are smitten now with their own plagues, crushed in their own council-house, and rise again but to follow after Rintrah, the fiery minister of his mother's triumph. Him the chief "Angel" follows to "his ancient temple serpent-formed," ringed round with Druid oaks, massive with pillar and porch built of precious stones; "such eternal in the heavens, of colours twelve, few known on earth, give light in the opaque."
Placed in the order of the stars, when the five senses whelmed
In deluge o'er the earth-born man: then bound the flexile eyes
Into two stationary orbs concentrating all things:
The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heaven of heavens
Were bended downward, and the nostril's golden gates shut,
Turned outward, barred and petrified against the infinite.
Thought changed the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth
To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid
In forests[1] of night; then all the eternal forests were divided
Into earths rolling in circles of space, that like an ocean rushed
And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh.
Then was the serpent temple formed, image of (the) infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions,[2] and man became an Angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crowned."
Thus again recurs the doctrine that the one inlet left us for spiritual perception—that namely of the senses—is but one and the least of many inlets and channels of communication now destroyed or perverted by the creative demon; a tenet which once well grasped and digested by the disciple will further his understanding of Blake more than anything else can: will indeed, pushed to the full extreme of its logical results, elucidate and justify much
- ↑ Night, or the darkness of worlds yet undivided and chaotic, is always typified by Blake as a "forest" dark with involved and implicated leaf or branch. Compare "The Tiger."
- ↑ Along this page a serpent of imperious build rears the strong and sinuous length of his dusky glittering body, and spits forth keen undulating fire.
