Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/306

292 in every one of these smaller days, at the moment when the sun reaches Leutha, the lark ascends, and so the message is carried from Heaven to Heaven one after another, until the twenty-eighth lark, that is to say the lark that rose when Luther had come round again, met the Divine feminine influence, Ololon, descending. (Milton — the Divine man — descended in the first moment, and when the circle is completed again, Ololon — the Divine woman — follows him.)

P. 36, ll. 13 to 32. Here direct autobiography mingles with the poem. The contrition of Ololon was an experience of Blake's. When it came to put on a natural or feminine form he sent it into his cottage to comfort his wife, who was sick with fatigue, — presumably much worried both by rheumatism and by Blake's " absences in Eden," which she said once were the only faults for which she ever had to blame him, all other reports and gossip notwithstanding.

P. 37 presents a new appearance. It was not done directly after page 36. What we have lost between them is unknown.

Lines 1 to 3 gives an answer of Ololon. She has come to seek Milton.

Lines 3 to 60. She finds him, he has entered into the accuser of sins and destroyer of joys. The whole symbolic connection between the Churches, Spectres, Cherub, and Mundane Shell is then declared. Read with the other parts of the myth and commentative chapters, it explains itself.

P. 39, l. 8. The number of the starry regions explains why Los first opposed Milton with forty-eight fibres. Milton appears in visionary form as historically known.

P. 39, ll. 9 to 27. Satan is seen both within and without, and further explained.

P. 39, ll. 27 to 49. Milton in Eastern porch, — place where the lark mounts, — speaks as a State and identifies Satan, as Los does in Jerusalem, as his spectre, his self-hood, selfrighteousness, and utters Blake's own manifesto upon the purposes of his poetry.