Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/129

Rh This moment is the same as that told in the eighth stanza of the second "Book of Urizen."

Prophecy was watching the shadow or chaos, the unorganized body of restrictive reason. Los watched Urizen's dark globe.

7. Los manifested himself to eternals as the spirit of freedom. He divided the eternal fires that were beating around him and round Urizen's dark world. They are seen in the seventh stanza of the second chapter of "Urizen." These fires are feminine as compared with the fires of Los, for wrath is masculine compared with desire.

8. Los, having caused wrath to enter desire and so destroyed its virginity, caused imagination to enter sense, dividing its materiality, and remained there, the master.

9. He reduced the flames to their own opposites, darkness, trembling, hiding, and coldness.

10. But inactive sense, since the days when Eno guided the chariot, leads to inactive imagination in each individual man, and in Los. The flames turned to black marble of Egypt, to purely corporeal emotion, and so, frozen with lack of divine heat, closed round him.

1, 2 and 3. (As the tomb triumphed on Christ for three days, so) for three stanzas the dark of maternity triumphs on the light paternity, materialism on imagination. At the third the rock is broken, and the spiritual body is free ; Los is impotent in the first stanza, rending in the second, utterly liberated in the third.

4. And suddenly finds that he has made an error. He should neither have bound the senses to be only sense, nor have destroyed them for being only sense. He suddenly finds himself in vacuum.

5. And so he falls, for truth has bounds, error none. But his fall is fructifying even now, for he whirls as he falls, VOL. II.