Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/307

 Rh P. 39, ll. 50 to 57. Satan claims to be the Messiah, — as in Milton's poems.

P. 40, l. 1. Milton is seen on Blake's path with the starry-seven whose words are forms.

P. 40, ll. 10 to 52. The appeal to Albion to awake. This seems to have been written for a page of "Jerusalem," perhaps to follow l. 83.

P. 40, ll. 53 to 61. Urizen's struggles with Milton continue, notwithstanding the presence of the visionary Milton on Blake's pathway.

P. 42, l. 3. Milton and Ololon perceive each other, but Blake only imperfectly perceives what they do. The naïveté of this and the manifest honesty of the vision as narrative, are here so evident as to form the best of excuses for the fragmentary nature of this and all Blake's later poems viewed as literature.

P. 42, ll. 3 and 4. Ololon tells Milton all she sees of him and admits herself to be "Natural Religion," an absurdity. She weeps lest the little ones of Jerusalem should be lost, because the Satanic Milton who was annihilated, is the moral personage, the "wicker man of Scandinavia," to and in whom they are sacrificed.

At her words Rahab is revealed within Satan, whose regions are a mingling of city and desert — Babylon and Midian. Milton tells Ololon the secret of annihilation, which is the putting off of the "false body" or incrustation.

P. 43, l. 28. It is in fact the not-human. With all his faults Milton at least tended against the classic and in favour of the symbolic, and as such is allowed to be a State, — that of self-annihilation, — and now he comes to awake Blake and retire or vanish while a more purely mystical Christianity than his own is put forward. The result is to be the swallowing up of generation in regeneration, of the symbol in the symbolized.

P. 43, ll. 29 to 38. Then Ololon declares herself as the contrary of Milton, who is masculine Hope. She is feminine Despair. (She is like Theotormon, he like Oothoon.)