Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/132

 118 2, 3. Los, astonished and terrified at his own experiences, now made furnaces that there might be a counterpart to the pipes that drew in the spawn of the waters. He formed the anvil and hammer. Just as the loins are a duplex region, so is the heart, a place not only of breathing but of heating, with a fire as well as an air of its own, otherwise the loins would overbalance the region above them and the outer control the inner. Then began the binding of the cold head — of Urizen. This is the moment of the close of the second and the whole of the third chapter of "Urizen."

4, 5. And while outwardly he merely enclosed Urizen's fountain of thought under a roof ("Urizen," IV., 8), he was really condensing the moods of desire into a self-hood which should eventually bring them forth again as its own, whether under the name of Orс, or under any other.

6. Oft the incomplete vitality was quenched in the deeps of its own material. This is the strange alternation of experience and imagination whose ultimate symbol is the ever buried and ever rising Christ.

7. And nine ages completed the fruitful circlings of the fires, for the whirling that began in void, went on in torrents of water, after earth was burst, and is now in fire, so that the four regions are all fructified. Then Los knew that the product he had made was completed. What is called Orc when seen from another portion of the visionary world, and is changed to a rock, and awakens Urizen, is now brought as a glowing rock, or sun, and to it is chained the backbone of Urizen, his system of scientific and moral restrictiveness.

8. On this hot and dark rock Urizen lay — head chained to loins — in torment, as Orc lay in torment on the cold rock — loins chained to head. For the furnaces with their fires had joined the regions that the waters had divided when heavy and thin fell apart, for in this version, pity divides, as elsewhere pity unites, what wrath divides — action and re-action being eternal.

9. And from this orb of fire, a paradise whose four rivers