Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/147

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THE FIRST BOOK OF URIZEN.
133

4. And their three-fold infinite organic emotional dwelling-places shrunk to a mortal's heart, and died a mortal's death.

5. And they buried their imaginative emotions in restriction, and the laws of prudence being so formed were called laws of God, Morality having put on the aureole.

6. And the salt floods of bitter passion beat round those dwelling-places of emotion, whose symbolic name is Africa; but this shrunken portion, Egypt.

7. The self-hoods within self-hood, under Urizen's cold mental unimaginativeness, had ever less and less of brother-hood, for the formulas of intellect do not mingle as those of mysticism, nor the moralities sympathize as the inspirations.

8. So Fuzon, the one fire-like child of this northern universe, called his enthusiasms together and left earth, dropping the contemplation of experience altogether.

9. And religion, the shrinking tendency, the salt, or astringent female of tearful nets, became a globe, a region.

Analysis of Personal Changes.

Urizen, going North, enters into the Personality of Urthona, whose vehicular form is Los, and whose region Earth, and the gate of generation.

Here he solidifies until he becomes a black globe, shaped like a heart.

This solidification sets free from the mingling a portion of Urthona's masculine potency which belongs to him as a vehicle, not as a region. This is Los. (Compare "Jerusalem," p. 53, l. 1.)

The globe is, as compared with Los, feminine. Los, desiring and pitying over it, weeping and howling, organizes it as though engendering on it till it is complete; but, for lack of desire, quite dead and motionless. At this, though himself confined within the same stillness, he pities it. The first female, Pity, or Enitharmon, begins.