Till the horrid plant bending its boughs
Grew to roots when it felt the earth,
And again sprung to many a tree.
4.Amaz’d started Urizen, when
He beheld himself compassed round
And high roofed over with trees.
He arose, but the stems stood so thick
He with difficulty and great pain
Brought his Books, all but the Book
Of iron, from the dismal shade.
5.The Tree still grows over the Void
Enrooting itself all around,
An endless labyrinth of woe!
6.The corse of his first begotten
On the accursed Tree of Mystery,
On the topmost stem of this Tree,
Urizen nail’d Fuzon’s corse.
IV
1.Forth flew the arrows of pestilence
Round the pale living Corse on the tree.
2.For in Urizen’s slumbers of abstraction
In the infinite ages of Eternity,
When his Nerves of Joy melted & flow’d,
A white Lake on the dark blue air
In perturb’d pain and dismal torment
Now stretching out, now swift conglobing,
3.Effluvia vapor’d above
In noxious clouds; these hover’d thick
Over the disorganiz’d Immortal,
Till petrific pain scurf’d o’er the Lakes
As the bones of man, solid & dark.
4.The clouds of disease hover’d wide
Around the Immortal in torment,
Perching around the hurtling bones,
Disease on disease, shape on shape
Winged screaming in blood & torment.
5.The Eternal Prophet beat on his anvils;
Enrag’d in the desolate darkness
He forg’d nets of iron around
And Los threw them around the bones.
6.The shapes screaming flutter’d vain:
Some combin’d into muscles & glands,
Some organs for craving and lust;
Most remain’d on the tormented void,
Urizen’s army of horrors.
7.Round the pale living Corse on the Tree
Forty years flew the arrows of pestilence.
8.Wailing and terror and woe
Ran thro’ all his dismal world; Forty years all his sons & daughters
Felt their skulls harden; then Asia
Arose in the pendulous deep.
9.They reptilize upon the Earth.
10.Fuzon groan’d on the Tree.
V
1.The lamenting voice of Ahania
Weeping upon the void!
And round the Tree of Fuzon,
Distant in solitary night,
Her voice was heard, but no form
Had she; but her tears from clouds
Eternal fell round the Tree.
2.And the voice cried: ”Ah, Urizen! Love!
Flower of morning! I weep on the verge
Of Non-entity; how wide the Abyss
Between Ahania and thee!
3.“I lie on the verge of the deep;
I see thy dark clouds ascend;
I see thy black forests and floods,
A horrible waste to my eyes!
4.”Weeping I walk over rocks,
Over dens & thro’ valleys of death.
Why didst thou despise Ahania
To cast me from thy bright presence
Into the World of Loneness?
5.“I cannot touch his hand,
Nor weep on his knees, nor hear
His voice & bow, nor see his eyes
And joy, nor hear his footsteps and
My heart leap at the lovely sound!
I cannot kiss the place
Whereon his bright feet have trod,
But I wander on the rocks
With hard necessity.
6.”Where is my golden palace?
Where my ivory bed?
Where the joy of my morning hour?
Where the sons of eternity singing
7.“To awake bright Urizen, my king,
To arise to the mountain sport,
To the bliss of eternal valleys;
8.”To awake my king in the morn,
To embrace Ahania’s joy
On the bredth of his open bosom?
From my soft cloud of dew to fall
In showers of life on his harvests,
9.“When he gave my happy soul
To the sons of eternal joy,
When he took the daughters of life
Into my chambers of love,
10.”When I found babes of bliss on my beds
And bosoms of milk in my chambers
Fill’d with eternal seed.
O eternal births sung round Ahania
In interchange sweet of their joys!
11.“Swell’d with ripeness & fat with fatness,
Bursting on winds, my odors,
My ripe figs and rich pomegranates
In infant joy at thy feet,
0 Urizen, sported and sang.
12.”Then thou with thy lap full of seed,
With thy hand full of generous fire
Walked forth from the clouds of morning,
On the virgins of springing joy,
On the human soul to cast
The seed of eternal science.
13.“The sweat poured down thy temples;
To Ahania return’d in evening,
The moisture awoke to birth
My mothers-joys, sleeping in bliss
.
14.”But now alone over rocks, mountains,
Cast out from thy lovely bosom,
Cruel jealousy! selfish fear!
