Preludium
The shadowy daughter of Urthona stood before red Orc.
When fourteen suns had faintly journey’d o’er his dark abode;
His food she brought in iron baskets, his drink in cups of iron;
Crown’d with a helmet & dark hair the nameless female stood;
A quiver with its burning stores, a bow like that of night,
When pestilence is shot from heaven; no other arms she need:
Invulnerable tho’ naked, save where clouds roll round her loins,
Their awful folds in the dark air; silent she stood as night;
For never from her iron tongue could voice or sound arise;
But dumb till that dread day when Orc assay’d his fierce embrace.
Dark virgin; said the hairy youth, thy father stern abhorr’d;
Rivets my tenfold chains while still on high my spirit soars;
Sometimes an eagle screaming in the sky, sometimes a lion,
Stalking upon the mountains, & sometimes a whale I lash
The raging fathomless abyss, anon a serpent folding
Around the pillars of Urthona, and round thy dark limbs,
On the Canadian wilds I fold, feeble my spirit folds.
For chaind beneath I rend these caverns; when thou bringest food
I howl my joy! and my red eyes seek to behold thy face
In vain! these clouds roll to & fro, & hide thee from my sight.
Silent as despairing love, and strong as jealousy,
The hairy shoulders rend the links, free are the wrists of fire;
Round the terrific loins he siez’d the panting struggling womb;
It joy’d: she put aside her clouds & smiled her first-born smile;
As when a black cloud shews its light’nings to the silent deep.
Soon as she saw the terrible boy then burst the virgin cry.
I know thee, I have found thee, & I will not let thee go;
Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa;
And thou art fall’n to give me life in regions of dark death.
On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions
Endur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep:
I see a serpent in Canada, who courts me to his love;
In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru;
I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away.
O what limb rendering pains I feel. thy fire & my frost
Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by the ligtnings rent;
This is eternal death; and this the torment long foretold.
—William Blake, America, a Prophecy (1793)
Listen to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, KV 622 (1791) in a performance by David Shifrin with Gerard Schwarz conducting the Mostly Mozart Orchestra:
