CHAPTER IX

THE PROPHETIC BOOKS CONTINUED

In studying the next book which Blake produced in 1794—the “Book of Urizen”—it is necessary to disabuse our minds of the idea that Blake’s thoughts were not clear to himself. However confused and troubled they appear to us, they were certainly clear as sunlight to him, but he failed in the labour of reducing them to terms of intellectual definiteness, much less to terms of poetic art. The excitement which these visions brought upon his tremulous and sensitive brain seems to have induced a kind of “possession,” similar to that of the maenads at the festival of Dionysus of old, so that no very consecutive utterance may be expected from him. Yet there is a kind of sequence in “Urizen,” and the marvellous illustrations to the book cannot be properly appreciated without holding the thread of the so-called poem. Setting aside the ancient Biblical tradition, our prophet undertakes no less a task than the writing of a new Genesis, which in its naked horror and despair causes the very gods themselves to hide their faces out of pity to the sons of men.

Urizen the creator, the god of restraints and prohibitions, becomes self-inclosed and divides himself from Eternity and the Eternals.

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TITLE-PAGE OF “URIZEN.” PUBLISHED 1794

In fire and strife and anguish he creates the world, “like a black globe, viewed by the Sons of Eternity, standing on the shore of the Infinite Ocean, like a human heart struggling and beating, the vast world of Urizen appears.” But after this effort he is laid in “stony sleep unorganized rent from eternity.” Los, who is Time, was then wrenched out of Urizen, and suffers fierce pain in the act of separation and division. Then, while Time works with hammers at his forge, fires belching around, he sees, nay! appears to assist at, the further changes of Urizen. For the “formless god” is gradually taking form, and inclosing himself in a human body. He assumes bones, heart, brain, eyes, ears, nostrils, stomach, throat, tongue, arms, legs, and feet. And now “his eternal life like a dream was obliterated.” An age of intense agony and stress was allotted to the evolution and development of each created portion of the body.

Meanwhile Los “forged chains new and new, numbering with links, hours, days and years.”