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(Engraved 1795)
I will sing you a song of Los, the Eternal Prophet: | |
| He sung it to four harps, at the tables of Eternity, | |
| In heart-formèd Africa. | |
| Urizen faded! Ariston shudder’d! | |
| And thus the Song began:— | 5 |
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| Adam stood in the garden of Eden, | |
| And Noah on the mountains of Ararat; | |
| They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations | |
| By the hands of the children of Los. | |
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| Adam shudder’d! Noah faded! Black grew the sunny African | 10 |
| When Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brahma in the East, | |
| (Night spoke to the Cloud: | |
| ‘Lo! these Human-form’d spirits, in smiling hypocrisy, war | |
| Against one another; so let them war on, slaves to the eternal elements.’) | |
| Noah shrunk beneath the waters; | 15 |
| Abram fled in fires from Chaldaea; | |
| Moses beheld upon Mount Sinai forms of dark delusion. | |
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| To Trismegistus, Palamabron gave an abstract Law; | |
| To Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. | |
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| Times rollèd on o’er all the sons of Har: time after time | 20 |
| Orc on Mount Atlas howl’d, chain’d down with the Chain of Jealousy; | |
| Then Oothoon hover’d over Judah and Jerusalem, | |
| And Jesus heard her voice—a Man of Sorrows!—He receiv’d | |
| A Gospel from wretched Theotormon. | |
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| The human race began to wither; for the healthy built | 25 |
| Secluded places, fearing the joys of Love, | |
| And the diseasèd only propagated. | |
| So Antamon call’d up Leutha from her valleys of delight, | |
| And to Mahomet a loose Bible gave; | |
| But in the North, to Odin, Sotha gave a Code of War, | 30 |
| Because of Diralada, thinking to reclaim his joy. | |
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| These were the Churches, Hospitals, Castles, Palaces, | |
| Like nets and gins and traps, to catch the joys of Eternity, | |
| And all the rest a desert; | |
| Till, like a dream, Eternity was obliterated and erasèd, | 35 |
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| Since that dread day when Har and Heva fled, | |
| Because their brethren and sisters liv’d in War and Lust; | |
| And, as they fled, they shrunk | |
| Into two narrow doleful forms, | |
| Creeping in reptile flesh upon | 40 |
| The bosom of the ground; | |
| And all the vast of Nature shrunk | |
| Before their shrunken eyes. | |
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| Thus the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon gave | |
| Laws and Religions to the sons of Har, binding them more | 45 |
| And more to Earth, closing and restraining; | |
| Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete: | |
| Urizen wept, and gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke. | |
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| Clouds roll heavy upon the Alps round Rousseau and Voltaire, | |
| And on the mountains of Lebanon round the deceasèd Gods | 50 |
| Of Asia, and on the deserts of Africa round the Fallen Angels. | |
| The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent. | |
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