William Blake (1757–1827). The Poetical Works. 1908.
Verses from ‘The Gates of Paradise’The Keys of the Gates
T
Reminds thee of thy Mother’s grief.
1.
My Eternal Man set in repose,
The Female from his darkness rose;
And she found me beneath a Tree,
Mandrake, and in her Veil hid me.
Serpent Reasonings us entice
Of good and evil, virtue and vice,
2.Doubt self-jealous, Watery folly;
3.Struggling thro’ Earth’s melancholy;
4.Naked in Air, in shame and fear;
5.Blind in Fire, with shield and spear;
Two-horn’d Reasoning, cloven fiction,
In doubt, which is self-contradiction,
A dark Hermaphrodite we stood—
Rational truth, root of evil and good.
Round me flew the Flaming Sword;
Round her snowy Whirlwinds roar’d,
Freezing her Veil, the Mundane Shell.
6.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.
7.One dies! Alas! the Living and Dead!
One is slain! and One is fled!
8.In Vain-glory hatcht and nurst,
By double Spectres, self-accurst.
My Son! my Son! thou treatest me
But as I have instructed thee.
9.On the shadows of the Moon,
Climbing thro’ Night’s highest noon;
10.In Time’s Ocean falling, drown’d;
11.In Agèd Ignorance profound,
Holy and cold, I clipp’d the wings
Of all sublunary things,
12.And in depths of my dungeons
Closed the Father and the Sons.
13.But when once I did descry
The Immortal Man that cannot die,
14.Thro’ evening shades I haste away
To close the labours of my day.
15.The Door of Death I open found,
And the Worm weaving in the ground:
16.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.