'Unwilling I look up to heaven: unwilling count the stars,
'Sitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine.
'I seize their burning power,
'And bring forth howling terrors and devouring fiery kings!
'Devouring and devoured, roaming on dark and desolate mountains,
'In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees,
'Ah! mother Enitharmon!
'Stamp not with solid form this vig'rous progeny of fire!
'I bring forth from my teeming bosom, myriads of flames,
'And thou dost stamp them with a signet. Then they roam abroad,
'And leave me, void as death.
'Ah! I am drown'd in shady woe, and visionary joy.
'And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band?
'To compass it with swaddling bands? And who shall cherish it
'With milk and honey?
'I see it smile, and I roll inward, and my voice is past.'
She ceas'd; and rolled her shady clouds
Into the secret place.
So rapid was the production of this class of Blake's writings that, notwithstanding their rich and elaborate decoration, and the tedious process by which the whole had to be, with his own hand, engraved and afterwards coloured, the same year witnessed the completion of another, and the succeeding year, of two more 'prophetic books.' The Book of Urizen (1794), was the title of the next. The same may be said of it as of its predecessors. Like them, the poem is shapeless, unfathomable; but in the heaping up of gloomy and terrible images, the America and Europe are even exceeded.
The following striking passage, which describes the appearing of the first woman, will serve as an example of Urizen:—
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At length, in tears and cries, embodied |
