ABSTRACT
Porphyry’s “urns of workmanship divine” are retained in the “funeral urns of Beulah”; and the “funeral veils” are likewise mortal bodies: In Eden, Females sleep the winter in soft silken veils Woven by their own hands to hide them in the darksom grave. Perhaps Taylor’s greatest service to the romantic poets was in teaching the use of symbolic discourse as the language of metaphysical thought. Thel desires the pure life of eternity; Lyca’s desire for “sleep” is the debility of the impure. Blake clearly insists that only souls possessed by “passion & appetite” remain “Sleepers,” or transmigrate, as Plotinus says, “from sleep to sleep, from dream to dream.” The souls of the impure, after wandering for a time – as Blake says, “being piteous Passions & Desires With neither lineament nor form” – return to earthly generation and are given “counterparts,” physical bodies.
