Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/78

64 is distinguished from his eternity, that tin's mobility is Christ, that it foil, or went out into the void which then became nature, and, on returning 1, that it formed the joys of heaven from that which it took from the energy, or " eternal hell" outside.

The Holy (J host is desire, — which must be taken to mean not flesh-hunger, but exuberance — not merely a thirst, but a conflagration. On this exuberance, presently to be identified with the symbol of the genital organs as being Beauty, Reason, or the limiter builds ideas by cutting and shaping the energy into material for building — not by adding anything of his own. The central potency of energy, the dweller in flaming fire, usually miscalled Satan, became Jehovah when the death of Christ had completed the experience and therefore person- ality of the Godhead.

But Milton only saw in the Father, Destiny; in the son, Reason ; in the Holy Ghost nothing vital or personal, — non- entity. Notwithstanding this, being a true poet, Milton did his best work when writing of the expanding forces, not the contracting or boundary-making forces, and was thus of the Devil's party without knowing it.

So ends the utterance of the Voice of the Devil. It ex- presses Blake's own views, but not at all in the form which his maturer mind gave to them. Urizen in the South is the dweller in Flaming fire. Urizen in the North, the limiter, who is often indistinguishable from the Miltonic view of the Man of Sorrows, and who is Reason among other things, and is a builder also, while Ore, his opposite, is, whether for good or evil, the Devil of this book. The Christ and the Satan of the books of "Jerusalem," " Milton/' and "Vala," is distinctly different from the " Messiah" of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, — different by development, not by change. The Satan of these books also takes a place hardly foreshadowed by the "Devil" of the "Marriage."

Blake was here attempting to write his doctrines without the aid of the myth, using merely popular terms. His difficulty