ABSTRACT
Certain themes – perhaps they must be called archetypal – may be seen as acting as symbolic fields which draw into their sphere of energy appropriate material. There is not one fragment of Blake’s myth that is not held together by the adamant of some powerful imaginative idea. The northern gate of birth, which in Porphyry's myth is the place where the weaving nymphs have erected their looms, has its parallel in those golden looms of Enitharmon, first described in Night VIII of Vala. Enitharmon has had a momentary glimpse of the horror of “Non-Entity.” Ahania, the earth-goddess banished by Urizen from the world of divine light, wanders in the “Non-Entity” of material existence. Similarly, Enitharmon’s broken gates become a “broad and beaten way” for the “dead.”. The concept of “vegetated” bodies is likewise Darwinian, an odd foreshadowing of the biological science of the poet’s grandson, who extended quantitative science into the sphere of life.
