Hints of more than one design of theirs might be found in it. And Blake's designs have, I repeat, the look of originals. A shock as of something wholly fresh and new, these typical compositions give us.
The verses at the commencement elucidate, to a certain extent, the intention of the Series, embodying an ever recurrent canon of Blake's Theology:—
Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the Gates of Paradise,
Against the Accuser's chief desire,
Who walked among the stones of fire,
Jehovah's fingers wrote The Law:
He wept! then rose in zeal and awe,
And in the midst of Sinai's heat,
Hid it beneath His Mercy Seat.
O Christians! Christians! tell me why
You rear it on your altars high?
'What is man?'—the frontispiece significantly inquires.
To the Gates of Paradise their author in some copies added what many another Book of his would have profited by,—the Keys of the Gates, in sundry wild lines of rudest verse, which do not pretend to be poetry, but merely to tag the artist's ideas with rhyme, and are themselves a little obscure, though they do help one to catch the prevailing motives. For which reason they shall here accompany our samples of the 'emblems.' The numbers prefixed to the lines refer them to the plates which they are severally intended to explain.
The Keys of the Gates.
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The Caterpillar on the Leaf |
