6

The chasm between the dream and the reality was bridged by a cosmic man who falls from his heavenly estate, suffers the dispersion of his members, becomes entangled in a web of matter but finally purifies and unites himself and reascends.19

Within this mythic frame Percival points to Blake's considerable use of tradition:

Orphic and Pythagorean tradition, Neoplatonism in the whole of its extent, the Hermitic, kabbalistic, Gnostic, and alchemical writings, Erigena, Paracelsus, Boehme, and Swedenborg.20

This extensive use of tradition seems sufficient, to Percival, to counter the view that the poem was built out of visions or dreams.

In Fearful Symmetry, Frye gives us his methodology:

[the] doctrine of a single original language and religion implies that the similarities in ritual, myth and doctrine among all religions are more significant than their differences. It implies that a study of comparative religion, a morphology of myths, rituals and theologies, will lead us to a single visionary conception.21

For her part Raine states that

the cycle of descent and return, the journey of

the traveller who leaves his native country to return

again is not Christian: it is Platonic; and even

into his interpretation of Job, Blake is carrying

on that grand conception that re-echoes from Heraclitus

down through the Greek philosophers and poets. . . .

The contrasting states of sleep and waking, a death

into life and a re-awakening into eternity, form

the very substance of Blake's thought.22

19

Milton 0. Percival, William Blake's Circle of Destiny

(New York: Octagon Books, 1970), p. 187.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 188.

Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake [Boston: Beacon Press, 1947), p. 424.

22

Kathleen Raine , Blake and Tradition, Vol. I (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 40.