The Symbolic Figure of the Course of Human History

William Blake,
The Symbolic Figure of the Course of Human History
described by Virgil,
 illustration for The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri (Inferno XIV, 94-119) 1824–27, 

Inferno XIV, 94-119. Dante and Virgil, in the third ring of the seventh circle, come across a blood-red stream. Dante explains that the rivers of Hell are formed by tears falling from the giant old man encased in the mountain of Ida on the island of Crete, the centre of the known world. For Dante this figure embodied the course of human history. His head is of gold, his arms and breast of silver, his lower abdomen brass, and below that he is of iron save that his right foot is of clay; this denotes the decay of the world from the Golden Age before the Fall to Dante's own time, the clay foot representing the degenerate church. Blake endows the figure with a crown, an orb and a sceptre to show that in his view the decay of the world was the result of political oppression - kingship and tyranny.

Why is our Dear Leader being celebrated for the unprecedented meeting with North Korean Dear Leader when the North Korean has been designated a war criminal by the International Bar Association War Crimes Committee, along with the UN? According to that report from several years ago, Kim Jong-un has committed all but one of the 11 crimes against humanity:

1. Murder
2. Extermination
3. Enslavement
4. Forcible Transfer
5. Imprisonment
6. Torture
7. Sexual Violence
8. Persecution
9. Enforced Disappearances
10. Other Inhuman Acts

Among the abuses reported are these: "starving prisoners are regularly executed when caught scavenging for food; abortions being performed by injecting motor oil into the wombs of pregnant women, according to a former North Korean army nurse; and firing squad executions of prisoners who attempt to escape."

This article in The New York Times from today, June 11th, reports in excruciating detail the crimes against humanity.

Yet, we must watch the POSPOTUS smile and joke with the photographers about making him "look thin" and "perfect" as they line up behind chairs of an impeccably set table. We must listen to his supporters crow in ignorance at his depravity. We must look at headlines of this unprecedented meeting.

What is happening? I have been wrapped up in myself, in my family, pushing these things to the back or down, down, down. I practice tonglen. I breathe in suffering and breathe out love.

What is happening?

We cannot normalize this. We have to resist.

Is it wrong to hope for lightning, for some act of a god to render justice?

#resist

Shedding Skin

Any street in Los Angeles, CA

The numbing regularity of tent cities and my half sandwich (pastrami and coleslaw with Russian dressing on rye) wrapped in white paper, a grim and stupid offering that shreds the heart.

A Korean woman in a black bra and waist-high underpants scrubbed every inch (literal) of my body the other day. Face down, she said and shoved a folded-up towel under my cheek. Turn on side, she said and lay a steadying hand on my naked hip. I opened my eyes, ran my finger over the tiny gray balls and shreds on the table. She didn't say it but I knew it. Skin. My skin. Dead skin. I was a baby lying there, tended. My skin is olive and free of wrinkles, speckled with moles (I hate that word) yet soft, smooth, a place where a heart can slip out of its hiding and rest. I open doors and windows. I risk everything.

In the universe there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in-between there are doors. William Blake said that. He also said Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair. 

I read past my bedtime, closing doors and windows, deep into Trollope, the tedium of it, then silence, the heart's slow beat, sleep.

Wink, #2

We shelter in ourselves an angel
whom we constantly shock.

Jean Cocteau

Those who restrain desire do so
because theirs is weak enough
to be restrained.

William Blake




At the doughnut shop, I waited in line to buy a sesame bagel, toasted, with cream cheese, bacon and tomato.

A woman in an arm brace, the kind used for carpal tunnel syndrome, sat at a small table with an autistic man. He ate a powdered donut with jelly oozing out, and she played with three figs on a napkin.

The young man in front of me had a tattoo on his arm that read I Do The Wrong Things For The Right Reasons.

I might begin a How We Do It post with these lines that I heard Lorrie Moore say that night I went to hear her read:

How can it be described? How can any of it be described?
The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things.

