Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/141

Rh they own in this place of night, the completed self -hood arises and "with his left hand south and his right north, turns away from the light, the east, towards the vegetative region of the west — place of setting sun and falling dew.

1 & 2. Still hints of eternity may be gathered, for Vision sends its message even to the mortal eye, but all the rest of the wisdom and joy of eternal life rolls in vain like myriads in a crowd that is an ocean, singing unadmitted round a fast closed wall of rock.

3. And Urizen's true life became obliterated like a dream, for so seems the world of imagination to the world of outer reason, or experience.

4. And with a shudder —symbol of the separation of a child from its mother, of the total isolation of a self-hood — Los smote those two worlds apart in Urizen. Then, since by organizing him Los had mingled with Urizen, entering into his inert by prophetic power, as male mingles with female, they were both found together in one dark silent void.

5. And this void was not fertilized. It had the virginity of primaeval night, and the beholding of it struck horror into the soul of Los.

6. Los wept. But tears are fruitful. Pity, a feminine, a child-bearing possibility, began in the void as he saw Urizen in chains.

7. And fertilizing power poured down the cliffs or upright rocks of the intellectual petrification and system he had created, for immortal potency was still within it.

And this Pity, by further separation of nerves and blood, as the sea, in Genesis, divides from the dry land, became more emphatically the feminine red drop of the body.

Such division occurred in Los, through pity of Urizen, before his death-image, and such takes place in the immortal