We see here the symbols, partly Jewish and partly British, into which Blake had gradually resolved his mythology. 'The persons and machinery,' he said, were 'entirely new to the inhabitants of earth (some of the persons excepted).' This has been usually, but needlessly, supposed to mean that real people are introduced under disguises. Does it not rather mean, what would be strictly true, that the 'machinery' is here of a kind wholly new to the Prophetic Books, while of the 'persons' some have already been met with, others are now seen for the first time? It is all, in his own words, 'allegory addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding,' and the allegory becomes harder to read as it becomes more and more naked, concentrated, and unexplained. Milton seems to have arisen out of a symbol which came visibly before Blake's eyes on his first waking in the cottage at Felpham. 'Work will go on here with Godspeed,' he writes to Butts. 'A roller and two harrows lie before my window. I met a plough on my first going out at my gate the first morning after my arrival, and the ploughboy said to the ploughman, "Father, the gate is open."' At the beginning of his poem Blake writes:
'The Plow goes forth in tempests and lightnings and
the Harrow cruel
In blights of the east; the heavy Roller follows in
howlings;'
And the imagery returns at intervals, in the vision of 'the Last Vintage,' the 'Great Harvest and Vintage of the Nations.' The personal element comes in the continual references to the cottage at Felpham;
'He set me down in Felpham's Vale and prepared a
beautiful
Cottage for me that in three years I might write all
these Visions
To display Nature's cruel holiness: the deceits of
Natural Religion;'
And it is in the cottage near the sea that he sees the vision of Milton, when he:
'Descended down a Paved work of all kinds of precious
stones
Out from the eastern sky; descending down into my
Cottage
Garden; clothed in black, severe and silent he
descended.'
He awakes from the vision to find his wife by his side:
'My bones trembled. I fell outstretched upon the
path
A moment, and my Soul returned into its mortal state
To Resurrection and Judgment in the Vegetable Body,
And my sweet Shadow of delight stood trembling by
my side.'
In the prayer to be saved from his friends ('Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies'), in the defense of wrath ('Go to thy labours at the Mills and leave me to my wrath'), in the outburst:
'The idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination
And from laughter proceeds to murder by undervaluing
calumny,'