Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/205

 Rh P. 22, 11. 1 to 15. — But Albion's head being downwards, or Envy, his heart, Revenge, his loins Cruelty, of deliberate legal punishment, Jerusalem, in Vala, felt terror the moment the veil was round him, she being the veil's life. She felt terror, moral and physical, she felt that to personality, blood means war and hate, that should mean love, as blood's pre-natal life meant. She shrinks from Albion's eyes, conscious of her bodily tendencies, while in his envious soul her bodily inspiration sees the other sin of unforgivingness.

P. 22, 1. 16. — Then beneath the silent moon, — (the moon is the feminine locus, now stricken with the dumbness of Albion's revengeful heart, in which the language of love was silenced). Albion speaks the language of experience. He has brought personal love into the light of mental consciousness — day — and like Adam in Eden after eating the fruit, causes innocence, by fancying that it was dead, to be no more. This is the doctrine that Adam's sin was not the nakedness of which he was ashamed, but the following of beauty's act with misguided opinion, — the belief that the state of innocence — an eternal state — was no more. The shame was then his disease, and the beginning of his punishment.

P. 22, 11. 21 to 24. — Jerusalem continues the doctrine, by describing the error, not under figure of eating a fruit, but under that of anatomizing an infant, whose presence is a joy, while his dissection is a misery, and its very condition a death. Compare the "Mental Traveller." "Her fingers number every nerve." The old woman there has the morbid morality of Albion.

P. 22, 11. 25 to 33. — Then Albion bids Jerusalem hide where she cannot be seen or touched. That is, he will have the inspired sympathies made part of the Unconscious, and hidden in the flesh, whose conscious instincts dwelling in the feminine or bodily blood — Vala's robe — shall live while his masculine blood, ideal passion, is drained away. For Luvah is slain, — love is materialized and made spectral, personal. Thus Albion hopes to escape from analyzing joy or envying love.