With the cleansing of her breast comes the clearing of her vision. She is no longer enclosed by her five senses, nor her infinite brain into a narrow circle, but she sees through nature, and comes to see Theotormon as he really is. He was only a selfish devourer. But she cries:
“Can that be Love, that drinks another as a sponge drinks water,
That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the day,
To spin a web of age around him, grey and hoary and dark;
Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hangs before his sight?”
Then she names it aright:
“Such is self-love that envies all, a creeping skeleton,
With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed!”
Her own love has risen far above such selfishness. She will even lie by his side on a bank, and view him without jealousy as he takes his delight with “girls of mild silver, or of furious gold,” and into the heaven of generous love she will bring no selfish blightings. Then with these lovely words she concludes her golden speech:
“Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy!
Arise, and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy.”
Here we get in poetry, as later in the Epipsychidion of Shelley, a beautiful conception of love and sexual morality. It is what all with any touch of poetical feeling have at times felt since the days of Shelley, and it has appeared in many modern novels and plays. But we must keep in mind that man’s deepest feelings and thoughts are revealed by his acts and not his words, however beautiful they may be. Blake was to push his mental liberty to its utmost extent, and advocate a freedom that should satisfy the exorbitant demands of the most modern eroto-maniac; but the fact remains that in his own life he fulfilled to the letter the requirements of traditional morality, not because his wandering fancy was inactive, but because, things being as they are, it is not always possible to translate poetry into act, and the old morality is the only thing that reckons with the disabilities of this tiresome old world.
In this same year Blake wrote and engraved America, A Prophecy.
We have already seen his interest in the French Revolution, and his excited hope that it would lead to the regeneration of Europe and the world. He now works backwards to the American War of Independence, and considers that the Demon’s (Orc’s) light that France received had first been kindled when the thirteen States of North America struck for liberty.
He expected much from America. Believing at this period that rebellion was the direct road to liberty and wisdom, his expectation of America was great because, being farther removed from tradition, her position predisposed her to rebel.