Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/281

 Rh day when, water will cover the earth, and "the rains of Jehovah" — the sixth eye — contend with the fires of Moloch. Another correspondence associates the present story with the Churches. "The rains of Jehovah" close the history of the first church with the flood of time and space.

P. 6, ll. 11 to 15. The mind, Los, has to choose from labour of imagination, and covers itself with the external world symbolized by Los placing his left shoe above his head. The feet are the lower and most outward part of the mind, and the left foot means that part of the mind nearest to the Northern darkness, for Los has his face to the East. The lower mind is placed above the higher. This is not done because Los has become enamoured of matter, but as a "solemn mourning," or period of repentance spent in mere outward life, that the confused mental powers may return to themselves. The powers of the mill of reason rest, also the Imaginative well — Reuben — and ideal's space.

P. 6, ll. 16 to 26. Mind speaks of the power of rule, and tells them that it is itself to blame, for it should have known that the rest offered to the spirit by mechanical assistance — "pity" — "divides the soul" into two contending parts, one of imagination, one of reason, and "man unmans," that is, contracts him down from the universal, and imaginative, to the limitations of his life of the moment. He bids them therefore rest for this day from their labours, following the track of his thought — his "plough" — passively, for this day will be "a blank in Nature," that is a period without creative effort. They follow mind and its will accordingly, and the Elect, who belong to rule, and the Redeemed, who belong to imaginative impulse, tormented by mechanical reason, mourn, that is, remain inactive. (It is as though an artist having tried to do the creative part of his work by mere reason and patience, and to do the mechanical part with the impulsive side of his mind, got all into such confusion that he had to cease from his work and merely observe.)

P. 6, ll. 27 to 33. We now find this blank in nature