Self-destroying, how can delight
Renew in these chains of darkness,
Where bones of beasts are strown
On the bleak and snowy mountains,
Where bones from the birth are buried
Before they see the light?”
FINIS
THE BOOK OF LOS
(1795)
I
1.Eno, aged Mother,
Who the chariot of Leutha guides
Since the day of thunders in old time,
2.Sitting beneath the eternal Oak
Trembled and shook the steadfast Earth,
And thus her speech broke forth:
3.“0 Times remote!
When Love & Joy were adoration,
And none impure were deem’d:
Not Eyeless Covet,
Nor Thin-lip’d Envy,
Nor Bristled Wrath,
Nor Curled Wantonness;
4.”But Covet was poured full,
Envy fed with fat of lambs,
Wrath with lion’s gore,
Wantonness lull’d to sleep
With the virgin’s lute
Or sated with her love;
5.“Till Covet broke his locks 6: ban
And slept with open doors; Envy sung at the rich man’s feast;
Wrath was follow’d up and down
By a little ewe lamb,
And Wantonness on his own true love
Begot a giant race.”
6.Raging furious, the flames of desire
Ran thro’ heaven & earth, living flames
Intelligent, organix‘d, arm’d
With destruction & plagues. In the midst
The Eternal Prophet, bound in a chain,
Compell’d to watch Urizen’s shadow,
7.Rag’d with curses & sparkles of fury:
Round the flames roll, as Los hurls his chains,
Mounting up from his fury, condens’d,
Rolling round & round, mounting on high
Into vacuum, into non-entity
Where nothing was; dashed wide apart,
His feet stamp the eternal fierce-raging
Rivers of wide flame; they roll round
And round on all sides, making their way
<
br /> Into darkness and shadowy obscurity.
8.Wide apart stood the fires: Los remain’d
In the void between fire and fire:
In trembling and horror they beheld him;
They stood wide apart, driv’n by his hands
And his feet, which the nether abyss
Stamp’d in fury and hot indignation.
9.But no light from the fires! all was
Darkness round Los: heat was not; for bound up
Into fiery spheres from his fury,
The gigantic flames trembled and hid.
10.Coldness, darkness, obstruction, a Solid
Without fluctuation, hard as adamant,
Black as marble of Egypt, impenetrable,
Bound in the fierce raging Immortal;
And the seperated fires froze in:
A vast solid without fluctuation
Bound in his expanding clear senses.
II
1.The Immortal stood frozen amidst The vast rock of eternity times And times, a night of vast durance, Impatient, stifled, stiffen‘d, hard’ned;
2.Till impatience no longer could bear
The hard bondage: rent, rent, the vast solid,
With a crash from immense to immense,
3.Cracked across into numberless fragments.
The Prophetic wrath, strugling for vent,
Hurls apart, stamping furious to dust
And crumbling with bursting sobs, heaves
The black marble on high into fragments.
4.Hurl’d apart on all sides as a falling
Rock, the innumerable fragments away
Fell asunder; and horrible vacuum
Beneath him, & on all sides round,
5.Falling, falling, Los fell & fell,
Sunk precipitant, heavy, down, down,
Times on times, night on night, day on day—
Truth has bounds, Error none—falling, falling,
Years on years, and ages on ages
Still he fell thro’ the void, still a void
Found for falling, day & night without end;
For tho’ day or night was not, their spaces
Were measur’d by his incessant whirls
In the horrid vacuity bottomless.
6.The Immortal revolving, indignant,
First in wrath threw his limbs like the babe
New born into our world: wrath subsided,
And contemplative thoughts first arose;
Then aloft his head rear’d in the Abyss
And his downward-borne fall chang’d oblique
7.Many ages of groans, till there grew
Branchy forms organizing the Human
Into finite inflexible organs;
8.Till in process from falling he bore
Sidelong on the purple air, wafting
The weak breeze in efforts o‘erwearied.
9.Incessant the falling Mind labour’d,
Organizing itself, till the Vacuum
Became element, pliant to rise
Or to fall or to swim or to fly,
With ease searching the dire vacuity.
III
1.The Lungs heave incessant, dull, and heavy;
For as yet were all other parts formless,
Shiv‘ring, clinging around like a cloud,
Dim & glutinous as the white Polypus
Driv’n by waves & englob’d on the tide.
