Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/130

 116 measuring night and day, and where circles are, there the void will presently bear fruit.

6. And his fall having done its first work, changes to an oblique motion, and presently his head that had been downwards (for when the bodily man enters into activity of the loins, the spiritual man within him is reversed in all its regions, its head is in the bodily loins, its loins in the bodily lie id). This moment corresponds in the story of Los to that of the third stanza of the fourth chapter of "Urizen," where the eddies of his wrath settle to a lake.

7. In the ages of sorrow Los expiates his error, giving it organs, that it may be rightly met and put off in the end. Such was his action in the region of the loins.

8. In the dark purple air, the region of the heart, he floated sideways in sorrowful feminine feeling, and gave his emotion to all that has not up and down but long and wide for its mystic measurement, even to accident and chance.

9. And in the region of the head, the falling but still prophetic Mind organized itself, and became that which is called by mortals Imagination.

(The last three stanzas exactly show the contrast between the book of "Urizen" and of "Los." Both enter the feminine darkness. Both organize themselves. Urizen propagates restrictions and a net from the watery region of tears, from the loins, or pitiful and watery portion, in the head. Los ends by propagating freedom, the pliant faculty of entering into all the vacuity called nature, from the fiery, or mental and wrathful, region of the head of (or spiritual head in) the loins.)

1. The loins are a duplex symbolic region of earth and water. The earth Los had cast away. The water he must vivify.