And lastly Blake’s own spiritual life worked the change. As he learnt to see through Nature to her antetype, so he learnt to see through physical beauty. A beautiful face was a very transitory manifestation of eternal beauty. When Blake with Plato had pierced through to the unseen fount of beauty, then he was no longer a slave to externals. The passion remained, but transmuted, and legitimate relief was found in the continuous creation of beautiful things. Doubtless many will be disappointed that Blake’s experience brought him back to traditional morality; but after all the terms on which he held it—a clean conception of sex, and faithfulness to a woman worthy of all faith—were not so very narrow and rigorous. They are terms that every man ought at once to accept, if ever he should be so fortunate as to have them proposed to him.
The above ideas are culled from The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. I do not propose any detailed analysis here. This I have done at some length in Vision and Vesture. I will merely point out in conclusion that although these poems seem to ramble all over the universe inside and outside without plan or order, there is, in fact, a connecting link in the figure of Albion.
Albion is the personification of the divine humanity; but regarded individually he is fallen man, bound with “the pale limbs of his Eternal Individuality upon the Rock of Ages.” His inward eyes are closed from the Divine Vision, and so he may be reckoned dead in trespasses and sin. Blake pronounced the natural man altogether an evil. But Albion is not an image of total depravity. Within him are all the divine faculties in addition to the five senses without, but they are closed. If he is to be redeemed, there is no need to create new spiritual faculties, but to re-create and make operative those that are already there. Hence Blake drives back of regeneration to the first generation, when man was made in the image and likeness of God. Regeneration is the renewal of the ancient image and likeness through the cross of Christ and the breath of the Divine Spirit.
Albion, like Lazarus, is sick. “He whom Thou lovest is sick. He wanders from his house of Eternity.” His “exteriors are become indefinite, opened to pain, in a fierce, hungry void, and none can visit his regions.”
Pained and impotent, he laments like Job:
“Oh I am nothing if I enter into judgment with Thee.
If Thou withdraw Thy breath I die, and vanish into Hades;
If Thou dost lay Thy hand upon me, behold I am silent;
If Thou withhold Thy hand I perish like a leaf;
Oh I am nothing, and to nothing must return again.
If Thou withdraw Thy breath, behold I am oblivion.”
“Eternal death haunts all my expectations. Rent from Eternal Brotherhood we die and are no more.”
And so Man like a corse
“lay on the Rock. The Sea of Time and Space
Beat round the rocks in mighty waves.”
Even his limbs “vegetated in monstrous forms of death.”