.)
In vain I shrink from them into vegetative instincts of the region of watery growth. From the sun and moon and stars, spiritual potencies of red passion, fall the prolific pains that fertilize me. ”

“ The Earth trembling and naked lay In secret bed of mortal clay. On Sinai fell the hand Divine, Putting back the bloody shrine, And she heard the breath of God As she heard by Eden's flood. " Good and evil are no more ; Sinai's trumpets cease to roar. Cease, finger of God, to write ; The heavens are not clean in thy sight. Thou art good, and thou alone ; Nor may the sinner cast one stone. To be good only, is to be As God or else a Pharisee. ”

“ And Los wept and suffered, for though he is Time as seen by mortals, he is Eternity in himself, and all the self-hoods that are rent from Eternity are rent from his side. Urizen was so rent. He became darkness, blood, experience, mortality, all that is not imagination and inspiration. He became as the Feminine principle, without its lovable emotional symplicity. He became jealousy, which is always female uninstinctive, unmaternal made for destruction, even when it is the jealousy of God. ”

“ The sun, Urizen, sheds a faint light along the northern horizon. "Fleecy clouds" float in the air. Orc rises in the form of the northern lights or of a shooting star. The feminine powers long for dominion and the clouds obscure the moon — Los — and cover the world with cold and with increasing darkness. The meteorological symbolism then leaves us for a time to return when the clouds are dispersed and the trump of doom is sounded by Newton. There is a period of pleasant life before dawn, when the fish sport on the waves by the light of the moon. ”

“ It is not the final Humanity and Union of all, but the final Limit of Opacity, the aggregate of separateness massed. It is piled-up dust, not the water of life. It coheres by the water of death; fleshly instinct. It is bound by the fire of vegetation; fleshly growth and decay. At the incarnation Christ put on this water and this fire. The one burned the other. He ended by putting them both off. His mother was Law and Nature. His body was Satan. When crucified he was his own destroyer, destroying the Serpent in Himself. This Serpent, Satan, was what was nailed to the tree. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But visible fury and love, frank and masculine, remained as a light of Egypt — as the imaginative and God-like thing in this dark world — till Los beat it in the body of the sun and made it one with the blood, as the Spirit of God and the dark waters were made one in Genesis. ”

“ Matter for a while gets the better of spirit. Then, as the sunset leads to starlight, they arose in a new form, as intellectual ideas of a purely reasoning kind, as the "corporeal understanding," as the light of night. They struggle upward, or inward, striving to enter in this form the imagination, the " bosom of God." In the thoughts perturbed they tried, to follow Albion's angel to his ancient temple, serpent formed. ”

“ But he is solitary there, he only propagates destruction through grief, and restraint unlike Los, possesses of the moon the loins.
The winds and clouds, during the repose of the fire and light, are invited to awake and sing to the elemental harps. North and South repose, East and West arise and sing. The sons of Urizen, the northern sons, are destructive, and envy the sons of Los who are elemental and joyous. They demand that spiritual life, delight, and not merely intellectual destruction, be attached to experiences, and claim this because joy is among their privileges. ”

“ For there the babe is born in joy That was begotten in dire woe, Just as we reap in joy the fruit That we in bitter tears did sow. 3. And if the babe is born a boy He's given to a woman old Who nails him down upon a rock, Catches his shrieks in cups of gold. 4. She binds iron thorns about his head, She pierces both his hands and feet, She cuts his heart out at his side To make it feel both cold and heat. 5. Her fingers number every nerve, Just as a miser counts his gold ; She lives upon his shrieks and cries, And she grows young as he grows old. ”

“ Covet, Urizen. 4. Who, not being opposed as the limitations of matter oppose the freedom of idea, were harmless.
5. And generous, joy-giving, love-giving, and fruitful.
6. At this outcry -of the ancient maternity, living flames of the wrath and desire, the heart and loins of imagination that together make creations possible, ran through the generative region of prophecy. The fires were armed with destruction of freedom and plague of the senses that are open to pain, They were thus creative, This moment is the same as that told in the eighth stanza of the second "Book of Urizen." ”

“ Till he becomes a wayward babe, And she a weeping woman old ; Then many a lover wanders here, The sun and stars are nearer rolled. 23. The trees bring forth sweet ecstacy To all who in the desert roam, Till many a city there is built, And many a pleasant shepherd's home. 24. But when they find the frowning babe, Terror strikes through the region wild ; They cry : " The babe ! the babe is born ! " And flee away on every side. 25. For who dare touch the frowning form His arm is withered to the root ; Bears, lions, wolves, all howling fly, And every tree doth shed its fruit. ”

“ Then my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise, My person degrade and my temper chastise; And the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; All my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. I am either too low or too highly priz'd; When elate I'm envied ; when meek I'm despised. "This," he adds, "is but too true a picture of my present state. I pray God to keep you from it and to deliver me in his own good time." Mary, after uttering the lament of the first two lines, says that to be weak and smooth and not raise envy is "called Christian love." ”

“ This is the truth whose contemplation led William Bond into the error of failing to perceive that when seen from another side the same problem would yield a different solution, until Mary's fainting fit at the bedside gave him light. "In a Myrtle shade" is not written merely, as has been supposed, against the chain of marriage and morality, but against that of the flesh itself. Love will not only refuse, when existing in a given lover, to be bound to a woman because this lover is personally united with her in legal marriage. ”

“ Satan is the Accuser. Accusation is the great mental sin. Other sin is merely physical, and belongs to the things of Time that pass. Accusation is not the only mental sin. Denial is equally deadly. Satan is not only the moral accuser but the denier of Imaginative truth, for he would have Reason and Memory only considered to be intellectual attributes. With these he builds the dark fiction of error — a belief in that delusive Goddess Nature, who is the mother of physical morality, and of mental immorality. She is Mary, the pure, and Rahab the Harlot. ”

“ Then is the head a mere forgetfuluess of eternity, the heart a dumbness to love, the loins a necessary law of nature, and man's mind is locked away by the pre-occupation and kept as in fetters of ice from eternity, the free Imagination, while ever still Time beats, and those fetters are as ice of iron and brass,— cold experience, cold emotion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Image of God in which man was made is the form of the Imagination. This is common to all men and will end by becoming One Form. It will unite all. It will survive all. It will redeem all, saving them from violation or experience and the slavery of belief in nature, in accusation, and in the mental permanence of sin. In a word it saves them from Satan, God of this world. Reason and memory tend also to unite men's personalities into one great Temporary Delusion. This is the great Satan, opposite of the great Saviour. It is negative, imagination only being positive. ”

“ On her white marble and even neck, her heart In-orbed and bonified with locks of shadowing modesty, shining Beams mild, all love and all perfection, that when the lips Receive a kiss from gods or men, a threefold kiss returns From the pressed loveliness ; so her whole immortal form threefold, Threefold embrace returns, consuming lives of gods and men In fires of beauty, melting them as gold and silver in the furnace. ”

“ Urizen's burning refuses to worship Urizen's darkness.
3. He threw the globe of wrath that lengthened into a beam, just as Urizen's tears lengthen into ropes of a net. The beam is the spear, or arrow, symbol of male potency and desire.
4. Urizen opposed the disk of the sun — the exterior sun — "a black shadow like an eye" (" Visions of the Daughters," p. 2) — which is feminine because it is material and is of the loins. It is the globe of his life-blood. It is in the void, the womb, the heart, and is within the Temple. All the regions are one within the other. ”