Page:Works of William Blake Volume 2.djvu/17



BEFORE reading tho paraphrase, a glance may be given at the chart facing page 8, which shows the way in which the division of the various poems into bcoks and chapters follows the division of their contents into varions classes of fable and symbols corresponding to Head, Heart, and Loins, and the fourfold symbolism of the Zoas. It cannot properly be under- stood until the reader has mastored the poems themselves, but a partial understanding will help him to feel their coherence of structure and to see them as a whole instead of as a succession of unrelated fragments. One or more typical incidents are taken from each chapter of the poems, and placed in compartments by themselves in such a way as to show in each poem a continuous story running through the gamnt of Head, Heart, Loins, four times repeated, or through as much of that gamut as the story requires. In many of the poems there are several such stories. We have been content in most cases to choose the more important. In "Milton," and occasionally elsewhere, more than one are given.

In the first chapter of "Milton," Milton, the masculine, spiritual potency, descends into corpcreal life. In the second chapter (which is under the emctional feminine Heart, Ololon), the feminine spiritual potency follows him, that he may not lose altogether the world of emotional beauty, and she, too, grows corporeal. In the Head division of the Head, Palamabron, the imaginative mind, tries to do the work of Satan, the external reason, and brings about in the Heart