Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/18

6 the spectres do with their emanations in the third night of " Vala." In Europe we get the North (the womb) in its evil aspect of restrictive external reason and necessity confining human energy until it breaks away at dawn. Had the chart permitted, the four poems might have been tabulated under the cardinal points as follows : —

They give when arranged as above a more coherent story, and repeat the history of the Churches given in the chapters on the Cherub. In Africa the reason makes laws and religions. In America the reason is in turn conquered by the emotions and bodily life (America), a conquest corresponding to the flood, the closing of the Western gate, and the sinking of the Atlantic continent. In Europe the mind travels through the Northern darkness of matter. In Asia it arises into the Eastern dawn, and the bodily life itself grows joyous or imaginative, and the dead bones of reason are clothed with emotion. Each poem is, however, complete in itself. In " Urizen" the first chapter describes Urizen becoming spectral. In the second he hides himself with the opaque passive or feminine nature (compare Second Night of " Vala "), and in the third chapter he tosses about in this opaque nature. In the fourth chapter he is fixed into a personality by Los, or, to take the symbol from another ; point of view, fallen mind is divided into states or moods by Time. In the fifth chapter Enitharmon or ideal space emanates from Los, and the chaos, which in the second chapter I surrounded Urizen, is made mental by being associated with purely ideal life. In the sixth chapter Orc is born of Time and space. In "Vala" he is conceived in Night V. Had "Vala" been divided into " Days " his birth would presumably have been given on the sixth. It is foretold in Night V., l. 63, and an account of his youth is then given as though he were already born, as the poem requires his presence as an understood and