Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/80

66 books. It is the rock of separation, the division of man from man, on which Albion took his seat (" Jerusalem," p. 28, 1. 12), which Blake attributed to the divorce of reason and morality from imagination and forgiveness, or love — that is, the rupture of what he now called the marriage of Heaven and Hell, and later on simply tho division of the masculine from the feminine. This is the rock of the North, and is the seat of Satan. The rock of the South is the power of Divine Forgiveness and the permanence of imaginative form and of the " true surfaces " of things which appear when the apparent (phenomenal) surfaces are corroded away. It is the Throne of God, beyond which Reason would exalt law by making Mystery the sanction of Morality. (" Jerusalem," p. 78, 1. 18). The fine senses are called an abyss here, a flood elsewhere. The devil's first question hints that a bird has two appear- ances. One is its true form and includes the shape of its mind and emotions. The other is its apparent form of feathers " closed" by our fitfe senses. This "closing" is what "creates" the outer form by making it seem solid. It is Satan's " world of opaqueness ,; (called Luvah's when Luvah was Satan. "Jerusalem," p. 73, 1. 22), and its creation is the paradoxical act of cruelty and mercy produced by shrinkage of mind, not by miraculous solidification of vacuum into matter.

The Proverbs op Hell.

The first proverb is divided into three parts which correspond to the triad Head, Heart, Loins. But they are placed in reverse order — Loins, Heart, Head — the exterior being the first. The proverb would read, if written in terms of the true Regions : — " Learn from the Loins ; teach from the Heart ; enjoy from the Head."

Passing by such of these proverbs as are figurative only in an obvious sense, with little reference to the peculiar use of words symbolically which was Blake's second language, we come to the seventh and twelfth which compare wisdom