Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/156

 142 3. This tree grew because Urizen shrunk away from immensity. He wrote the book of iron (of mortal love) under its shade. It surrounded him because it takes the place of deserted Eternity as the folding serpent and the winding worm.

4. He with difficulty brought his books, his mental regions, out from under the shade of this tree, all but the book of iron — of love.

5. The tree still grows, the religion which consists in calling the laws of prudence the laws of God, yet triumphs over the region of the outer senses, the eternal, the void.

6. On this tree Fuzon's corpse, the generated body of restrained passion, is nailed.

1. The arrows of pestilence — the desires of mortal parentage — flew round the living dead-body of spontaneous simple passion.

2. For in Urizen's slumbers of abstraction, a white lake had formed in the air, which is at once the net of religion and the liquid of generation, the catcher of souls in dogma, and of souls in corporeal birth.

3. The body is the mind's excrement, and its darkness is an evil cloud from the disease of the soul. This cloud hardened on the lake, and became the bones of man.

4. Diseases, or tendencies to mortal growth and imaginations, hovered like birds on the cloud.

5. And they were netted and caught by Los around the bones.

6. Till many were organized into the thoughts that seem to us to be fleshly organs, but others remained mere unfulfilled tendencies of nature in the void; horrors because incomplete existences, "ruinous fragments of life." ("Urizen," chap. II., stanza 3.)

7. Round the pale living body of passion, fastened to the