Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/85

seen, with astonishment. (" Milton," p. 11, 1. 31.) Everything (including Satan) has two aspects. An angel attempting to show the poet his eternal lot, takes him through a stable (place of tame instruction), a church (of restraint), its nether vault (of buried passion), to a mill, — type of the grinding of reason in analysis, or argument of law in nature. Mental darkness as of a cave succeeds, and finally the mere blank, such as nature without a spark of humanity is, or as reason without a fragment of poetry. The roots of trees are here, the nether parts of vegetation, the humblest form of blind, life. Below this is nothing conceivable to which the mind can lend existence. Here the imagination pauses. Blake proposes to pass to the void in search of Grod. Six stages of descent have been gone through. What of the seventh ? The first of the six was a stage of servitude, the next of moral restraint, and so onwards in emphasis of oppression. Blake, who always preached liberty, prepares us for a picture of the vision seen in the void where presently in accordance with the proverb that " standing water breeds reptiles of the mind," between the spider-web rays of the black sun, abhorrent creatures prey on one another. Between the black and white spiders, the poet's lot is cast by his guide. We half see an allusion to the fact that his poetry lies between the black and white lines in which it is written, for we have not forgotten that we but lately heard of men who "took the form of books." If this be the true meaning, there will break out from between the lines a view of diabolic poetry as it appears to a timid angel. This happens. Cloud and fire burst from the place where the poet's lot is cast. Tempest, and nether deep darken from it. The old serpent, nature and its impulses, swims the mental tempest in a horrible form. Green and purple, not the colours as in ordinary poetry of jealousy and tyranny, are on his forehead as on a tiger's, — the figurative tiger of wrath. They are the hues of instinctive growth and passionate blood.