'the swarm that in the noontide beam were born,' feeling in ourselves the power to direct, this way or that, the forces of Nature--of Nature, of which we form so trivial a part--shall we, in our boundless arrogance, in our pitiful conceit, deny that power to the
Ancient of Days? Saying, to our Creator, 'Thus far and no further.
The front door opened slowly, to show the hound, his nose white with milk, in charge of an
ancient of days clad in a blue linen ephod curiously gathered on breast and shoulders.
22 Until the
Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the most High; and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom.
In the Similitudes of Enoch, which is a text that's very clearly based on the vision of Daniel, there's a figure called the Son of Man who appears with the
Ancient of Days, like in Daniel.
The
Ancient of Days from the Aramaic "Atik Yomi," and Blake's God figure with compass, harken back to Milton's Paradise Lost, and is a "nous" figure whose job it is to establish mathematical order and stability to keep us from nihilism.
Having begun with a religious vocabulary--"
Ancient of Days," "friend," "believes"--the poem returns at the end to religiously charged words and phrases such as "bead of clear oil," "Healer," and "tear," a vocabulary that in Wright's via negativa summons a divine presence under erasure.
DRAMATIC
Ancient of Days, Blake's most famous work of art