In the eleventh plate an old man in spectacles ruthlessly clips the wings of a bright boy who wrestles and struggles under the cruel hands. Thus does Age, full of worldly experience and material philosophy, clip the wings of the aspiring soul of Youth.
Walled in by the divisions and materialisms into which Man has fallen through the creation of the generative nature, we see human souls despairing, and full of lassitude, enclosed in depths of icy dungeons, in the twelfth plate. This plate was afterwards taken as the basis of the design Blake made of Count Ugolino and his sons in the tower at Pisa in his Dante series.
In Plate 13 comes the promise of life. A man stretched on his bed with his family watching beside him, suddenly has a vision of "The Immortal Man that cannot die." After that all is different, and in Plate 14 "the traveller hasteth in the evening" of life to his journey's end, serenely cheerful, even anxious to shake off mortality, that he may realize his glorious vision the sooner.
But the way to Immortality is through the Gate of the Grave. So in Plate 15 we have the picture of Death's Door, to which our traveller has arrived at last. This early design embodying Blake's favourite conception was destined to be enlarged and sublimed into one of the most magnificent inventions of Christian Art. This is the first hint of the perfect final work, and on that account, as well as for its own intrinsic significance here, of the greatest interest.
Death's Door being opened, the Worm is seen at work in Plate 16. Who shall say how Blake has contrived to make the pale, hooded woman under the tree-roots so symbolic an image of the Worm? There is that about her at which the recoiling flesh shudders and sickens.
From W. B. Scott's Etching of Blake's undated Indian Ink Drawing, by kind permission of Messrs. Chatto and Windus]
Yet here, below the dim, twisted roots of the Tree of Physical Being, whence the embryo Man was plucked like a mandrake, is the house of the worm. "I have said to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister," quotes Blake enigmatically, beneath this leprous dream of mortality. But the enigma has a solution, for the worm at least destroys that body of generative and divided nature to which it is itself so nearly akin, and which has cramped and imprisoned eternal Man while on earth. So that we may be grateful to the worm in the end, for