Allen Ginsberg’s 1979 Naropa lecture on William Blake’s Europe – A Prophecy continues from here
AG: Then we have a whole cast of characters being called to display themselves.
“Then Enitharmon woke, nor knew that she had slept…”- (This all was her dream to begin with, and she didn’t know the revolution was coming. She doesn’t know the old order is over, so even when she wakes she still thinks it’s the evening light. That is, she doesn’t know it’s the morning (or) the dawn already. She doesn’t know the revolution’s been set loose) –
“And eighteen hundred years were fled/ As if they had not been/ She calld her sons & daughters/To the sports of night..” – ((These) “sports of night” are hidden marriage, hidden hypocritic sex, marriage under law, marriage under authority) – She calld her sons & daughters/ To the sports of night,/With her crystal house;
Crystal is used … did we go over this before? Crystal as the delusions of love? Crystal is Blake’s image for the delusions of love. Like in “The Crystal Cabinet”:
“The Maiden caught me in the Wild/ Where I was dancing merrily/She put me into her Cabinet/And Lockd me up with a golden Key.”
He “strove to seize the inmost form” – (the guy who’s lost in the Crystal Cabinet, in the soft “moony” delusions of love) – He “strove to seize the inmost Form/With ardor fierce and hands of fire,/But burst the Crystal Cabinet/And like a Weeping Babe became..”
Do you remember “The Crystal Cabinet” poem? Does anybody know that? Does anybody here know that poem? Well, maybe we better do that, because that’s kind of nice.
Anyway, “She calld her sons & daughters/To the sports of night,/Within her crystal house/And thus her song proceeds..”
And now she’s going to go through a great many symbolic characters.
But let’s get the “crystal” down, because “crystal” will recur in Blake now, and “The Crystal Cabinet” is one of his most beautiful poems.
to be continued
Audio for the above can be heard – here, beginning at approximately twenty-three minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-six-and-a-half minutes in