It is a more intimate sort of knowing than the literary critique. How neat, and almost imperceptible, this slow widening by means of the adjective of the disparity between Jerusalem and England, between Christ and fallen man. And Blake chooses his weapons with care, too. They are not simply human weapons, but weapons of divine power. The clouds unfold to admit the prophet-poet in his burning car, to admit him to the New Jerusalem that his prophetic struggle has built.
Arrows of desire are the very hub of the revolution.
The lineaments of gratified desire. Jerusalem is not a Utopia, built like More's out of common sense by forethought and legislation, but a state of existence brought about by true feeling which is the feeling of prophecy, the price within. Nothing except the amorous feeling of lying on a bank with my eyes closed soaking up sun, with the prickle of sunlight in prismatical colours behind my eyelids, a great feeling of yearning and deep content. Blake's aquatints are coloured with the colours behind the eyelid, the pinks and electrical sparks of yellow, and translucent flesh oranges. Yet Blake was a townsman, unlike Wordsworth the walker and climbing Coleridge.