Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/56

 THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL.

Of this poem we have no finally arranged text which Blake can bo supposed to have prepared for publication. It lies before us, a litter of helpless fragments at the mercy of an editor.

Mr. Rossetti, in the Aldine edition, has put these into moderately good order, but has cut paragraphs up and transposed lines in an arbitrary manner. He has selected the most readable passages, avoiding repetitions that occur with only slight variations in the MS. book. But he has taken liberties difficult to justify, making suppressions, and unnecessarily cutting asunder connected sentences. When he tells us in a foot-note that the poem is published in full, we cannot quite look upon this as a serious utterance.

To understand the poem we must consider the time of Blake's life, when it was written, and the circumstances which gave rise to it, as well as the artistic and religious theories which dictated its form. These points have not yet been touched on at all in any edition.

As in the poem "Jerusalem," "Christ " means here the Human Imagination, the junction of the four regions of Humanity. The poem takes the New Testament to be a story that was first lived, then written for its symbolic purpose. The poem does more. It colours the story deliberately and consciously with the personality of the writer. Each of us sees the " Last Judgment " in a different way, as Blake had observed in the essay written in the MS. book just before the composition of this poem. He was now about to show, claiming the same right of individual imaginative vision, how he saw the Gospel. He wrote the poem not earlier than the latter part of