Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/261

Rh But he

From her long melodious lamentation we give one continuous excerpt here. Sweet, and lucid as Thel, it is more subtle and more strong; the allusions to American servitude and English aspiration, which elsewhere distract and distort the sense and scheme of the poem, are here well cleared away.

I cry Arise, O Theotormon; for the village dog

Barks at the breaking day; the nightingale has done lamenting;

The lark does rustle in the green corn, and the eagle returns

From nightly prey and lifts his golden beak to the pure east;

Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions, to awake

The sun that sleeps too long. Arise my Theotormon, I am pure

Because the night is gone that closed me in its deadly black.

They told me that the night and day were all that I could see;

They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up,

And they enclosed my infinite beam into a narrow circle,

And sank my heart into the abyss, a red round globe hotburning

Till all from life I was obliterated and erased:

Instead of morn arises a bright shadow like an eye

In the eastern cloud; instead of night a sickly charnel-house.