Page:The sanity of William Blake.djvu/41

 Rh condemnation of the senses. He would save those orthodox from condemning any part of our nature. Energy is divine impulse, we elsewhere learn, the work of the imagination, and the desire for it is the light that lighteth every man who comes into the world. It is the only life. It is at once work, conquest, and worship. But its means is the oft-despised body without which nothing is done. The resurrection of the body was an idea essential in Blake's creed. And while he realizes more powerfully than any prophet before him how "the gross flesh hems us in," he honoured his servant, his "body the ass." Thus in Jerusalem p. 55, he says: "Let the human organs be kept in their perfect integrity, at will contracting into worms, or expanding into Gods." A message surely that for all time should be the watchword of the man of science! The worm is the symbol of small, sluggish, often dormant, beginnings of unknown power. One day it expands into butterfly beauty, and the eternal miracle is aflame. And man should know more of his seedlike energies locked away in the cabinet of his body. At will should the poet be able to call down his larks from the sky to find