Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/267

 Rh

At his embrace "she cast aside her clouds and smiled her first-born smile, as when a black cloud shows its lightnings to the silent deep."

Then begins the agony of revolution, her frost and his fire mingling in pain; and the poem opens as with a sound and a light of storm. It is throughout in the main a mere expansion and dilution of the "Song of Liberty" which we have already heard; and in the interludes of the great fight between Urizen and Orc the human names of American or English leaders fall upon the ear with a sudden incongruous clash: not perhaps unfelt by the author's ear also, but unheeded in his desire to make vital and vivid the message he came to deliver. The action is wholly swamped by the allegory; hardly is it related how the serpent-formed "hater of dignities, lover of wild rebellion and transgressor of God's Law," arose in red clouds, "a wonder, a human fire;" "heat but not light went from him;" "his terrible limbs were fire; "his voice shook the ancient Druid temple of tyranny and faith, proclaiming freedom and "the fiery joy that Urizen perverted to ten commands;" the "punishing demons" of the God of jealousy