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58 The dew of anxious souls, the death-sweat of the dying-- In every pillar'd hall & arched roof of Albion's skies. (K. II. 45-48) Albion's sons, Reuben and Levi, sleep on Welsh mountains. As Albion sleeps on the "Rock of Ages" so Reuben and Levi, symbolic of the "Fairies of Albion" (K. I. 19) or the old Celtic gods, sleep on the sacrificial 'rocks' of Celtic landscape. As symbols for the scattered race, Albion's sons help represent Blake's idea of the Primal Adam as Celtic and Hebraic. The sons' first existence is upon the mountains of Wales, as "Fairies of Albion," before they "become Nations far remote, in a little & dark Land" (K. II. 56) as the tribes of Israel. As Reuben and Levi become conscious on their Celtic 'rocks', they experience the sensory exudation and contraction characteristic of Blake's vision of the fall into the finite: Their eyes, their ears, nostrils & tongues roll outward, they behold 55 What is within now seen without; they are raw to 56 the hungry wind. (K. II. 54-55) The twelve sons of Albion are complemented by twelve daughters, likewise drawn from the Celtic tradition The daughters strip the forms "Jerusalem's curtains" from the "mild demons of the hills" (K. 11. 58), or the energies of the sons. The energies, now anarchic, energize the landscapes in the `forms' of pagan divinities. The daughters go "Across Europe & Asia to China & Japan like lightnings," revealing the disorganized potencies of the sons and "return to Albion on his rocky couch" (K. 11. 59-60). The sons of Albion thus become mere natural energies worshipped as "Gods of the Heathen" (K. 11. 19). The train of associations ends |