The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

1. The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth. 2. Albion's coast is sick, silent; the American meadows faint! 3. Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers and mutter across the ocean. France, rend down thy dungeon!2 4. Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Rome! 5. Cast thy keys, O Rome,3 into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling, 6. And weep.4 7. In her trembling hands she took the new born terror, howling. 8. On those infinite mountains of light now barr'd out by the Atlantic sea,5 the new born fire stood before the starry king!6 9. Flag'd with grey brow'd snows and thunderous visages, the jealous wings wav'd over the deep. 10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield, forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and [PLATE 26] hurl'd the new born wonder thro' the starry night. 11. The fire, the fire, is falling! 12. Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance! O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine. O African! black African! (Go, winged thought, widen his forehead.) 13. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea. 14. Wak'd from his eternal sleep, the hoary element7 roaring fled away: 15. Down rushd, beating his wings in vain, the jealous king; his grey brow'd councellors, thunderous warriors, curl'd veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots, horses, elephants; banners, castles, slings and rocks, 16. Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona's dens; 17. All night beneath the ruins; then, their sullen flames faded, emerge round the gloomy king, 18. With thunder and fire, leading his starry hosts thro' the waste wilderness [PLATE 27] he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay, 19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast, 1. Blake etched this poem in 1792 and sometimes bound it as an appendix to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It recounts the birth, manifested in the contemporary events in France, of the flaming Spirit of Revolution (whom Blake later called Ore), and describes his conflict with the tyrannical sky god (whom Blake later called Urizen). The poem ends with the portent of the Spirit of Revolution shattering the ten commandments, or prohibitions against political, religious, and moral liberty, and bringing in a free and joyous new world. "Albion's" (line 2): England's. 2. The political prison, the Bastille, was destroyed by the French revolutionaries in 1789. 3. The keys of Rome, a symbol of Papal power. 4. Echoing, among others, John 11.35 ("Jesus wept") and Revelation 18.11 (which states that at the fall of Babylon, "the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn for her"). 5. The legendary continent of Atlantis, sunk beneath the sea, which Blake uses to represent the condition before the Fall. 6. Blake often uses the stars, in their fixed courses, as a symbol of the law-governed Newtonian universe. 7. The sea, which to Blake represents a devouring chaos, such as had swallowed Atlantis.

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122 / WILLIAM BLAKE

20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law8 to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying: "Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease."9

Chorus

Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren, whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that

virginity, that wishes but acts not! For every thing that lives is Holy. 1792 1792 8. I.e., the Ten Commandments (verse 18), which the "finger of God" had written on "tables [tablets] of stone" (Exodus 31.18). 9. Cf. Isaiah's prophecy, 65.17�25, of "new heavens and a new earth," when " shall feed together, and the lthe bullock." The wolf and the lamb ion shall eat straw like

FROM BLAKE'S NOTEBOOK1

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;2 Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain. You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again;

5 And every sand becomes a Gem Reflected in the beams divine; Blown back, they blind the mocking Eye, But still in Israel's paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus

10 And Newton's Particles of light3 Are sands upon the Red sea shore, Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

Never pain to tell thy love

Never pain to tell thy love Love that never told can be,