2.And the unformed part crav’d repose;
Sleep began; the Lungs heave on the wave:
Weary, overweigh’d, sinking beneath
In a stifling black fluid, he woke.
3.He arose on the waters; but soon
Heavy falling, his organs like roots
Shooting out from the seed, shot beneath,
And a vast world of waters around him
In furious torrents began.
4.Then he sunk, & around his spent Lungs
Began intricate pipes that drew in
The spawn of the waters, Outbranching
An immense Fibrous Form, stretching out
Thro’ the bottoms of immensity raging.
5.He rose on the floods; then he smote
The wild deep with his terrible wrath,
Seperating the heavy and thin.
6.Down the heavy sunk, cleaving around
To the fragments of solid: up rose
The thin, flowing round the fierce fires
That glow’d furious in the expanse.
IV
1.Then Light first began: from the fires,
Beams, conducted by fluid so pure,
Flow’d around the Immense. Los beheld
Forthwith, writhing upon the dark void,
The Back bone of Urizen appear
Hurtling upon the wind
Like a serpent! like an iron chain
Whirling about in the Deep.
2.Upfolding his Fibres together
To a Form of impregnable strength,
Los, astonish’d and terrified, built
Furnaces; he formed an Anvil,
A Hammer of adamant: then began
The binding of Urizen day and night.
3.Circling round the dark Demon with bowlings,
Dismay & sharp blightings, the Prophet-Of
Eternity beat on his iron links.
4.And first from those infinite fires,
The light that flow’d down on the winds
He siez‘d, beating incessant, condensing
The subtil particles in an Orb.
5.Roaring indignant, the bright sparks
Endur’d the vast Hammer; but unwearied
Los beat on the Anvil, till glorious
An immense Orb of fire he fram’d.
6.Oft he quench’d it beneath in the Deeps,
Then survey’d the all bright mass, Again
Siezing fires from the terrific Orbs,
He heated the round Globe, then beat,
While, roaring, his Furnaces endur’d
The chain’d Orb in their infinite wombs
.
7.Nine ages completed their circles
When Los heated the glowing mass, casting
It down into the Deeps: the Deeps fled
Away in redounding smoke: the Sun
Stood self-balanc’d. And Los smil’d with joy.
He the vast Spine of Urizen siez’d,
And bound down to the glowing illusion.
8.But no light! for the Deep fled away
On all sides, and left an unform’d
Dark vacuity: here Urizen lay
In fierce torments on his glowing bed;
9.Till his Brain in a rock & his Heart
In a fleshy slough formed four rivers
Obscuring the immense Orb of fire
Flowing down into night: till a Form
Was completed, a Human Illusion
In darkness and deep clouds involv’d.
THE END OF THE BOOK OF LOS
THE SONG OF LOS
(1795)
AFRICA
I will sing you a song of Los, the Eternal Prophet:
He sung it to four harps at the tables of Etemity. In heart-formed Africa
Urizen faded! Ariston shudder’d! And thus the Song began:
Adam stood in the garden of Eden
And Noah on the mountains of Ararat;
They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations
By the hands of the children of Los.
Adam shudder’d! Noah faded! black grew the sunny African
When Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East.
(Night spoke to the Cloud:
“Lo these Human form’d spirits, in smiling hipocrisy, War
Against one another; so let them War on, slaves to the eternal Elements.”)
Noah shrunk beneath the waters;
Abram fled in fires from Chaldea;
Moses beheld upon Mount Sinai forms of dark delusion.
To Trismegistus, Palamabron gave an abs
tract Law:
To Pythagoras, Socrates & Plato.
Times rolled on o‘er all the sons of Har: time after time
Ore on Mount Atlas howl’d, chain’d down with the Chain of Jealousy;
Then Oothoon hover’d over Judah & Jerusalem,
And Jesus heard her voice (a man of sorrows) he reciev’ d
A Gospel from wretched Theotormon.
The human race began to wither, for the healthy built
Secluded places, fearing the joys of Love,
And the diseased only propagated.
So Antamon call’d up Leutha from her valleys of delight
And to Mahomet a loose Bible gave.
But in the North, to Odin, Sotha gave a Code of War,
Because of Diralada, thinking to reclaim his joy.
These were the Churches, Hospitals, Castles, Palaces,
Like nets & gins & traps to catch the joys of Eternity,
The Portable Blake Page 27
