Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/137

Rh blood rolled round his dim rock—for so must the hardness of a self-contemplative shadow be called.

3. And the trumpet caused creative imaginations and joys,—myriads of eternity, for these moods are also persons,—to hurry at its shrillness, at the intensity of the craving.

And with a terrible division eternity parted right and left. This eternity was Urizen's shadow. It was feminine, as all shadow must be. Its division was the loss of its virginity. Fragments of life were seen upon it, needing a male counterpart to enter into full existence. Urizen himself should be that counterpart.

4. But his self-begetting had only produced destructive forms. What else does reason and analysis engender? Yet fire ran over his regions and his deserts, for the heat of life abandons unwillingly the least creative part of mind.

5. But the fires gave no light, for they belonged all to the region of the five senses, the void, the womb, the feminine obscurity, experience. They were not the inspired light fires of prophecy.

6. And Urizen rushed into this region to hide himself in the contemplation of temporary mental states of the lower or sensuous plain. He would hide himself as the seed in the earth that he might bring forth harvest. But all he gained was that he fell under the curse of the unprophetic, non-eternal senses, and though eternal himself, tasted the bitterness of age and despair.

7. And his world became manifest to the prophetic eye of eternals outside it, as a black globe, and finally as a dark heart. It had the passion of growth, and its blood ran to quench the prophetic fires that beat on it from without, as in all of us happens to this day.

8. But this called up a spirit who had not yet advanced. Los, the Eternal Prophet, the moving or vehicular form of Urthona, the true regent of the northern land to which Urizen had come to dominate,—Los, labourer at furnaces whose bellows are lungs, and forger on anvils of affliction with a