It is difficult not to see some trace or transposition of the kind, evil counsellor Hayley, a 'Satan' of mild falsehood in the sight of Blake. But the main aim of the book is the assertion of the supremacy of the imagination:
'The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human
Existence itself,'
And the putting off of the 'filthy garments,' of 'Rational Demonstration,' of 'Memory,' of 'Bacon, Locke, and Newton,' the clothing of oneself in imagination:
'To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not
Inspiration,
That it shall no longer dare to mock with the aspersion
of Madness.
Cast on the Inspired by the tame high finisher of
paltry Blots,
Indefinite or paltry Rhymes; or paltry harmonies.'
It is because 'Everything in Eternity shines by its own Internal light,' and that jealousy and cruelty and hypocrisy are all darkenings of that light, that Blake declares his purpose of:
'Opening to every eye
These wonders of Satan's holiness showing to the
Earth
The Idol Virtues of the Natural Heart, and Satan's
Seat
Explore in all its Selfish Natural Virtue, and put off
In Self-annihilation all that is not of God alone.'
Such meanings as these flare out from time to time with individual splendors of phrase, like 'Time is the mercy of Eternity,' and the great poetic epigram, 'O Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches' (where, for a moment, a line falls into the regular rhythm of poetry), and around them are deserts and jungles, fragments of myth broken off and flung before us after this fashion:
'But Bahab and Tirzah pervert
Their mild influences, therefore the Seven Eyes of
God walk round
The Three Heavens of Ulro, where Tirzah and her
Sisters
Weave the black Woof of Death upon Entuthon
Benython
In the Vale of Surrey where Horeb terminates in
Rephaim.'
In Jerusalem, which was to have been 'the grandest poem which the world contains,' there is less of the exquisite lyrical work which still decorates many corners of Milton, but it is Blake's most serious attempt to set his myth in order, and it contains much of his deepest wisdom, with astonishing flashes of beauty. In Milton there was still a certain approximation to verse, most of the lines had at least a beginning and an end, but in Jerusalem, although he tells us that 'every word and every letter is studied and put into its place,' I am by no means sure that Blake ever intended the lines, as he wrote them, to be taken as metrical lines, or read very differently from the prose of the English Bible, with its pause in the sense at the end of each verse. A vague line, hesitating between six and seven beats, does indeed seem from time to time to emerge from chaos, and inversions are brought in at times to accentuate a cadence certainly intended, as here:
'Why should Punishment Weave the Veil with Iron
Wheels of War,
When Forgiveness might it Weave with Wings of
Cherubim?'