Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/86

72 The angel, like an alarmed conscience, retreats in fear of the lower nature thus revealed, and leaving a fungus, the parasitic blind life of some formula, in which he had found repose, climbs up into the intellectual protection of the analytic will.

Then all vanishes, and a singing voice tells the poet that the horrors he saw were a vision of what his own nature, if he tamed it down under the yoke of the weak, would become. The "alteration of opinions" here hinted is evidently the alteration of growth, like that of stream to sea and seed to tree, not mere variation like that of the weather-cock.

Now, the poet, who is the Lion referred to in the last words of this Book, proposes to take the ox, the angel, who must not have one and the same law with him, lest he be under oppression, and proposes to change the vision and show him in turn his own fate.

First they fly "westerly through the night till elevated above the earth's shadow." The West is the region of vegetative passion. If they go upwards through it they must be journeying from North by West to South, the reverse of the direction of Urizen's movement when he fell. The poet takes the timid angel far enough this way to escape the influence of earthly night. Then he dashes at the centre of the source of vision, the sun of imagination, not the dark sun of the inhuman void. Here, as of right, the poet puts on innocence. Now the angel is evidently a pale inspirer of Swedenborg. It was to supplement and partly refute Swedenborg Blake wrote the present book. So to keep hand in hand with the Angel he takes Swedenborg's volumes, and soon sinks with them from the glorious clime of poetic vision. Let any reader say whether, starting from that clime with that weight of kind, clear, cold commentary, he has not had the same experience.

All the planets, the arbiters of character and the dividers in old time of man's qualities, are passed but the sad Saturn. Even he is too poetic. A mere "space," if space it may be