# The works of William Blake, poetic, symbolic and critical/2/Europe

See: Contents of Vol. II
EUROPE.
In the copy of "Europe" possessed by the brothers Linnell, the following preface is to be read. It is not in the British Museum copy. Blake seems to have disused it as out of keeping with the tone of the rest of the Book.
Five windows light the caverned Man : through one he breathes the air ;
Through one hears music of the spheres ; through one the eternal Vine
Flourishes that he may receive the grapes ; through one can look
And see small portions of the eternal world that ever groweth ;
Through one himself pass out, what time he please, but he will not,
For stolen joys are sweet and bread eaten in secret pleasant.
 So sang a Fairy, mocking, as he sat on a streaked tulip,
Thinking none saw him. When he ceased I started from the trees
And caught him in my hat, as boys knock down a butterfly.
 How know you this, said I, small sir, where did you learn this song ?
Seeing himself in my possession thus he answered me, —
My Master, I am yours, command me, for I must obey.
 Then tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead ?
He, laughing, answered, I will write a book on leaves of flowers,
If you will feed me on love-thoughts, and give me now and then
A cup of sparkling poetic fancies, and when I am tipsy
I will sing you to this soft lute, and show you all alive
This world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.
 I took him home in my warm bosom. As we went along
Wild flowers I gathered, and he show'd me each eternal flower.
He laughed aloud to see them whimper because they were plucked,
Then hovered round me like a cloud of incense. When I came
Into my parlour and sat down and took my pen to write,
My Fairy sat upon he table and dictated Europe.
This counterpart arising, as emanations do, from Orc's breast, had, like Hela, snakey hair, for hair symbolizes the energy of thought, and the serpent is always Nature, the dust-eater. This hair flourishing in the winds of Enitharmon, the heart of space, aroused her to speak. (1-3.)
Mother Enitharmon, — she cried, — wilt thou bring forth other sons than Orc, for that of which I am made must make their wives, and I shall be absorbed into their fury, as a cloud dispersed away by lightning and thunder. (4-7.) Already my roots are within, in the heavens, the region of passion, my fruits outside in the cold earth, region of experience. Destructive experiences that consume imagination are the progeny of marriage with Orc. Why shouldest thou, the spiritual essence of Space, bring me, by nature a mere cloud, temporary contrast of the great fire, into life ? (8-11.)
In vain I shrink from them into vegetative instincts of the region of watery growth. From the sun and moon and stars, spiritual potencies of red passion, fall the prolific pains that fertilize me. (12-15.)
Unwillingly, in looking up I find myself married to the stars by the act of seeing them. These mental forces of personality have for sons the devouring kings on earth, and tyrannies of the reason in intellect, when wedded to my maternal region of experience. (16-19.)
The mountains most desolate ; the convictions and moralities most without imagination ; the hearts, or forests, most dark with the melancholy of mortality; the hollowest trees, wombs of vegetative maternity, are full of my progeny — desires that work in experience when experience turns into ​mental system. Ah ! mother, do not make this mood into an eternal fact. (20-23.)
But thou dost stamp it with the signet of identity, and the flames that are my children make my shadowy namelessness darker than ever when they grow definite, and leave me. (24-26.) Can the infinite pass into the temporary ? Can flames in truth become infants ? Can they be loved and fed with milk and honey, the sweetness of human and the sweetness of vegetable nourishment ? A smile on an infant's face tells me this can be so, and my complaint is silent.
With this she caused her clouds to enter the region of the loins that experience might become maternal. (26-33.)
The depth of winter came. The loins are essentially, as Winter is, the region of darkness. The north was in its most northern state of identity. Morality and reason triumphed over imagination, flesh over spirit ; war ceased. Spiritual propagation (" war gives life in eternity ") was suspended. This was caused by the descent of the secret child through the eastern gate, which is the same thing viewed from another point as the arising of the nameless shadowy female from the breast of Orc.
The troops of spiritual contest fled to the places of shadows, the loins, where they make their abode during the winter of man's mortal life. (1-5.)
This night and winter time is the triumph of the instinctive, of the feminine, the activity of Enitharmon. It is the repose of the masculine. Los (or Urthona) who had chained Urizen to the sun (see Books of " Los " and " Urizen ") rests from his labour at the furnaces, and Urizen is free of his chain. He is reflected in the north like a meteor. But he is solitary there, he only propagates destruction through grief, and restraint unlike Los, possesses of the moon the loins.
The winds and clouds, during the repose of the fire and light, are invited to awake and sing to the elemental harps. North and South repose, East and West arise and sing. The sons of Urizen, the northern sons, are destructive, and envy ​the sons of Los who are elemental and joyous. They demand that spiritual life, delight, and not merely intellectual destruction, be attached to experiences, and claim this because joy is among their privileges. (6-24.)
Every son of Enitharmon shall have his temporary, as well as his spiritual joy, and sport by night, the time of experience, as well as war in propagation by day, the time of inspiration. Orc is bound to earth to become visible by night, and crowned with the vine that he may have the lesser or natural intoxication as well as the spiritual exaltation. (25-29.) The vine is also the symbol of binding, of universal brotherhood by sympathy, especially when used in the highest sense,where it applies to the sympathy through Imagination, and is called Christ, the True Vine.
Orc rose, and manifesting himself as a naming demon, Enitharmon descended into his light, the feminine puts on desire, experience yearns, earth shares the joy known before to the distant heavens, the male or spiritual potencies. (26-34.)
Enitharmon in her energetic, Orc-like desires, will seek to make this delight of space dominate the delights of time, or state or mood. Then woman must have dominion. " The desire of the man is for the woman ; the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man."
She calls Rintrah and Palamabron, the Southern and Eastern unvegetated sons of Los, the most masculine potencies, and bids them (as Whitfield and Wesley, see "Milton," p. 20, 1. 55) tell the world that woman's love (including its fullest indulgence) is sin. They are to preach the resurrection of the mortal, not that of the spiritual, body, into an allegoric heaven, itself a symbol of existence, not an existence. Then joy being forbidden, the male potency may be weakened, the female that rejoices in secrecy may be strengthened. Thus the body's nets will catch and hold the spirit's powers.
Palamabron is bid to bring Elynitria, the arrow-shooting female chastity that repels, until regenerated by sympathy ​with results not to be analyzed in this part of the story (see "Milton," p. 9, 1. 38, to p. 11, 1. 36), and Rintrah to bring Ocalthron, the secret jealousy that restricts. These are the two mental powers to triumph in the night, when religion is a literal interpretation of the Scriptures.
Rintrah is bid bring all his troop, all lions, all golden suns in darkness, fury in forests; inspired delight become desire of the jealous, the secondary form of Orc, mere bodily strength. His power helps the dominion of woman. Her net catches nothing more certainly than his fury. (25-54.) Then came the eighteen centuries of Christendom. Woman slept, instinct ceased to have any spiritual energy of her own. Man was a dream, Theotormon the "sick man's dream," of the book of the "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," line 170 — and his dream was the Gospel of Sorrows. (Compare the Book of Asia.) And it was a woman's dream, for it was a thing of tears, dark water, natural affliction, not masculine or belonging to eternal spiritual joy that laughs at nature and her grief and her talk of sin, and her tree of good and evil. (55-60.)
Now was seen a mystic sunset and star-light night. Armies divided the peace of the world. Men who lived for the body and reason propagated both. Things were the reverse of what they should be. Instead of the light of heaven as a masculine potency dividing the clouds, shadows, that should be female, came in male form and divided the heavens. These were seen as sunset clouds.
Albion's Angel, who inhabits the sun, fell with the sunset. His own plagues, the mortal-colour, the blood-redness of his clouds, smote him. The cloud, full of fertility — demons of futurity — bears hard on the council house, the feminine hollow into which the setting sun passes, as Albion's angels attempt to gather there in council, in concentrated activity of the Obedient (angels were obedient male potencies). This council or gathering in the tent should have been fruitful, a fertilizing act, as should be every descent of spirit into matter, ​or male into female. (61-68.) (Compare "Council of God," for contrast, in Vala I., 428; IV., 246; VIII., 1.) But the angels are overwhelmed. Matter for a while gets the better of spirit. Then, as the sunset leads to starlight, they arose in a new form, as intellectual ideas of a purely reasoning kind, as the "corporeal understanding," as the light of night. They struggle upward, or inward, striving to enter in this form the imagination, the " bosom of God." In the thoughts perturbed they tried, to follow Albion's angel to his ancient temple, serpent formed.
This was the great Druid, error, the mistaking of spiritual significance for corporeal command.
The angel went by London to Verulam, which is the English for saying ("Jerusalem," p. -59, 1. 14, and p. 74, 1. 3) by Palamabron to Rintrah.
There, in the golden south, in the eyes, stands the vision of the temple as it was before it became serpent formed. Then it was the symbolic temple of Jerusalem (Apocalypse, c. 21) of twelve stones, which should be, but is not in the fallen, or non-mystic state of mind, the number of the senses, and give light in the opaque region of experience. But few of them are known on earth. They were left as the zodiacal symbol when the deluge of the five senses left man an unvisionary being. Then the eyes only knew perspective, the ears words of information : the nostrils breathed air, not spiritual atmosphere. (69-86.)
Thought — the power of Albion's angel at night, of the stars, the demons of futurity — in fact, the sons of Urizen and of Albion — changed the infinite into a serpent when the symbol of productivity seemed nothing but a physical instrument. The fires of prophecy — of pitying Los — were changed into the sons of Orc, the devouring and tyrannic passions. Man attempted to hide from them in sorrows, in instincts, in forests. These moods gave rise to the pre-occupation of the mind in scientific study. The heavens were no longer the plenum of potency, the fatherhood, the life-origin, but by ​the sad mood split into the reasoning moods (forests into earths rolling) became the astronomical heavens only, because seen as these only. They became a serpent-temple, image of the infinite shut up in finite revolutions. Then man also, instead of inhabiting the regions of his imagination, was compressed, in angelic obedience, into his own wall of flesh, by the deluge of conviction that overwhelmed him, telling him that all outside the wall was void. God was re-imagined in imitation of an absolute earthly monarch. (87-94.)
But the serpent was the " prester serpent " of the book of " Vala." He now contained in his purple head the head of Man (who is " head downwards "), and this head — the shaggy-roofed human skull, with purple eyes and red lips — became the attractive face that drags the visionary man into the life of the human loins. (95-103.)
Albion's Angel rose on the great stone of night, literal thought that overhangs London city, the genius of parentage. He saw over it Urizen, the scientific potency on the Atlantic, the ocean of male nerve-power. The brazen book — the book of brass or of the loins — was expanded from North to South, from experience to imagination.
Urizen unclasped his book and began to sow the seed of gloomy literalness on the youth of England, feeding his soul with pity. When he pities he propagates, and in the North his progeny are always unimaginative demonstrations. But Albion's spirit of Obedience and Law, his Angel, compels the youth, as they curse the pained heavens, parental potencies of Urizen, to submit to his ideas. The serpent-temple shadows the island, until Albion's angel in the flames of the desire for a more complete tyranny of literal over spiritual law, howling with a yearning like Orc's fiery passion, seeks the trump, the arousing instrument of the last mood of man, and therefore of the last doom. (104-120.)
He was seen then as a visionary symbol in the form of a judge, flying from the courts to the open land, and the wigs ​and robes of Lis office grew to his flesh while he went, as Orc's chain once grew to the rock. (121-127.)
Such was the result of the fury of Orc in the cold northern region of Europe, while Rintrah and his fires swarmed in the deep, and Palainabron shot his lightning down his back — portion whence the spectre, the egotism, the experience, not the emanation exudes. (128-131.)
Enitharmon laughed in her sleep to see that daily life and reason had triumphed over imagination — woman over man — prohibition over inspired freedom, till the spiritual potencies were all weakened. (As elsewhere said, "Genius was forbidden.") (132-139).
But the flames of Orc still filled Albion's Angel with the mad desire of tyrannizing — still obedience sought to rule ; still restriction desired to create ; three times he tried to blow the trumpet, the productive passion of the last judgment. (139-146.)
But, according to the law, "If a man would persist in his folly he would become wise," from Albion leaped the spirit called Newton, the spirit of sleep ("Newton's sleep" in the poem from Felpham — of "single vision"), and he blew the
trumpet. The restrictions of reason cramping spirit overset the restrictions of moral religion and bigotry cramping love and vision. The Angels fell. The dead did not rise. (147-151.)
Then Enitharmon woke — the Spirit of Space arose from the sleep of nature, the watery deluge of the five senses. The incident of her sleep was nothing to the prophetic emanation. She knew not that she had slept, and she called her children to renew the sports of night, the joys of the five senses. (152-155.) Joy is essentially awakening : restraint, sorrow, and reasoning are essentially sleep.
She calls Ethinthus — of whom no more is told than that she is queen of waters, and is to come though the earthworm call. She is a feminine emotion, and that she is a subtle name for the moon in this symbolic connection is left as a ​suggestion. She may be one of the "Fairies that lead the moon along the valley of Cherubim" (‎"Jerusalem," page 63, line 14) or conduct feminine emotion in sexual channels. It was part of Blake's original scheme to have published "Europe" always as a book dictated by a fairy, as the preface from Mr. Linnell's copy shows.
She is recognized as a feminine western figure, being the queen of waters, but is northern when viewed in contrast with the next.
