Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/138

 124 hammer that is the heart-beat, perceived Urizen's symbolic world to be part of his own machinery, and came forward to watch over it. All else in Eternity stood aloof. Los is Time, and he drew nearer as the other powers stood further off.

9. And Los wept and suffered, for though he is Time as seen by mortals, he is Eternity in himself, and all the self-hoods that are rent from Eternity are rent from his side. Urizen was so rent. He became darkness, blood, experience, mortality, all that is not imagination and inspiration. He became as the Feminine principle, without its lovable emotional symplicity. He became jealousy, which is always female uninstinctive, unmaternal made for destruction, even when it is the jealousy of God.

10. And when rent away he lay in a stony sleep.

11. This sleep of Urizen was his complete entrance into the unimaginative sphere, the clod of clay. It would have been death but for Los. (Elsewhere we read, Los is Time. Time is the Mercy of Eternity. Mercy changed death into sleep. The word summing up all this is Creation.)

12. Los howled (the howl is the sound-symbol for desire) in sign of his yearning to organize. Urizen was disorganized and rent from Eternity. Eternity is brotherhood and unity. Urizen had become self-hood and isolation. His organs that were lost were imaginative ideas. Without them Urizen had lost all that was distinctively masculine in his eternal or spiritual structure. He had entered into the feminine state. Los howled or desired over him as a male over a female, as he did again over Enitharmon, as Heavens over Hells, mind over energy; or as the spirit brooding in Genesis on the waters or the Breath on the Dust. But his desire not being for his own sake it healed the wound in him, made by the wrenching of Urizen apart.

13. Urizen having no desires outside himself could not heal. He slept because undesirous, yet was rifted with changes because still propagative by the potency not yet destroyed within him. He was an "Eternal" still.