Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/131

Rh First with lungs he brings air to the water, or heart to the loins.

2. Emotion entered the region of sense, and they both became weary first, struggling after.

3. Struggle leads to fruitfulness in eternity, and the waters became torrents, the lungs became organs.

4. Presently, in the region of material sense compared to which heart is masculine — as head is masculine compared in its turn with heart — a form is born of heart and loins, collected from the spawn of the waters as the burning globe of Urizen from the fires of the air.

5. Then, as in "Urizen" (Chapter V., stanza 4), Los smote the north from the south region (darkness from light, earth from fire, or loins from head), so now he separates the "heavy from the thin," west from the east, water from air, loins from heart.

6. The two loins, or female elements, water and earth, clove together — being the "heavy" — and sank; that is to say, passed into the outer or lower of human nature, while the "thin" or air, flowing around the fierce fires, coalesced with them and going to the upper or inner, really began uniting the scattered fires into an orb, a self-hood.

1. At this, light or human imagination first began. The pure fluid conducted the light from the fires. Air, the influence of the heart, being added to fire — passion of the head. Forthwith by this light Los beheld the void's spiritual form. It was a serpent. It was the backbone of Urizen. It was the system of logic or mere coherence without imagination, experience without inspiration, natural tendency without exaltation, the vast "chain of the mind" that "locks up," the head, heart, loins of unimaginativeness in the book of "Urizen" (Chapter VI., stanza 4) into forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity.