Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/62

48 when stripped of all that makes them lovable and poetic, and with nothing left in them but the naked incontrovertibility of their skeleton of truth, might read: —

"Thou art a Mind. Eternal is Mind : Eternal Mind is no more than Mind. Thine own Mentality learn to know as the region of religion and adoration, while all else is that of negation merely."

In the " Everlasting Gospel " the plane of utterance constantly changes. As Los rose and fell when element became pliant, so Blake speaks now from the higher, now the lower. At one moment a word is used in its mystical, at another in its popular sense.

Blake is seen in this poem thinking aloud to himself. His intention develops in spite of him. Begun at the time of his Felpham troubles as an artistic protest — art being the ritual of his religion — it escaped the bonds of the impulse that called it into being. It takes the form at one moment of a question addressed by the poet to his imagination, then it becomes an answer — even more, a manifesto.

Such as it is, the value is so great as helping to the interpretation of all the rest of the symbolic writings, and it so fitly supplements the prose essays, the Songs, the "Jerusalem," the "Milton," and "Vala," that while it cannot be finally read without them, it is not a mere piece of decorative literature. The making a text, the choosing a final version of it, is not yet the most important, or even the most justifiable task that can be undertaken. The first thing is to put on record all the scraps, versions, or repetitions we possess. They will be found here to the uttermost word.

Beginning with one of the last segments — because it is that over which Blake has written the title of the poem, probably intending it to supersede other versions — here are the lines as Blake left them.