'For everything that lives is holy, life delights in
life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be
defil'd.'
As, in that book, Blake had seen 'the fiery limbs, the flaming hair' of the son of fire 'spurning the clouds written with curses, stamping the stony law to dust'; so, here, he hears the voice of Orc proclaiming:
'The fierce joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts through the wild
wilderness;
That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion
abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, and none shall
gather the leaves.'
Liberty comes in like a flood bursting all barriers:
'The doors of marriage are open, and the Priests in
rustling scales
Rush into reptile coverts, hiding from the fires of
Orc,
That play around the golden roofs in wreaths of fierce
desire,
Leaving the females naked and glowing with the lusts
of youth.
For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of
religion
Run from their fetters reddening, and in long-drawn
arches sitting,
They feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of
ancient times,
Over their pale limbs as a vine when the tender grape
appears.'
The world, in this regeneration through revolution (which seemed to Blake, no doubt, a thing close at hand, in those days when France and America seemed to be breaking down the old tyrannies), is to be no longer a world laid out by convention for the untrustworthy; and he asks:
'Who commanded this? what God? what Angel?
To keep the generous from experience till the
ungenerous
Are unrestrained performers of the energies of
nature,
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science
That men get rich by.'
For twelve years, from the American to the French revolution, 'Angels and weak men' are to govern the strong, and then Europe is to be overwhelmed by the fire that had broken out in the West, though the ancient guardians of the five senses 'slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built houses.'
'But the gates were consumed, and their bolts and
hinges melted,
And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, and
round the abode of men.'
Here the myth, though it is present throughout, is an undercurrent, and the crying of the message is what is chiefly heard. In Europe (1794), which is written in lines broken up into frequent but not very significant irregularities, short lines alternating with long ones, in the manner of an irregular ode, the mythology is like a net or spiders web over the whole text. Names not used elsewhere, or not in the same form, are found: Manatha-Varcyon, Thiralatha, who in Europe is Diralada. The whole poem is an allegory of the sleep of Nature during the eighteen hundred years of the Christian era, under bonds of narrow religions and barren moralities and tyrannous laws, and of the awakening to forgotten joy, when 'Nature felt through all her pores the enormous revelry,' and the fiery spirit of Ore, beholding the morning in the east, shot to the earth: