The Devil answer'd; "Bray a fool in a mortar with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him.2 If Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree. Now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath's God?3 murder those who were murderd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery?4 steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate?5 covet when he pray'd for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them?6 I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from im[PLATE 24]pulse, not from rules."
When he had so spoken, I beheld the Angel, who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire, & he was consumed and arose as Elijah.7
Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend; we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.
I have also The Bible of Hell,8 which the world shall have whether they will or no.
One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.
1790-93 1790-93
PLATE 25
1. Jakob Boehme (1575�1624), a German shoemaker who developed a theosophical system that has had persisting influence on both theological and metaphysical speculation. Paracelsus (1493� 1541), a Swiss physician and a pioneer in empirical medicine, was also a prominent theorist of the occult. 2. Proverbs 27.22: "Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him." "Bray": pound into small pieces. 3. Mark 2.27: "The sabbath was made for man." 4. Cf. John 8.2-11. 5. Cf. Matthew 27.13-14. 6. Matthew 10.14: "Whosoever shall not receive you . . . when ye depart. . . shake off the dust of your feet." 7. In 2 Kings 2.11 the prophet Elijah "went up by a whirlwind into heaven," borne by "a chariot of fire." 8. I.e., the poems and designs that Blake is working on.
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A SONG OF LIBERTY / 121
A Song of Liberty1
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,
1. A commonplace book in which Blake drew 2. Blake regards both Voltaire and Rousseau, sketches and jotted down verses and memoranda French writers often hailed as the authors of between the late 1780s and 1810. It is known as the Revolution, as representing rationalism and the Rossetti manuscript because it later came into Deism. the possession of the poet and painter Dante 3. Newton in his Opticks hypothesized that light Gabriel Rossetti. These poems were first published consisted of minute material particles. Democritus in imperfect form in 1863, then transcribed from (460-362 b.c.E.) proposed that atoms were the the manuscript by Geoffrey Keynes in 1935. ultimate components of the universe.
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AND DID THOSE FEET / 123