Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/144

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1. The child was named Orc. He is desire personified. He feeds on the milk of pity, turning it to mortal fire.

2. Los aroused Enitharmon, dividing her pitying sleep with the cleaving of passionate wakefulness. In so doing, desire began to threaten to enter into her. This aroused the jealousy of Los. He felt it tighten his bosom like a girdle. By pity he threw it off in the region of generative love. But by day, by imaginative light, he perceived what was happening to Enitharmon, and jealousy bound his breast again.

3. The often broken and still renewing girdle, falling on the rock of memory, grew there to a chain.

4. So they took desire to a high moral place of the masculine activity of mind, and Orc, being led to this mountain, was bound there, though Enitharmon wept. Yet beneath the shadow of deathful analysings, Pity and Prophecy bound Desire to morality by the chain grown on memory.

5. And the deathful shadow, being Urizen, heard the child's voice, and the child's nature began to enter into him. He also wished to have sons. He began to awake to life, and since all mortal things exist in the mortal part of mind, all things began to awake as this awoke.

6. Then the temporal mind began to explore the sensuous capacities which are the dens in which it dwells.

7. And as an immortal, when alone, only propagates by division, he began to prepare means of division suitable to his region.

8. Having prepared these fourfold, like the fourfold forms of life through which Orc went before born into human form, he planted a garden of fruits, for his four stages had been mechanical and earthy, and vegetation, not humanity, was their highest outcome. From this garden came the smell of ripe figs, mentioned in the second chapter of "Tiriel."

9. But Los, calling up his energy, poured round Enitharmon fires of prophecy to defend her from the cold positive of