Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/139

Rh 14. Till Los (seeing that there is no way out of Self-hood but by its own perfection, as there is none out of the circle of the senses but by their expansion till all circles unite in an infinite circle, just as many soap-bubbles coalesce in one) aroused his fires, horrified at the restrictiveness of clay.

(misnumbered IV. by Blake as may be seen in the facsimile).

1. Los, viewing this deathly sleep, was astonished and frightened at the vision of hurting bones, for bones are symbol of sense confined within the narrow nerves, not free to roam the firmament of intuitive inspiration.

2. And he was astonished and frightened at the sulphurous Immortal, perturbed and raging, for Sulphur is symbol of opaque generative bodily disturbance, with no expansion fit for Immortals, and its rage is not their wrathful creativeness.

3. And Urizen raged in pitch—the horror of the dark heart—and nitre, destructive intellect, round the furious limbs of Los, round those ideas that were his prophetic members.

4. Therefore Los began to form nets and gins, that are systems of thought and life, and by correspondence, organs of the body. And he cast these round to catch the troubles of Urizen as our organs catch the perishable pains that, by the law of Merciful Creation, shall die with them.

5. And though Los, being also Time, binds nothing but change the great Unbinder, yet he binds this fast, and so the changes of Urizen in Iron of Experience and Brass of Passion were bound.

6. And these were the changes.

1. In his perturbed sleep, as the dark ages of torment rolled over Urizen, Los by his beating on the rivets thus divided the night.