Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/81

Rh and folly in a manner that show a peculiar kind of wisdom, — imagination, vision, the perception of " true surfaces," — -to be meant; and a peculiar kind of folly, — the subjection of the mind to outer nature, apparent surfaces, and its own "narrowed perceptions."

The "food" of the fifteenth proverb is the food of emotion, wholesome to the soul when coming straight from imagination, not so when caught by the bodily organs which are nets and traps designed either by Time (as the Mundane Shell) to be put off in time, or by the weaker spirits of creation that they may have a dwelling-place. The veins and blood-vessels of the body are the typical net. Morality is its mental equivalent when made of a tissue of laws. Compare " Jerusalem," p. 42, 1. 81; "Vala/" Night II., 1. 154; « Urizen/' chap. III., Stanza 4. See also above, chapter on the Symbol of the Worm.

The proverb also means; — All good virtue is obtained with- out the threat of punishment — all good morality without law. Such wholesome food is described in one of the letters from Felpham as

and again in the poem " Broken Love" :

The next proverb with any obscurity for the reader not accustomed to Blake is the forty-fourth. As "The plough follows words, so God inwards prayers." It contains a reading of the fable of Hercules and the carter, suggesting that when Hercules had irritated the carter into helping himself, he had answered the carter's prayer for help and justified it, since until alter the prayer the carter was incapable of the effort. Compare "Jerusalem," p. 43, 1. 12, and Blake's personal statement that when imagination failed him he prayed.

VOL. II. 5 *