Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/128

 BOOK OF LOS.

1. Since the day of creative thoughts, the thunders of old time, when earth — or the five senses — was begun and made the chariot of Leutha — bodily beauty — Eno, the aged mother, has guided it, for the maternal power rules in the material sphere of thought.

2. Beneath the eternal vegetation — that oak which the mistaken Druids supposed to be imagination — Eno trembled, and, shaking- the earth, was delivered of children ; that is, of speech.

3. She called aloud on the times that had ceased to be, when the four quarters of humanity — now known as four evils — were, in right of imaginative freedom, four blameless things. When from the masculine — joy, and the feminine — love, came the child, adoration. (The three, as we learn elsewhere, became Selfhood, Pity and Desire.)

She calls to the four regions by their fallen names : —


 * Envy, Luvah.
 * Waste, | Tharmas.
 * Wantonness, they correspond to the old forms of  Urthona.
 * 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,