The substance of the poem is almost entirely autobiographical. Blake himself tells us, in one of his letters, that it is descriptive of "the spiritual acts" of his "three years' slumber on the banks of ocean." Both the characters and the action have their counterparts in the drama which had been enacted at Felpham. The disguise is often a close one: but we are told that it is a "sublime allegory," and "allegory addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding," is Blake's "definition of the most sublime poetry." The writing was "from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against" his "will." "Thus," he writes, "the time it has taken in writing was rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists … all produced without labour or study." The purpose of the book is clearly stated on p. 36, II. 21-25:
.. When Los join'd with me he took me in his fiery whirlwind:
My vegetated portion was hurried from Lambeth's shades:
He set me down in Felpham's vale and prepar'd a beautiful
Cottage for me, that in three years I might write all these visions,
To display Nature's cruel holiness: the deceits of natural religion.
Blake had already issued, some years earlier, two little tracts containing aphorisms on the subject of natural religion. They had doubtless been called forth by Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, written 1751 but not published until 1779, three years after the author's death. In The Song of Los again he speaks of the laws and religions which had bound men more and more to earth, "Till a philosophy of five senses was complete," which Urizen, weeping, had given "into the hands of Newton and Locke." In Milton the subject is more comprehensively dealt with. The author's intention "to justify the ways of God to man" is stated on the title-page. The Muses whom he invokes in the Preface are not the classical "Daughters of Memory"; they are the daughters of "Imagination" or "Inspiration"; for his appeal is for the restoration of purely imaginative art, based upon biblical and not upon classical models. The Bible he held to be directly and consciously derived from the source of all inspiration, while the art of the Greeks and Romans he believed to be a mere per-
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