William Blake – America – A Prophecy – 14

Allen Ginsberg continues  William Blake’s “America – A Prophecy” from here

AG: So, the serpent came down, told off Adam and Eve, and so:

“The terror answerd: I am Orc, wreath’d round the accursed  tree:/  The times are ended; shadows pass the morning begins to break;/  The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands” – ( The Ten Commandments, perverted from liberty.  The Ten Commandments) – “What night he led the starry hosts thro’ the wide wilderness..” – (The “wild wilderness” would be the Abyss of Light.  The starry hosts, remember, we had “starry” as reason, as Urizenic rational solidification of the universe -We had that before as part of the symbolism, if you remember, stars connected with that reason).

“That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion abroad/To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves;/ To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves/But they shall rot on desarts blossom, & consume in  bottomless deeps;/ To make the desarts/Bloom..” – ( Isaiah, that comes from – {“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose” (Isiiah 35:1 – King James version of the Bible ) – “& the deeps shrink to their fountains,/And to renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof./That pale religious letchery, seeking Virginity,/May find it in a harlot, and in coarse-clad honesty/The undefil’d tho’ ravish’d in her cradle night and morn:/For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life;/Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d..” – (Oothoon) – “Fires inwrap the early globe, yet man is not consumd..” – (In other words, man dies, and dies and dies, and man is not consumed, because he goes back to the worm and the worm eats him and another man gets born).

“Amidst the lustful fires he walks..”  – (“The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom”, or, “Energy is Eternal Delight”) – “Amidst the lustful fires he walks: his feet become like  brass…” – (Not feet of clay.  So this is from the fires.. from the Biblical myths of Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel.   Daniel? Who was it that was thrown into the fire? Daniel?

Student: Daniel and his friends.

AG: Yeah, they had feet of clay. But anyway, in this case, his feet become like brass,

“His knees and thighs like silver, & his breast and head like gold” – (Well, that’s pretty good).

Well, we’ll quit there because it nine-five.

Class and tape end here 

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately seventy-seven minutes in and concluding at the end of the tape]

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