When Los had finished his unwilling task, and saw Urizen all bound with the chains of time, the senses, and the enclosing boundaries of his own selfhood, “Pity began.” This is another painful division and shrinkage,—
In tears and cries imbodied
A female form trembling and pale,
Waves before his deathy face.
Her name is Pity or Enitharmon. She is also Space, and her union with Los or Time naturally follows. The Eternals are so terrified at what Urizen has done, that they enclose the new creation in a tent to hide it from their sight, and call the tent Science. From the union of Space and Time springs a child, Orc, hereafter the deliverer, whom the father and mother chain with the chain of jealousy below the deathful shadow of Urizen.
Urizen then explores his new kingdom, and, looking on his teeming world, he sickened, for he saw “that no flesh nor spirit could keep his iron laws (of prohibition and restraint) one moment.” So he made a great Web or Net, and flung it over all, and this was called the Net of Religion. And of his now finished Creation it is written,
Six days they shrunk up from existence
And on the seventh day they rested.
And they blessed the seventh day in sick hope,
And forgot their eternal life.
The evolution or changes of Urizen form the subjects of a great number of the plates. Blake has wrought here through the pictorial medium as Dante wrought the “Inferno” in his own art. The same high imagination, the same passionate and unshrinking realization of it, the same terrible force are integral parts of the minds of both artists, and inspire both works, different in kind as they are and separated by centuries of thought and feeling. No wonder that Linnell desired Blake in his old age to make drawings from the “Inferno,” “thinking him the very man and only to illustrate Dante.”
The prelude to the book is set in a tender and lovely key, very difficult, however, to harmonize with what follows. It is not obvious why it occurs here or what connection it has with the dark story of Urizen. The same little picture will be found in the smaller Book of Designs, but there it is quite differently rendered as to colour, and I think more beautifully. Our reproduction is from the latter plate.
The cloud-like form of a beautiful woman, drifts across the sky, drawing by the hand a little baby, with the ideal face of sweet infancy. There is a delicious curve in the woman’s body, a swirl of the garments, and a quick, fish-like, darting movement about the action of the child which contribute to the impression of flight through a buoyant atmosphere.
Turning over the pages of “Urizen” one terror after another takes the breath and quickens the pulse. Urizen—or is it Orc?—his terrible face averted, strides through a world of fire dividing the flames with his arms.
