Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/300

286 P. 19, ll. 37 to 44. The multitudes that make up the State called Ololon called the Divine Family which appeared as four suns, then joined in one, and wept, as Christ over Lazarus. They grieved at Milton's going to this error, which is death, being opposite of the "only means to Forgiveness" ("Jerusalem," p. 49, 1. 75), which is life, and is the force of the hammer of Los himself. (Ibid., p. 88,1. 50.) In fact they grieved for the sacrifice of Christ (the portion of him in the State called Milton) to Tharmas, the false tongue seen on its moral, not sensuous or artistic, side.

P. 19, ll. 45 to 50. Then Ololon took refuge in Milton's bosom of sacrifice from the efforts of poetic creation, — the wars of eternity, even as the Bard did from outer wrangling.

P. 19, ll. 51 to 57. The Divine family made watchmen of the people of Ololon for the lower world's sake. Such is the best that imagination can make of contrition. It cannot restore poetry gone to error, even though it went there in one only of its fourfold phases as a sacrifice.

P. 19, l. 58. And the self-sacrifice of Ololon identified it with Christ also, though it be but a cloud, an outward thing of the life of instinct and blood.

P. 20, ll. 1 to 25. Blake tells what he felt in Lambeth when he saw with what and with whom his symbolic perceptions had identified him, (Here the tale touches "Vala," as above] noted, Night VIII., l. 345, and dates that portion of the poem, incidentally, as after 1803.) He tells us the temporary things of nature become permanent in the mind, the world being bound on as a sandal.

From here, l. 26, to the end of p. 23, the forces of imagination and contrition, of the sacrifice that turns itself into mental labour, and that which gives its ease away to suffer for what it deems to be moral truth, — a miracle in human nature, — and the attractions of all contraries and their dangers are sketched in reference to all the myths and mingled with the names of historic personages who illustrate. At the end, the classified symbols Bowlaboola and Allamanda,