f shadows, wake! expand!(4:6 )” Here is the initial call, the call to Albion, which is Israel, that has been superimposed on England. For as we see later, “All is Eternal Death unless you can weave a chaste/ Body over an unchaste Mind!(21:11)” He needs England to feel the way he feels, to see not just the trees in the forest but the color of each of those trees, and which have sparrows living in them. For Blake, life is Eternal Death, and only in the imagination can there be refuge. Thus the first contradiction appears; the idea that one must awaken not the physical self, but the Los within. Awake, but on the inside, keep your temporal self asleep- it does too much damage when arisen. For no immortal hand or eye can weave a chaste body over any mind. An image forms here of Blake resting his hands ever so on gently the English people to begin to sense their new directions. Herein lies the portal through which he traveled in order to exit the long Miltonic shadow- the England Blake was moved to prophesize to was not Milton’s. The factories had changed that. And though man is ever unchanged, it is democratization and technology that drag the cart of history. Blake saw then most clearly that he was not Milton, nor should he try to be. His England, his Albion was starving for something vastly different than Milton’s England was. Enter now into Jerusalem’s second chapter, where Los is struggling to find a piece of salvation he can hold onto in the midst of the massive cyclical revolutions of nature and history. The scene is one is direct relationship to Satan’s brooding at the opening of Paradise Lost, yet it has grown more chaotic and with more potential for evil, “For had the Body of Albion fall’n down and from its dreadful ruins/ Let loose the enormous Spectre on the darkness of the deep.(40:32)” Blake knows that the unprecedented democratizing England felt could have the abili...
