Hence the affirmation:
'For all are Men in Eternity, Rivers, Mountains,
Cities, Villages;'
And the voice of London saying:
'My Streets are my Ideas of Imagination.'
Hence the parallels and correspondences, the names too well known to have any ready-made meaning to the emotions (London or Bath), the names so wholly unknown that they also could mean nothing to the emotions or to the memory (Bowlahoola, Golgonooza), the whole inhuman mythology, abstractions of frigid fire. In Jerusalem Blake interrupts himself to say:
'I call them by their English names; English, the
rough basement.
Los built the stubborn structure of the Language,
acting against
Albion's melancholy, who must else have been a
Dumb despair.'
In the Prophetic Books we see Blake laboring upon a 'rough basement' of 'stubborn' English; is it, after all this 'consolidated and extended work,' this 'energetic exertion of his talent,' a building set up in vain, the attempt to express what must else have been, and must now for ever remain, 'a dumb despair'?
I think we must take the Prophetic Books not quite as Blake would have had us take them. He was not a systematic thinker, and he was not content to be a lyric poet. Nor indeed did he ever profess to offer us a system, built on logic and propped by reasoning, but a myth, which is a poetical creation. He said in Jerusalem:
'I must Create a System, or be enslaved by another
Man's.
I will not Reason or Compare: my business is to
Create.'
To Blake each new aspect of truth came as a divine gift, and between all his affirmations of truth there is no contradiction, or no other than that vital contradiction of opposites equally true. The difficulty lies in co-ordinating them into so minutely articulated a myth, and the difficulty is increased when we possess, instead of the whole body of the myth, only fragments of it. Of the myth itself it must be said that, whether from defects inherent in it or from the fragmentary state in which it comes to us, it can never mean anything wholly definite or satisfying even to those minds best prepared to receive mystical doctrine. We cannot read the Prophetic Books either for their thought only or for their beauty only. Yet we shall find in them both inspired thought and unearthly beauty. With these two things, not always found together, we must be content.