Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/305

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
MILTON II.
291

P. 35, ll. 48 to 53. In this moment a fountain of influence flows from the mind of man outward into the external physical, and inward into the external mental, worlds, into the world of sensation and the world of custom and dogma, awakened by the inspired moment this purifying stream from the mind, and in this final union is in art (Golgonooza), the union of symbol and thought.

P. 35, ll. 54 to 61. The Wild Thyme is the messenger o the formative mind to length and breadth. He is not greater because he would overpower the world with his merely earthward tendency if he were. This Thyme covers the rock or individualized tendency, which is over the abode of the Divine aspirations (the lark), and beside the source of the two streams of influence already described.

P. 35, ll. 61 to 67. The aspirations — the lark — mount upward to the place in the symbolic Heavens which is called Leutha (see chart of symbolic Heavens in chapter on the Zodiacal symbolism of the Cherub). (This Heaven named last, when the Heavens are enumerated, is now named first, for it is considered in its capacity as a gate where influx can enter, rather than as the place for the removal of accumulated abstractions of dogma and symbol). Adam is now the second, and so on. The aspiration — the lark — is the messenger that keeps the eyes of God — the Divine senses descended into formalism and dogmatism and materialism — from forgetting their office. It rises from the side of imaginative life or Art, which faces to the East or towards Love.

P. 36, ll. 1 to 12. When the lark reaches the gate of Leutha he meets another lark, that is to say he meets and becomes one for a moment with his own symbol or external expression. They both then descend to their different abodes — the first lark to his home in imagination pure and simple, the second lark to his place in symbol and dogma. Each Heaven is not only a sub-division of the day that is made up of all the Heavens, but contains within itself the twenty seven-fold Heavens on a smaller scale, and is a complete day in itself, and

VOL. II. 19 *