ABSTRACT
The myth of Oothoon in the Visions of the Daughters of Albion makes a third with those of Thel and Lyca; for here, too, Blake has told the story of the soul’s descent into generation. Taylor applies the argument to the myth of Persephone: “Proserpine, therefore, or the soul, at the very instant of her descent into matter, is, with the utmost propriety, represented as eagerly engaged in plucking this fatal flower.” The Neoplatonic structure of the poem is wedded to an Ossianic story whose landscape no less than its narrative links it with the symbolism of the Persephone myth-Macpherson’s Oithona. Blake has made the looking-glass water, and the cloud that obscures it the mud in the stream, perhaps for the sake of consistency with the Neoplatonic imagery of water, the Narcissus myth of the mirroring pool, and the rest; but the thought is St. Teresa’s.
