Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/67

 Rh similarity is concerned. It is uncertain what Blake intended finally to do with it. Was all to have been left out ? Had he considered his work too long ? Was there loss of interest, and change of mind ? The MS. book gives no answer. The version on the left, here printed, seems to have been the last. It is written in the smallest hand, crushed, into places only just left for it, and has the look of being an amended copy.

It concludes, after the words "slept in beams of light," with the marginal note "78 lines." It will be noticed that it contains a greater number, but a study of the MS. shows that the lines from "He did not die with Christian ease " to "certainly was not what Christ meant," were written later and marked for insertion at the place in the poem where they are here printed. The lines of the segment are seventy-eight without them. They are the afterthought of an afterthought. At their close a mark occurs that the next passage is to be that beginning " Was Jesus chaste ? " &c, which contains ninety-four lines, and was numbered to avoid mistakes and the reading in of other passages, the lines being somewhat scattered among other MS. There are actually ninety-six, the last couplet having been added after enumeration. A pencil note on the first page of this long passage must be reproduced. " This was spoken by my spectre to Bacon, Newton, and Locke," &c, and four lines also in pencil on the margin, —

These have no place assigned to them in the poem, and would bring the ninety-six lines of the segment to a hundred. It sheds light, however, on the symbolic meaning of chastity. Bacon, Newton, and Locke, when seen as one man, are in the state called Rahab (as