Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/278

264 gives the delusive power to Nature and nails Imagination on the stems of vegetation, and makes it an atonement for the sins of matter. The higher portion of mind is sacrificed to the lower, but in the end triumphs by spiritualizing it.

P. 3, ll. 16 to 24. He bids them tell what caused the spirit of religious poetry — symbolized by Milton — to leave its world of silent inner mood and come forth as manifest utterance. They answer it was the song of a bard or the creative imagination still dwelling in the natural man which persuaded Milton's poetry of supernatural mind to descend. (A Druid is the reasoning — a bard the creative side of Nature's life, before the various coverings or churches have developed.)

P. 3, l. 25, to p. 4, l. 7. The daughters of Beulah, now speaking through Blake, bid the reader note well these things, for they tell of his salvation from the body, or the non-mystic and temporary doctrines of art and poetry.

Before they relate the descent of Milton they describe the World into which he had to descend. Los and Enitharmon— time and space — make these classes of men. Space weaves them out of the mental unity of man, symbolized by London, various suburbs being mentioned to represent its zoas and "London Stone" expresses its most "natural" portion because of the association of London stones with Druidism. The corporeal portion of mental space — "the weights of the loom" — play alluring music to overpower the souls.

P. 4, ll. 18 to 23. Time — the eternal present — "eternal mind," labour making, not only the three classes but "schemes of conduct," of art and literature, which are mental conduct, "the plough" to prepare the way for the souls' journey and "the harrow," to wrap it round as in a close furrow. His four sons, or forms of action corresponding to the intellectual, emotional, instinctive and energetic powers, work with him, and their labours go on in all parts of mind symbolized by districts of London and of the world, when Babel — or war of man upon man, thought upon thought — has taken the place of imaginative unity, Jerusalem, southward, the least corporeal