Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/157

Rh containing flesh, the arrows of pestitential indolent desire flew, and the imprisoned or nailed body was what is understood in the Bible by Israel in the wilderness, a reading indicated by the term "forty years."

8. The ideas of Reason grew more formal, and his fragments of life more hard and less malleable to the will, until the land where the Garden of Eden was to be emerged from the deeps.

9. And the serpent of that garden was composed of the dead passions of Urizen. It was born of them by accretion. Therefore, this is said in the ninth division. In the tenth — number of multitude — Fuzon's groans are heard. They are innumerable.

1. The lamenting voice of Ahania, of Urizen's "indulgent self of weariness," of his "invisible lust," was heard round the Tree of Mystery, where his energy was nailed by religious restraints, weeping. She had no form, for she was an outcast of the mind where form dwells. Her tears from clouds, her fructifying drops from the blood, fell round the tree.

2. And the voice cried that it was far from the mind, and almost wholly non-mentalized into unconsciousness, or body or void.

3. From whence it could see his dark power and dark melancholy.

4. But he had despised her, though jealous, and cast her into the vegetating void of loneliness.

5. She could not even kiss the place where his feet, the nether portions of his imagination, had trod. But when his Head, Heart, Loins, had become Forgetfulness, Dumbness, Necessity, she was sent to the rocks which, with the snow and forests, overgrew them all, and sent to wander there with Necessity.

6. Where, she asked, was his golden palace, the light of