'And in the vineyards of red France appear'd the light
of his fury.'
It is another hymn of revolution, but this time an awakening more wholly mental, with only occasional contemporary allusions like that of the judge in Westminster whose wig grows to his scalp, and who is seen 'groveling along Great George Street through the Park gate.' 'Howlings and hissings, shrieks and groans, and voices of despair,' are heard throughout; we see thought change the infinite to a serpent:
'Then was the serpent temple formed, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions, and man become an
angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd.'
The serpent temple shadows the whole island:
'Enitharmon laugh'd in her sleep to see (O woman's
triumph)
Every house a den, every man bound: the shadows
are filled
With spectres, and the windows wove over with curses
of iron:
Over the doors Thou shalt not: and over the chimneys
Fear is written:
With bands of iron round their necks fasten'd into the
walls
The citizens: in leaden gyves the inhabitants of
suburbs
Walk heavy: soft and bent are the bones of villagers.'
The whole book is a lament and protest, and it ends with a call to spiritual battle. In a gay and naïve prologue, written by Blake in a copy of Europe in the possession of Mr. Linnell, and quoted by Ellis and Yeats, Blake tells us that he caught a fairy on a streaked tulip, and brought him home:
'As we went along
Wild flowers I gathered, and he show'd me each eternal
flower.
He laughed aloud to see them whimper because they
were pluck'd,
Then hover'd round me like a cloud of incense. When
I came
Into my parlour and sat down and took my pen to
write,
My fairy sat upon the table and dictated Europe.
The First Book of Urizen (1794) is a myth, shadowed in dark symbols, of the creation of mortal life and its severing from eternity; the birth of Time out of the void and self-contemplating shadow' of unimaginative Reason; the creation of the senses, each a limiting of eternity, and the closing of the tent of heavenly knowledge, so that Time and the creatures of Time behold eternity no more. We see the birth of Pity and of Desire, woman the shadow and desire the child of man. Reason despairs as it realizes that life lives upon death, and the cold pity of its despair forms into a chill shadow, which follows it like a spider's web, and freezes into the net of religion, or the restraint of the activities. Under this net the senses shrink inwards, and that creation which is 'the body of our death' and our stationing in time and space is finished:
'Six days they shrank up from existence,
And on the seventh they rested
And they bless'd the seventh day, in sick hope,
And forgot their eternal life.'
Then the children of reason, now 'sons and daughters of sorrow,'