Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/296

282 eternal wave of imagination within hint shadowed at the opaque world he was entering.

P. 12, ll. 36 to 42. He enters into the body (the covering cherub) and the seven angels of the Presence, or the seven-fold light of the mind, wept over this body.

P. 14, ll. 1 to 7. The seven angels go with him and give him perception of the bodily life (the last five are the five senses — the first two are thought and feeling — the brain and the blood). He walks with them in Eden, in the beginning of vegetative life.

P. 14, ll. 8 to 1 6. The body grows, as it were, into the earth (like a polypus). To those in the spiritual world he seems asleep, but to himself he seems lost in night. The emanations of the spiritual moods feed him with beautiful emotions.

P. 14, ll. 17 to 20. His body journeys through the'satanic world, the spirit thoughts see the poet like a warning light — a comet.

P. 14, ll. 21 to 35. All we have yet to pass sucks us into it as into a vortex, while that we have left takes definite shape in the memory or in the perception which repeat experience and was moulded upon experience. (There can be no form without thought and no thought without experience.) The earth is not yet a form, because we have not yet made it intellectual and imaginative with our experience. It is a great plain (Blake alludes to the lower limit of man when he uses this term earth). The heaven we have already passed through (by heaven he means here the mentor's world), and it is accordingly full of images of beauty and truth.

P. 14, ll. 36 to 46. Milton sees sleeping Humanity asleep in matter, but sustained by the power of God — the " rock of ages " — from sinking wholly into that matter, " the sea of time and space."' Milton, in descending into this humanity, goes head-foremost, so that what is below " soon seem above," the lower vegetative life seemed to enclose him above as well as below, as the sensuous wave encloses us all. His body falls like a globe— a self-hood.