Page 57 - GALIET THE HOLY WORD: Blake IV++

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
turns them into shapes,
and gives to airy nothing
a local habitation and a name.”32
Socrates, too, in his dialogue with Ion, proclaims the poet as a divinely inspired messenger. Socrates’ fabled magnet, the Stone of Heraclea, is a metaphor for divine inspiration: “as a magnet attracts iron and passes that attraction along, so the gods inspire the artist, who inspires the interpreter, who in turn, inspires the audience.”33 Thus Blake and Shakespeare and Socrates, endow the Bard, the interpreter of the Holy Word, with Prophecy’s macrocosmic gift.
Yet, to Blake, if the Poet inherits heaven, he also inherits its other: hell. To read absence 3⁄4 the unsaid in between the verses of SI’s and SE’s “Introductions,” is to experience the struggle between these opposing realms. A quivering melancholy inundates us as we mourn with the Bard the loss of the Holy Word. We experience the Piper’s
32 Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Peter Holland. London: Oxford University Press. 1994. 231
33 Leicht, Vicent, Editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. London:UK: W.W.W. Norton & Company. 2001. 35
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