Colors are the wounds of light

William Blake

I must have had a difficult dream life last night as I slept, because I woke feeling bruised and worn, hot behind the eyes. I woke just before dawn when it was still dark, watched the sun come up through the blinds on the door. Yesterday, I bought myself some tiny pink roses and put them in a vase and put the vase on my bedroom dresser. Under the vase, I put a white piece of notepaper on which was written the names and numbers of the people at Sophie's school who are supposed to be helping us. So much of my energy is directed toward the hostile, toward difficulty. I thought I'd let the colors do the work.

Does that make sense?

Black Magical Thinking

Pieta
William Blake

Joan Didion, in her formidable memoir The Year of Magical Thinking describes the way she thought in the year after her husband's sudden death as I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant. Didion, of course, was grieving for her husband, and her magical thinking, although not entirely conscious, was that she could actually bring him back. Today was the second day of Sophie having quite a few seizures, certainly far more than the few to none that she'd had in the previous two weeks. I heard her thump onto the floor in her room just a few moments ago, and when I stood up and ran to her bedroom, I knew that she was probably seizing, had probably stood up from her bed and then gone down like a tree, felled. I picked her up off the floor and comforted her, changed her diaper for the fifth time and pulled the covers over her. I felt bitter and not a little angry, wondered if she'd eaten anything off or whether she was having an allergic reaction to something or other. I went over the day -- the last two days -- and wondered if she was having a delayed reaction to the cold she'd been struggling with for a week. I even, for a moment, thought that she might be reacting to me. Don't assure me that this is not so. There have probably been hundreds of times in the last near-twenty years that I've thought it -- wondered if the core, the reason for Sophie's seizures lay in me, in my literal cells. It occurs to me that this is a sort of magical thinking -- a black magical thinking, the subversion of magical thinking. The power to reverse the narrative is beyond my grasp, and if I don't stop grasping, trying to figure out why, why, why, the outcome won't be changed. 

This black magical thinking is childlike, near primitive, actually, and definitely urgent and constant. 

Tiny Particles

That was a headline in this morning's paper, and it just struck me. That's all -- it just struck me. So much that we think we know -- in fact, everything we think we know, lands up being debunked. This headline, that I glanced at on my way to the bathroom (I'm one of those people who realizes they need to pee well before they actually pee so that they find themselves really needing to pee well after they first noticed) provoked so many other thoughts:

1. the fact that Sophie is responding to marijuana after unsuccessfully ingesting twenty powerful synthetic drugs in nearly as many years (really, what the hell? Couldn't THEY have figured this out sooner?)
2.  how often THEY (because it's always THEY, right) reverse positions on what is good for you and  what is bad. For instance, I know you've heard that having a large ass helps you to live longer than a skinny one (I'm living forever, apparently), but did you hear the latest news that eating a handful of nuts a day will help you to live longer? So much for counting out those cashews on Weight Watchers.
3. how we're pressured to trust Science unequivocally
4. how we often do trust Science unequivocally
5. how we're browbeaten for expressing our doubts (think vaccination "debate")
6. how weird and inexplicable the universe really is (the typhoon in the Philippines, tiny particles upending the universe, men in general)
7. how weird and inexplicable human beings generally are (despite "evidence" to the contrary, there are still those diehards who believe Adam and Eve just appeared one day in a garden)
8. how weird and inexplicable my own brain is (that thoughts keep coming, willy nilly, prompted by no less than one headline and the urge to pee)
9. how tiny particles can upend one's universe in general (evidently the world of astronomy is rocking)
10. how Blake wrote in 1803 To see a World in a Grain of Sand/and a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/and Eternity in an hour.

Reader, what's upending your universe today?