Manatha Varcyon should be a sun fairy ; a feminine figure of sunrise clouds.
Leutha, luring bird of Eden, emanation of Palamabron and temptress of Satan (in "Milton," p. 10), is a feminine eastern figure (Palamabron is the Eastern, or Luvah-like, son of Los), symbolized by the perfumes of flowers that open at sunrise (as in "Milton").
Antamon the figure of the cloud, in the East.
Oothoon, the flame in the West.
Sotha and Tiralatha, fairies of the South — the eyes — whose horses are like black pupils.
And Orс himself — all are called to the "red light" of mortal love.
The cry is that of the Moon calling up her clouds, or Enitharmon her winged figures, or fairies.
The call is heard through the four points.
Urthona hears it through Ethinthus, for Los is "possessor of the moon."
Luvah, through Antamon and Leutha.
Tharmas, through Manatha Varcyon, and Oothoon.
Urizen, through Sotha and Tyralatha, but, it being night and Urizen not shining, these two eye-fairies dwell in " dreamful caves." The dream is that of "Single Vision and Newton's Sleep." (Compare the poem written to Mr. Butts from Felpham, published among the letters in Gilchrist, and in the Aldine edition.)
That is to say, the visionary spirits in the hour of the rule ​of the five senses (Night), and in their region (North), keep their horses (intellectual activities) in the stable and busy themselves with the poetic dreams of Beulah—"consolation of sleepers—land of shades." (156-193, 198.)
In the joys of the senses, in the sports of night, the stars of Urizen, the watchers of darkened intellect, awake to desire and life as Urizen did when Orc was chained to the rock (see "Urizen"). (194.)
Till imagination—the dawn of the East—suddenly begining, Red Orc shot from the heights of dream down to the level of fact, and his first performance was the French Revolution. (199-201.) Violence rejoiced, sweet pleasure wept. (202-207.) At this Los, as the spirit of prophecy, called all his powers to strive with blood (268-210), and in strife was Blake's mental warfare all his life long.
Tabular Abstract to Europe.
Night, the period of material or feminine power, comes.
| (1) Head | Enitharmon calls for joy. She will bind all pleasure to the "elemental" forces. She calls for Ore, but will have him bound. |
| Heart | Enitharmon calls for dominion. Not being satisfied with bindingjoy to matter, she will have matter rule over it. The clouds ofrestraint and cold unimaginativeness fall upon Albion's guardian. He withdraws into the limits of physical man—the serpent-temple—and tries to blow the last trumpet or effect the last fructification. |
| Loins | Head invading region of heart and loins. Reason, as Newton blows the trumpet, and autumn instead of spring results. |
The meteorological symbolism of the poem may be pieced together as follows:—Night comes on, darkness; the secret child descends first in the east. The sun, Urizen, sheds a faint light along the northern horizon. "Fleecy clouds" float in the air. Orc rises in the form of the northern lights or of a shooting star. The feminine powers long ​for dominion and the clouds obscure the moon — Los — and cover the world with cold and with increasing darkness. The meteorological symbolism then leaves us for a time to return when the clouds are dispersed and the trump of doom is sounded by Newton. There is a period of pleasant life before dawn, when the fish sport on the waves by the light of the moon. The sun then rises.
The significance of the Preludium is that it deals with the travail of the feminine principle when about to give birth to the soul or tendency that it has clothed in flesh. In the poem itself the Christian era is a great womb from which the imaginative life comes docked of its immortality and clothed with bodily reason.
For much more about the serpent-temple see "Jerusalem," page 67, 1. 34. It is there called "the polypus of generation," and is said to have its head, as in present poem, at Verulam, and its heart at Stonehenge. It is six-fold, and includes six symbolic cities — Verulam, Worcester, Chichester, Salisbury, Exeter and Bristol. Being in the south of England, it is a kind of image of the "serpent coiled in the south "of Jerusalem, (p. 14, 1. 3.) It is the Phallic symbol again of the Masculine in its separate and spectrous form. ("Jerusalem," p. 09, 11. 1 to 5.) Thus through the polypus we see that Reason is both feminine as a ratio of the five senses which are, in the aggregate, Nature who is Vala and Rahab ; and at the same time masculine as its serpentine symbol shows, because it is a destroyer and a warrior, in the form of a fructifier.
It is the "serpent temple" into which the sun was put. The sun is also the plough. On it, as such, Urizen "laid his hand." As such the bulls of Luvah drags it every morning out of the deep. Its quality of identity with the plough belongs to it as an outward symbol or organ of Time, the ever masculine potency.