Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/55

 Rh the domineering love can never destroy, or quell. She still pursues the now changed mind. She has taken its sin, as a disease is caught by infection. The mind returns to health, for contraries cannot both be ill at once. It has ceased to be spectrous or tyrannic.

11. Till the man turns from placing his affections on things of this world, — called in the aggregate female love, — and roots up the infernal grove of vegetative attraction, he can never be worthy to step into the happiness of mental love and creativeness.

12. But error to be put off must have a body, — it only ceases to be an infection when it becomes a dogma. So he gives her to the rocks, and dogmatizes her into the region of corporeally conceived and analyzed fact away from the dangerous and infectious form of spiritual unspoken attractive- ness. He creates another form, a truly spiritually female, the Imagination's bride, — and she, as love should be, is subser- vient to inspiration, and does not seek to master it. (Compare " Jerusalem," p. 43, l. 7.)

13. Yet with a last clinging to the bodily attractiveness that was once so sweet, he suggests that they shall live together by giving up " love " — -in the sense of exclusiveness and jealousy — and that they together root up the inferual grove — the growth of the tyrannic element in each. Then should they both see the eternal portions of mind where are no such qualities.

14. Thus the only personal act left is that annihilation of personal tendency, the act of forgiveness, and when it is performed this is found to be the bread (of sweet joy, as elsewhere called), and the wine (of delight).

Note. — The text of the poem here is reprinted from the Aldine edition, the present editors not having seen the MS.

The above interpretation does not exhaust the ideas symbolized in the poem. It only selects one thread of mean- ing and indicates it slightly with the object of enabling the reader to obtain a coherent view of the work.