FURTHER IDEAS

(OF GOOD AND EVIL)

INTRODUCTION, Keys, and EpiloOGUE TO

THE GATES OF PARADISE

"FOR CHILDREN'

(ENGRAVED 1793)

WITH AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE, VERSES FROM LETTERS, ETC.

'The Gates of Paradise' is the title of a set of small engravings, some of which have been reprinted in Gilchrist's ‘Life.' A man drowning, one walking quickly near trees, a boy knocking down a Cupid like a butterfly with his hat, a caterpillar with a baby's face, some one wishing to mount to the moon, and other scattered fancies. There is no coherence in them. The verses here following were to serve as explanation. Sketches for the engravings occur in the centres of the pages of the manuscript book, and it must remain doubtful whether the title given since to the poems of various kinds written on the margins was not really designed by Blake for the engravings. The sixteenth line of the Keys of the Gates' gives colour to the suggestion. However this may be, Blake did not print the words Ideas of Good and Evil" at the head of these lines, nor did he cross them out, but left them, covering a whole page of his book, to the mercy of posterity, along with the mass of unsorted poetry that he wrote after them during a period of between ten and fifteen years.

INTRODUCTION TO THE GATES

MUTUAL forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the Gates of Paradise,

Against the Accuser's chief desire,
Who walked among the stones of fire,
Jehovah's fingers wrote the Law:
He wept; then rose in zeal and awe,
And, in the midst of Sinai's heat,
Hid it beneath His Mercy-Seat.
O Christians! Christians! tell me why
You rear it on your altars high.

THE KEYS OF THE GATES

THE caterpillar on the leaf
Reminds thee of thy mother's grief.
My Eternal Man set in repose,
The Female from his darkness rose;
And she found me beneath a tree,
A mandrake, and in her veil hid me.
Serpent reasonings us entice
Of good and evil, virtue, vice.
Doubt self-jealous, watery folly,
Struggling through Earth's melancholy.
Naked in air, in shame and fear,
Blind in fire, with shield and spear,
Two horrid reasoning cloven fictions,
In doubt which is self-contradiction,
A dark hermaphrodite I stood,-
Rational truth, root of evil and good.
Round me, flew the flaming sword;
Round her, snowy whirlwinds roared,
Freezing her veil, the mundane shell.
I rent the veil where the dead dwell:
When weary man enters his cave,
He meets his Saviour in the grave.
Some find a female garment there,
And some a male, woven with care,
Lest the sexual garments sweet
Should grow a devouring winding-sheet.
One dies! alas! the living and dead!
One is slain, and one is fled!

In vain-glory hatched and nursed,
By double spectres, self-accursed.
My son! my son ! thou treatest me
But as I have instructed thee.
On the shadows of the moon,
Climbing through night's highest noon:
In Time's ocean falling, drowned :
In aged ignorance profound,

Holy and cold, I clipped the wings
Of all sublunary things:
And in depths of icy dungeons
Closed the father and the sons.
But, when once I did descry
The Immortal Man that cannot die,
Through evening shades I haste away
To close the labours of my day.
The door of Death I open found,
And the worm weaving in the ground:
Thou 'rt my mother, from the womb;
Wife, sister, daughter, to the tomb:
Weaving to dreams the sexual strife,
And weeping over the web of life.

EPILOGUE

TO THE ACCUSER, WHO IS THE GOD OF THIS WORLD

TRULY, my Satan, thou art but a dunce,

And dost not know the garment from the man ; Every harlot was a virgin once,

Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan. Though thou art worshipped by the names divine Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still

The son of morn in weary night's decline, The lost traveller's dream under the hill.

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AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE

(Not printed or engraved by Blake. Date about 1793-4.)

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

The following were perhaps meant to be called Auguries of Innocence also. Mr. Herne Shepherd, who seems to have had access to Blake's manuscript of the piece, thinks so, as does Mr. Rossetti. Mr. Shepherd's text is here followed blindly, as he is more generally strict than Mr. Rossetti. Mr. Yeats's suggestion to call the couplets proverbs is not adopted, as there is no Blakean authority for it, and it might add a difficulty of reference on account of the 'Proverbs of Hell,' Blake's own title for a section of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.'

A ROBIN REDBREAST in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.

A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell through all its regions.

A dog starved at his master's gate

Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain doth tear.

A skylark wounded on the wing

Doth make a cherub cease to sing.

The game-cock clipped and armed for fight
Does the rising sun affright.

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