Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/285

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MILTON I.
271

becomes utterly dark. The fires of Rintrah are within him, but the stones or reasons of which he is built up darken wholly. A deeper Ulro — Or Ulro that is — da now formed. (The Third Church has now developed — the Church in which the soul no longer remembers even that natural laws and objects are but symbols.)

P. 7, ll. 36 to 48. For a time sadness and silence — uncreative life — fills the mind, and Satan accuses the creative power for shutting imaginative impulse in the mind. Rintrah creates entrenchments of philosophy and law about Satan ; but Satan, being essentially uncreative and without enthusiasm, at last tears them asunder, and sinks down absolute death and negation, for he now no longer lives with the borrowed life of Rintrah. He is now merely mechanical force — whether of the mind or the body — and not the enthusiastic denial of the earlier stage. (The opaque Reason sooner or later destroys the impulse that gives it the power to think at all, as Tiriel, growing old and feeble, curses his own sons and daughters. Impulse is always of the imagination.)

P. 7, ll. 49 to 52. He sinks down to the "spaces" especially associated with the cherub — to Rome, Babylon, and Tyre, the Loins, Heart, Head. (The Third Church is now complete, and the world is ready for redemption.) For Rome, compare Song of Liberty after "Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Here the "extra page," numbered 8, is fortunately rejected by Blake. It helps the interpretation if read in this place, but not the continuity of the myth, as it does not read on into the beginning of p. 9. It connects Analogy with the moving space.

P. 9, ll. 1 to 15. Satan will destroy the spiritual identity — the core — of humanity, unless help comes. The spiritual emotion, Enitharmon, is hid from all these things by the imaginative mind in a pleasant region of mental space.

P. 9, ll. 6 to 14. A special region of material or maternal — "moony" — space receives the logical and mechanical part of the mind, and thus the emotions — human victims —