Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/125

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
WILLIAM BLAKE
101

very significant irregularities, short lines alternating with long ones, in the manner of an irregular ode, the mythology is like a net or spider's web over the whole text. Names not used elsewhere, or not in the same form, are found: Manatha-Varcyon, Thiralatha, who in Europe is Diralada. The whole poem is an allegory of the sleep of Nature during the eighteen hundred years of the Christian era, under bonds of narrow religions and barren moralities and tyrannous laws, and of the awakening to forgotten joy, when 'Nature felt through all her pores the enormous revelry,' and the fiery spirit of Orc, beholding the morning in the east, shot to the earth,

'And in the vineyards of red France appear'd the light of his fury.'

It is another hymn of revolution, but this time an awakening more wholly mental, with only occasional contemporary allusions like that of the judge in Westminster whose wig grows to his scalp, and who is seen 'grovelling along Great George Street through the Park gate.' 'Howlings and hissings, shrieks and groans, and voices of