Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/53

 Rh mood's right to exist, if existence be a joy. This is to be taken as the root-doctrine, without which the poem mistakenly called "Broken Love" cannot be read at all.

1. The story is of the condition of man when in Error. His foresight unaccompanied by imagination, his mere expectation of memory, that which is an "unformed chaos" when seen in front of a man, guards his way from the freedom of imagination. In doing so it restrains him, and in restraining him it sins. Far within him, his emanation, the affectionate side, not the creative power of imagination, weeps for his sin.

2. But since joys are holy, not griefs, her weeping only leads to another sin. She adopts the convictions of the unformed memory. She believes that experience is life, and deepens the winter, the mortality, of the fleshly region of the five senses,, unfolding its fathomless abyss in his bosom. In this boundless deep, — for truth has bounds ; error, none, — the two wander and weep.

3. Wherever the affections wander in the world of experi- ence the reason pursues them, for he is now the personal consciousness, the man himself. When will she return from wandering in the wintry places where he can follow at all ? When will love belong, that is, once more to mental, not to the wilderness of bodily life ? (Compare "Milton," extra page 32, l. 5.)

4. For love in the region of experience is in the region of selfishness. Like a spectre, like personality of Keason or Memory, the emanation or affection takes to itself pride and scorn, adds jealousy, and becomes the worse tyrant of the two, growing to be the more convincing and. restrictive, unmystic, unvisionary form of consciousness.

5. Seven of the Reason's Loves, which should become by joy, Creative and Imaginative, she bereaves of life by cutting them apart from their own affectionateness. Thus the mind that should live, or create and love, is kept in its deadness, its separateness from inspiration and slavery to its own tendency