Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/27

 Rh Holy Thursday pleads that this world be made more like the world of imagination, that things should' be on earth as in heaven, though Blake has said elsewhere ("Vision of the Last Judgment") that until after the Last Judgment had passed on each of us this could not be.

But in the "Little Girl Lost" we return to symbolic utterance. This and the companion poem are fitting counterparts to those of the little boy. The little girl is that Innocence who from time immemorial has had no need to fear the lion. But the end of the story is new. The parents do not reclaim the child. They make common cause with the lion. Their own lost innocence is found when they cease to be jealous. They go after the girl, as "Milton" went, in "self-annihilation."

The "Chimney-Sweeper" is symbolic too, though it is none the less practical. The expression "clothes of death," reveals the intention. The chimney-sweeper is not merely a sooty child though he is this also. Blake is not merely indignant at the treatment the child gets though he is this also. The chimney- sweeper is Oothoon in disguise, shut up in Bromion's caves, till "all from life" the child would be "obliterated and erased," if God were not "within and without; even in the depths of Hell." The parents, meanwhile, go to church to make themselves "drunk with the cup of Religion" that is offered by "Mystery."

The Nurse who sings next is undoubtedly symbolic. She speaks with the voice of Envy. The use of the word "disguise" as connected with "winter and night "that is to say with Urizen in the North is technical in the Blake- vocabulary. It appears in "Vala," Night VII., 1. 515. In a more literary sense it is used in the half -bitter and half -playful verses quoted here from the MS. book on page

" 'Twas Death in a disguise."

The sick roser and the invisible worm would be understood, as meaning love and mortality, whoever had been the author. But in Blake it must be remembered that the howling (or