Page 56 - GALIET THE HOLY WORD: Blake IV++
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shadows, only stars. The Soul, only light. The centre of centre: infinite multiplicities in a single one. And like the Chrysanthemum, it flourishes only in Autumn.
It shall be the ineffable Word, the naming of the Lamb’s song, which once written, will proclaim the beginnings of the Piper’s dreamy voyage towards his fall. No longer pure, the Piper matures into a Priest, a Prophet, then a Bard 3⁄4 yearning wistfully for his forever-lost Paradise. Unable to endure innocence’s loss, the prophetic Bard wistfully sings his desolate verses, and from the seeds of his pleading despair, the Tree of Knowledge flourishes by his hubris nourished. In prophetic agony, his Songs of Experience mourn, worn and torn, as if each were the Lamb’s Crown of Thorns.
In his visionary grief, Blake is not the only one that endows the Bard with omniscient and prophetic powers of divine madness. Shakespeare foretold them in Midsummer’s Night Dream:
“...The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth,
from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth,
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