WILLIAM BLAKE: GOLDEN STRING: CYCLE

Monday, September 14, 2020

CYCLE - RETURN

New York Public Library

Milton

Plate 29, copy C

We are following simplest cycle that is discernible in Blake - that of Fall, Return and Judgment. Man falls from the idyllic state of innocence, passes through experience and reaches a transformative event where all that can be annihilated is annihilated.

The second stage, Return, can also be named Experience, Regeneration, or Renewal.

In William Blake's Circle of Destiny by Milton O Percival, on Page 219 writes:

"The course of experience, which is at once the course of error and the process by which Satan is revealed and regeneration accomplished, is in the hands of Los and Enithrmon. Feeble as their light may be, selfish and misguided as their purposes often are, they nevertheless embody the instinct for preservation which the Poetic Genius - the imagination - can never entirely lose, and which enables man slowly yet surely to turn the experience of error into the apprehension of truth."

Percival further states on page 273)

"Since there is no chasm, in Blake's system, between man and nature, the struggle toward regeneration in the natural world must be thought of, equally with the struggle in the spiritual world, as the work of Los. Los with his hammer vehemently constricting, hardening and fixing, eternally creating only to destroy the false work he has created, is Blake's dramatization as the process as he saw it constantly at work. For destruction is as essential as creation. For this reason the natural world is cast in mortal form. Death and decay are its attributes. Its vegetable life, like Los's systems is 'continually building and continually decaying.' The invisible fires in which these vegetable forms consume are the fires of vegetation or generation which also light the furnaces of Los. Just as the soul of man is purified by the 'furnaces of affliction' so is the physical world destroyed and renewed in the fires of 'generation or vegetation.' The necessary change is in both cases accomplished by death in fire."