For a double vision is always with me.
With my inward eye, ’tis an old man gray;
With my outward, a thistle across the way.
The personification and nomenclature of these double visions of his seem to suggest the genesis of this mythology. He has peopled a twilight mental world with a dim shadowy population of personified states and conditions. They bear strange mouth-filling names, such as Orc, Fuzon, Rintrah, Palamabron, Enitharmon, Oothoon and Ololon. What each symbolizes must be determined by the reader for himself. No explanation of their separate functions will be attempted in this book. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have carried explanation and analytic criticism as far as it can be carried, and the reader who is interested in the literary matter of the prophetic books should consult their learned work as well as Mr. Swinburne’s highly-suggestive critical essay.
CHAPTER VI
HIS MYSTICAL NATURE
To the world of his own time Blake appeared a mad visionary, whose sweet impulsive early poems attracted a few of the rarer souls of the age, but whose pictures and designs were practically unknown. His genius, atmosphere, and modes of thought were antipathetic to his age, and his aims and achievement proved so difficult to understand from the point of view of that day, that he was summarily and uncomprehendingly set down as mad.
This was an offhand and unintelligent method of accounting for so rare a spirit. The spectacle of a man who might, had he chosen, have enjoyed riches, honour, admiration and glory, but who instead, like his great Master, cared not at all for lordship in this world, but much for the preservation of the kingdom of the spirit that is not of this world, did a great deal to earn for Blake the name of madman. The world has always regarded the voluntarily poor with suspicion and misapprehension.
Then, again, Blake was one of those who lived very near the veil which shrouds the great unexplored spiritual forces. Death, as we know, seemed to him but the “passing from one room to another.”
To raise the veil, to look forth on the cause of phenomena, on the visions of eternal imagination, to strain to the uttermost that he might hear the reverberations of the unmeasured mighty stream of Divine power, to bathe within that stream, and let it bear him onward as it would—these were to him the real purposes of life, and being so, formed other reasons why the world, all engrossed as it is with wealth and position, and “here” and “now,” looked at him askance.