complicated because truth, being only known to our minds in the form of paradox, cannot be freely written, even in symbolic terms, without complexity.
We see Nature, with Reason at the top and Lust at the bottom, with Jealousy on the one hand and Morality on the other. We know that it is all a delusion, and exists nowhere but in our own minds, yet we become what we behold—we suffer—our "centres are open to pain.” All this is Satan, with Law, his wife, mortal mother of the Redeemer.
We see Nature’s opposite, symbolically Christ, immoral because forgiving, unreasonable because creative, not jealous, yet with a bride—who is liberty—and he also dwells nowhere but in us, yet in our higher regions to which he invites us to enter, forgetting contest and attaining peace and universal brotherhood. Then the “Mortal disappears in improved knowledge,” and gently “fades away” (“Vala,” Night VIII., 1. 544).
These two opposites we see throughout Blake’s works, and into them we can resolve all his apparently contradictory symbols.
But if, on explanation, his myth loses its confusion, though it cannot lose its fragmentary character as a work of literature, it still fortunately retains its beauty, as does the “infant joy,” though its anatomy “horrible, ghost, and deadly ” be exposed time after time.
There may remain, and do, many passages that would call for analysis beyond what is given in the following interpretations and paraphrases of the poems and Books, if the Blake commentary were to be made ideally complete. But already analysis, or Satan’s Mill, has been long served by Palamabron in “officious brotherhood,” and we may exclaim with Urizen:—
“Can I not leave this world of cumbrous wheels?”
END OF VOL. I.
