Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/44

30 side the same problem would yield a different solution, until Mary's fainting fit at the bedside gave him light. "In a Myrtle shade" is not written merely, as has been supposed, against the chain of marriage and morality, but against that of the flesh itself. Love will not only refuse, when existing in a given lover, to be bound to a woman because this lover is personally united with her in legal marriage. Love refuses to be bound to that other vegetable, the lover's own body, and the mundane shell itself. Love has a right to the "land of dreams beyond the morning star."

"Idolatry" repeats the statement made elsewhere that the classics have the same origin as the Bible, but are perverted as well as stolen from the same sources of inspiration. The "Will and the Way" are the comic equivalent for the sad acknowledgment of the power of reserve in all the romantic poems, which have one single subject wherever found, that it is the nature of bodily tendencies to be frightened at mental enthusiasm, or, as stated in "Jerusalem," the daughters of Albion fly before the Spectre of Los, revealed as undisguised desire, while Los himself dare not approach them openly lest he be vegetated under their looms. ("Jerusalem," p. 17, l. 7.)

Broken Love, the Mental Traveller, and the Everlasting Gospel must be considered more in detail.