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 170 that they also could mean nothing to the emotions or to the memory (Bowlahoola, Golgonooza), the whole unhuman mythology, abstractions of frigid fire. In Jerusalem Blake interrupts himself to say:

In the Prophetic Books we see Blake labouring upon a 'rough basement' of 'stubborn' English; is it, after all this 'consolidated and extended work,' this 'energetic exertion of his talent,' a building set up in vain, the attempt to express what must else have been, and must now for ever remain, 'a dumb despair'?

I think we must take the Prophetic Books not quite as Blake would have had us take them. He was not a systematic thinker, and he was not content to be a lyric poet. Nor indeed did he ever profess to offer us a system, built on logic and propped by reasoning, but a myth, which is a poetical creation. He said in Jerusalem: