Poem
The story begins with Fuzon rebelling against Urizen, his father:
- "Shall we worship this Demon of Smoke,"
- Said Fuzon, "This abstract non-entity
- This cloudy God seated on Waters
- Now seen, now obscur'd; King of sorrow?" (10-13)
After the verbal attack, Fuzon attacks Urizon with fire and declares himself God. This leads to the creation of the tree of mystery by Urizon on accident followed by the nailing of Fuzon's body to it:
- Amaz'd started Urizen! when
- He beheld himself compassed round
- And high roofed over with trees
- He arose but the stems stood so thick
- He with difficulty and great pain
- Brought his Books, all but the Book
- Of iron, from the dismal shade (lines 116-122)
The poem continues with Ahania lamenting her disconnection from Urizen:
- Cruel jealousy! selfish fear!
- Self-destroying: how can delight
- Renew in these chains of darkness (lines 233-235)
Read more about this topic: The Book Of Ahania
Famous quotes containing the word poem:
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Every poem of value must have a residue [of language].... It cannot be exhausted because our lives are not long enough to do so. Indeed, in the greatest poetry, the residue may seem to increase as our experience increases—that is, as we become more sensitive to the particular ignitions in its language. We return to a poem not because of its symbolic [or sociological] value, but because of the waste, or subversion, or difficulty, or consolation of its provision.”
—William Logan, U.S. educator. “Condition of the Individual Talent,” The Sewanee Review, p. 93, Winter 1994.
“The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
Does it move to and fro or is it of both
At once? Is it a luminous flittering
Or the concentration of a cloudy day?”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)