[52]That is, woman has become subject to oppression of customs; suffers violence at the hands of marriage laws and other such condemnable things. “Emancipation” and the cognate creeds of which later days have heard so much never had a more violent and vehement preacher. Not love, not the plucking of the flower, but error, fear, submission to custom and law, is that which “defiles” a woman in the sight of our prophet.
[53]Even thus told, the myth is plain enough; a word or two of briefer translation may serve also to light up future allusions. “I plucked Leutha’s flower,” says Oothoon in the prelude of this poem, “and I was not ashamed;” the flower that brings forth a child, which nature permits and desires her to gather; Leutha is the spirit emblematic of physical pleasure, of sensual impulse and indulgence, from whom comes the “loose Bible” of Mahomet (Song of Los). But crossing the seas eastward to find her lover, the strong enslaved spirit of Europe, she, type of womanhood and freedom, is caught and chained as he by the force of conventional error and tyrannous habit, which makes her seem impure in his eyes; so they sit bound back to back, afraid to love; the eagles that tear her flesh are emblems of her lover’s scorn; vainly, a virgin at heart, she appeals to all the fair and fearless face of nature against her rival, the prurient modesty of custom, a virgin in face, a harlot at heart; against unnatural laws of restraint upon youths and maidens, whose inevitable outcome is in the licentious alternative not less unnatural; he will not answer but with vain and vague lamentation, will not turn himself and love her for all her crying: the mystery of things and thoughts, the tyranny of times and laws, is heavy upon them to the end. All forms of life but these are free to be fair and happy: only from east to west the prison-houses are full of the wailing of women.
[54]Night, or the darkness of worlds yet undivided and chaotic, is always typified by Blake as a “forest” dark with involved and implicated leaf or branch. Compare “The Tiger.”
[55]Along this page a serpent of imperious build rears the strong and sinuous length of his dusky glittering body, and spits forth keen undulating fire.
[56]It is possible that Blake intended here some grotesque emblematic reference to the riots witnessed by himself, in which Lord Mansfield’s house and MSS. were destroyed by fire. At all events, here alone is there any visible allusion to a matter of recent history.
[57]That is, being unable to reconcile qualities, to pass beyond the legal and logical grounds of good and evil into the secret places where they are not. The whole argument hinges on this difference between Pantheism, which can, and Theism, which cannot, and is therefore no surer or saner than a mere religion based on Church or Bible, nor less incompetent to include, to expound, to redeem the world.
[58]Compare, for the doctrine as to delusion and jealousy beingfeminineprinciples (destructive by their weakness, not by their strength), this strange expostulation with God, recalling the tone of earlier prophets:—
“Why art thou silent and invisible,Father of Jealousy?Why dost thou hide thyself in cloudsFrom every searching eye?Why darkness and obscurityIn all thy words and laws,That none dare eat the fruit but fromThe wily serpent’s jaws?Or is it because Jealousy[A]Gives feminine applause?”
[A](This word, half rubbed off in the MS., may be “secrecy”; and the point would remain the same.)
[59]Leutha, the spirit or guardian goddess of natural pleasure and physical beauty, is sacrificed as a ransom to redeem the spirit or guardian god of prohibitive law or judicial faith; to him she is sacrificed that through her he may be saved. Thus, in theVisions of the Daughters of Albion, the maiden who “plucks Leutha’s flower,” who trusts and indulges Nature, has her “virgin mantle torn in twain by the terrible thunders” of religious and moral law: woman was sacrificed and man “fast bound in misery” during the eighteen centuries—through which the mother goddess lay asleep, to weep over her children at her waking; as in the Prophecy ofEuropeTime the father and Space the mother of men are afflicted and spellbound until the sleep of faith be slept out. There again the emblematic name of Leutha recurs in passing.
[60]That is of course the reprobate according to theology, such as the heretical prophet himself: the class of men upon which is laid the burden of the sins of the elect, as Satan’s upon Rintrah in the myth.
[61]This line appears to have been too much for the writer in theLife, who here breaks his quotation short off by the head, annihilating with a quite ingenious violence at once grammar, sense, and sound. It is but a small nut to have broken his critical tooth upon; the evident meaning being simply this: that within the centre of everything living by animal or vegetative life there is by way of kernel something imperishable; the fleshly or material life of form contains the infinite spiritual life, lurking under leaf or latent under limb: man and flower and beast have each the separate secret of a soul or divisible indestructible spirit (compare even theSongs of Innocence); but while the earthly and fleshly form remains there stand as wardens of the ways the two material giants, Strength and Force, binding the soul in the body with chains of flesh and sex, the spirit in the petals with bonds of vegetable form, fashioned fastenings of chalice and anther, sprinklings of dusty gold on leaf or pistil; always, without hammer or rivet of Vulcanic forging, able to hold fast Prometheus in blind bondage to the flesh and form of things; so that except by inspiration there can be no chance of seeing what does exist and work in man or beast or flower; only by vision or by death shall one be brought safe past the watch guarded by the sentinels of material form and bodily life, the crude tributary “Afrites” (as in the Æschylean myth) of the governing power which fashions and fetters life in men and things. And thus this, the singing of birds and dancing of flowers, the springing of colour and kindling of music at each day’s dawn, is a symbol—“a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon”—of the dwellers in that milder and moonlight-coloured world of reflex mortal spirits over the imperishable influences of a higher spiritual world, which descending upon earth must be clothed with material mystery and become subject to sensuous form and likeness in the body of the shadow of death. This glorious passage, almost to be matched for wealth of sound, for growth and gradation of floral and musical splendour, for mastery of imperial colour, even against the great interlude or symphony of flowers inMaud, was not cast at random into the poem, but has also a “soul” or meaning in it—though the ways of seeing and understanding are somewhat too closely guarded by “Og and Anak.” Reading it as an excerpt indeed one need hardly wish to see beyond the form or material figure. That “innumerable dance” of tree and flower and herb is not unfit for comparison with the oldἀνήριθμον γέλασμαof the waves of the sea.
