Is it a dryad who lies outstretched on page 23 with the rising sap of her vegetable life stirring within her fibrous extremities, and awakening her to some dim half-painful consciousness. And below her, what hints of strange buried gnomic life, of Titans convulsively heaving like volcanoes in the dark earth, of creatures begotten of rocks and tree-roots, living like the suckers of plants in the fissures and crannies of deep strata!

Again, on page 33 appears the beautiful weird fantasy that I have named a dryad. The sun and the moon shine on her simultaneously, and her rudimentary limbs appear now to be branches and again to be embryonic wings. A sort of vampire bat is poised above her. At the top of the same page a man with the world under his foot like a stool would seem to have been saved fainting in the arms of an effulgent divine Being from some threatening danger.

I pondered long over this design before finding the clue, which I now believe is to be found in these words, on the previous page, in “Jerusalem”: “The reasoning spectre stands between man and his immortal imagination.”

On Plate 53 is represented a woman sitting enthroned on a sunflower, her double wings form a sort of baldachino above her head. She has a triple tiara from which flames arise in a pyramidal shape, and the sun, the moon, and the stars are contained in her vast wings. The vegetative human has blossomed in the sunflower of spiritual life. No longer “the starry heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion,” but instead of separation there is a large union. “In every bosom a universe expands,” and “everything exists in the human imagination,” are words which help to explain this curious design.

[Larger Image]

PRINTED PLATE (UNCOLOURED), FROM
“JERUSALEM, THE EMANATION OF THE GIANT ALBION.” 1804

A coloured print of the same plate, very sumptuous and rich, was exhibited in the Carfax Galleries in January, 1894.

A beautiful drawing on page 46 gives the meeting of Vala with Jerusalem and her children, but as an artist’s forms often contain more in them than the obvious expression of a fact, so here one may permit oneself to see another meaning underlying this, as the ancient text underlies the palimpsest. Vala may also have an analogy with Death, who like a veiled woman meets a mother with her children. As she lifts her veil, and looks upon one among the group, the child takes flight and attempts to draw his sister after him. Blake, who seldom made his faces characteristic, but was satisfied with making them merely typical, has given this woman’s face a piteous expression of fear and entreaty.

A notable plate is that representing the Crucifixion, the motive of which, when disengaged from the confused material of the book, is discovered to be the bed-rock or foundation, the radical thought, at the base of “Jerusalem” and the next work “Milton.” Jesus the Saviour is Eternal Imagination slain by men, who nail it to the “stems of generation,” that is, kill it through the opacity of the senses and the limitations of sexual life. Just in the same way Orc, the deliverer, who is a type or other aspect of Jesus, is Genius, and by man is nailed on to the rocks of Mount Atlas.