The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at [the] tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
William Blake, Sun at His Eastern Gate (detail)
Five thousand years:
a wound of air,
as hope is overflown
down muddy currents
before the dales of death.
Fifty hundred years—
price of Enitharmon’s sleep,
for all there is—it never was:
humanity—a dream.
For joy is lost—in noise,
while sitting in the stony untruth,
eternal foxes yield the wheel of time:
an iron storm beneath a litter moon.
Mechanical skills to drop
countless grains of words like sand—
declaring: behold this light—
but they’re beneath
the golden wings of day.
And we won’t tell which one is old, who’s young;
when all the colours fade to night,
and strum the strings which join morning to dusk.
Feels everything is dust.
Until,
unless
the energies awake,
as clouds of pearls will gather round
the morning—you—dawn, sound:
by dew—unchained.
Let the Priests of the Raven of Dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the Sons of Joy. Nor his accepted brethren whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious lechery call that virginity that wishes, but acts not!