[62]One may fear that some such symbolic stuff as this is really at the root of the admirable poem christened by its editor with the name ofBroken Love: which I gravely suspect was meant for insertion in some fresh instalment of prophetic rhapsody by way of complement or sequel toJerusalem. The whole tone of it, and especially that of some rejected stanzas, is exactly in the elemental manner of the scenes (where scene is none) between Albion, Jerusalem, and Vala the Spectre of Jerusalem (books 1st and 2nd):—
“Thou hast parted from my side—Once thou wast a virgin bride:Never shalt thou a true love find—My Spectre follows thee behind.“When my love did first begin,Thou didst call that love a sin;Secret trembling, night and day,Driving all my loves away.”
These two stanzas (recalling so many other passages where Blake has enforced his doctrines as to the fatal tendency of the fears and jealousies, the abstinence and doubt, produced by theoretic virtue and hatched by artificial chastity) stood originally as third and fourth in the poem. They are cancelled in Blake’s own MS.; but in that MS. the poem ends as follows, in a way (I fear) conclusive as to the justice of my suggestion; I mark them conjecturally, as I suppose the dialogue to stand, by way of helping the reader to some glimpse of the point here and there.
“When wilt thou return and viewMy loves and them to life renew?When wilt thou return and live?When wilt thou pity as I forgive?”“Never, never, I return;Still for victory I burn.Living, thee alone I’ll have;And when dead I’ll be thy grave.“Through the heaven and earth and hellThou shalt never, never quell:I will fly and thou pursue;Night and morn the flight renew.”
(This I take to be the jealous lust of power and exclusive love speaking through the incarnate “female will.” SeeJerusalemagain.)
“And I, to end thy cruel mocks,Annihilate thee on the rocks,And another form createTo be subservient to my fate.“Till I turn from female loveAnd root up the infernal grove,I shall never worthy beTo step into eternity.”
(This stanza ought probably to be omitted; but I retain it as being carefully numbered for insertion by Blake: though he by some evident slip of mind or pen has put it before the preceding one.)
“Let us agree to give up loveAnd root up the infernal grove,Then shall we return and seeThe worlds of happy eternity.“And throughout all eternityI forgive you, you forgive me;As our dear Redeemer said,This the wine and this the bread.”
That is perfectJerusalemboth for style and matter. The struggle of either side for supremacy—the flight and pursuit—the vehemence and perversion—the menace and the persuasion—the separate Spectre or incarnation of sex “annihilated on the rocks” of rough law or stony circumstance and necessity—the final vision of an eternity where the jealous divided loves and personal affections “born of shame and pride” shall be destroyed or absorbed in resignation of individual office and quality—all this belongs but too clearly to the huge prophetic roll. Few however will be desirous, and none will be wise, to resign for these gigantic shadows of formless and baseless fancy the splendid exposition given by the editor (p. 76 of vol. ii). Seen by that new external illumination, though it be none of the author’s kindling, his poem stands on firmer feet and is clothed with a nearer light.
[63]In the mythologic scheme, also, Los god of time and Albion father of the races of men are rival powers; and the “Spectre” or satellite deity reproaches his lord with resignation of the world and all its ways and generations (which should have been subject only to the Time-Spirit) to the guidance of the nations sprung from the patriarch Albion (called in Biblical records after Jewish names, here spoken of by their English or other titles, more or less burlesque and barbaric) who have taken upon themselves to subdue even Time himself to this work and divide his spoils. So closely is the bare mythical construction enwound with the symbolic or doctrinal passages which are meant to give it such vitality and such coherence as they may.
[64]Who adore nature as she appears to the Deist, who select this and reject that, assume and presume according to moral law and custom, instead of accepting the Pantheistic revelation which consecrates all things and absorbs all contraries.
Transcriber’s Note:
Images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to a nearby paragraph break.
The text in the list of illustrations is presented as in the original text, but the links navigate to the page number closest to the illustration’s loaction in this document.
Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original.