[A](This word, half rubbed off in the MS., may be “secrecy”; and the point would remain the same.)
[59] Leutha, the spirit or guardian goddess of natural pleasure and physical beauty, is sacrificed as a ransom to redeem the spirit or guardian god of prohibitive law or judicial faith; to him she is sacrificed that through her he may be saved. Thus, in the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the maiden who “plucks Leutha’s flower,” who trusts and indulges Nature, has her “virgin mantle torn in twain by the terrible thunders” of religious and moral law: woman was sacrificed and man “fast bound in misery” during the eighteen centuries—through which the mother goddess lay asleep, to weep over her children at her waking; as in the Prophecy of Europe Time the father and Space the mother of men are afflicted and spellbound until the sleep of faith be slept out. There again the emblematic name of Leutha recurs in passing.
[60] That is of course the reprobate according to theology, such as the heretical prophet himself: the class of men upon which is laid the burden of the sins of the elect, as Satan’s upon Rintrah in the myth.
[61] This line appears to have been too much for the writer in the Life, who here breaks his quotation short off by the head, annihilating with a quite ingenious violence at once grammar, sense, and sound. It is but a small nut to have broken his critical tooth upon; the evident meaning being simply this: that within the centre of everything living by animal or vegetative life there is by way of kernel something imperishable; the fleshly or material life of form contains the infinite spiritual life, lurking under leaf or latent under limb: man and flower and beast have each the separate secret of a soul or divisible indestructible spirit (compare even the Songs of Innocence); but while the earthly and fleshly form remains there stand as wardens of the ways the two material giants, Strength and Force, binding the soul in the body with chains of flesh and sex, the spirit in the petals with bonds of vegetable form, fashioned fastenings of chalice and anther, sprinklings of dusty gold on leaf or pistil; always, without hammer or rivet of Vulcanic forging, able to hold fast Prometheus in blind bondage to the flesh and form of things; so that except by inspiration there can be no chance of seeing what does exist and work in man or beast or flower; only by vision or by death shall one be brought safe past the watch guarded by the sentinels of material form and bodily life, the crude tributary “Afrites” (as in the Æschylean myth) of the governing power which fashions and fetters life in men and things. And thus this, the singing of birds and dancing of flowers, the springing of colour and kindling of music at each day’s dawn, is a symbol—“a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon”—of the dwellers in that milder and moonlight-coloured world of reflex mortal spirits over the imperishable influences of a higher spiritual world, which descending upon earth must be clothed with material mystery and become subject to sensuous form and likeness in the body of the shadow of death. This glorious passage, almost to be matched for wealth of sound, for growth and gradation of floral and musical splendour, for mastery of imperial colour, even against the great interlude or symphony of flowers in Maud, was not cast at random into the poem, but has also a “soul” or meaning in it—though the ways of seeing and understanding are somewhat too closely guarded by “Og and Anak.” Reading it as an excerpt indeed one need hardly wish to see beyond the form or material figure. That “innumerable dance” of tree and flower and herb is not unfit for comparison with the old ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα of the waves of the sea.
[62] One may fear that some such symbolic stuff as this is really at the root of the admirable poem christened by its editor with the name of Broken Love: which I gravely suspect was meant for insertion in some fresh instalment of prophetic rhapsody by way of complement or sequel to Jerusalem. The whole tone of it, and especially that of some rejected stanzas, is exactly in the elemental manner of the scenes (where scene is none) between Albion, Jerusalem, and Vala the Spectre of Jerusalem (books 1st and 2nd):—
“Thou hast parted from my side—
Once thou wast a virgin bride:
Never shalt thou a true love find—
My Spectre follows thee behind.
“When my love did first begin,
Thou didst call that love a sin;
Secret trembling, night and day,
Driving all my loves away.”
These two stanzas (recalling so many other passages where Blake has enforced his doctrines as to the fatal tendency of the fears and jealousies, the abstinence and doubt, produced by theoretic virtue and hatched by artificial chastity) stood originally as third and fourth in the poem. They are cancelled in Blake’s own MS.; but in that MS. the poem ends as follows, in a way (I fear) conclusive as to the justice of my suggestion; I mark them conjecturally, as I suppose the dialogue to stand, by way of helping the reader to some glimpse of the point here and there.
“When wilt thou return and view
My loves and them to life renew?
When wilt thou return and live?
When wilt thou pity as I forgive?”
“Never, never, I return;
Still for victory I burn.
Living, thee alone I’ll have;
And when dead I’ll be thy grave.
“Through the heaven and earth and hell
Thou shalt never, never quell:
I will fly and thou pursue;
Night and morn the flight renew.”
(This I take to be the jealous lust of power and exclusive love speaking through the incarnate “female will.” See Jerusalem again.)
“And I, to end thy cruel mocks,
Annihilate thee on the rocks,
And another form create
To be subservient to my fate.
“Till I turn from female love
And root up the infernal grove,
I shall never worthy be
To step into eternity.”