How We Do It: Part XXXVII of a Series: Fragment

I took Sophie to the osteopath this morning, and she placed her gentle hands on Sophie and worked to move and heal her. In her silent room with a view of the gray Pacific, doves cooing on the sill, the doctor spoke softly and I lay my head on Sophie's stomach and closed my eyes and breathed in calming myself, breathing out smile. We spoke of Dr. Viola Frymann, the great and now very old osteopath who saw Sophie regularly when she was a baby and whose influence on me is immeasurable. I heard the gurgling of Sophie's stomach beneath my head, felt the infinitesimal jerks of her body, let tears slide out of my eyes, the memory of Sophie as a baby, the hopes for her, the compromises and acceptance, the despair and love and acceptance again, even of death. When I drove home, the cars ahead and around me glinting in a too-hot Los Angeles morning, I thought of the angry voices of the internet from that morning, those who call other mothers irresponsible for what they do and don't do for their children, the endless and interminable vaccination argument, black and white and how clicking them off, shutting those voices, xing them out, angry and stupid, doesn't still or instill anything. Sit with me, here, I think, lay your head, here, next to mine. Listen. Lower your voice. Abide.



Of course! The path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, --


The Swan

Across the wide waters
     something comes
          floating—a slim
             and delicate

ship, filled
     with white flowers—
          and it moves
             on its miraculous muscles

as though time didn't exist,
     as though bringing such gifts
          to the dry shore
             was a happiness

almost beyond bearing.
     And now it turns its dark eyes,
          it rearranges
             the clouds of its wings,

it trails
     an elaborate webbed foot,
          the color of charcoal.
             Soon it will be here.

Oh, what shall I do
     when that poppy-colored beak
          rests in my hand?
             Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:

I miss my husband's company—
     he is so often
          in paradise.
             Of course! the path to heaven

doesn't lie down in flat miles.
     It's in the imagination
          with which you perceive
             this world,

and the gestures
     with which you honor it.
          Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those
             white wings
           touch the shore?

Mary Oliver

Overreach

William Blake, 1793

It's a cloudy Monday morning in the southland, and things are changing in these parts. Some you know about and some you don't, but I have a great sense of expectation and hope in nearly all areas. In fact, if I were a Miss America contestant on a stage and asked by the guy who asks these things, What do you most want in the world? I might say World peace! with a big silly grin on my face and a flick of my blonde hair.

Here's a poem:

To converse with the greats

To converse with the greats
by trying their blindfolds on;
to correspond with books
by rewriting them;
to edit holy edicts,
and at the midnight hour
to talk with the clock by tapping a wall
in the solitary confinement of the universe.

Vera Pavlova

The Highway to Hell

William Blake (1757-1827)

But, sooner or later, what American society has told him he can do, what it has now made possible, is that George Zimmerman can load his piece, tuck it into the back of his pants, climb into his SUV, and cruise the rainy streets of Sanford in the night, all of his senses a'tingle, all his instincts honed, on the lookout with his hunter's eye for assholes and fucking punks. There's one down the block. What the hell's he doing here? Asshole. Fucking punk. Better pull over and check this out.

from What George Zimmerman Can Do Now by Charles P. Pierce****

So, last night. Henry, Oliver and I walked Valentine over to a friend's house as the sun was setting. We hung out for a while and then walked home. On the long stretch of La Brea, on a Sunday night, there were the usual cars, people walking out of restaurants, buses stopping to pick up lone people at bus-stops. We walked by several homeless camps, sleeping bags laid out, a shopping cart piled to the brim with what looked like crap but was probably essential. I yelled at the boys to slow down on their skateboards, to watch the edge of the street, to not get too far ahead of me. At Wilshire and La Brea we waited for a light and then walked through. We heard sirens in the distance, but we always hear sirens in the distance. This is Los Angeles, home to millions. And then they came. The sirens grew louder, and then they stopped. A police car raced by us, and then another. No more sirens, but lights flashed. Oliver yelled, Look how many! and we turned around as more cars raced by us, three, four, ten, twenty, forty, fifty. Look! Maybe that's an Undercover one! Oliver yelled as a huge black sedan, flanked by police rushed by. We stood there and watched them. We watched like we were at a tennis match, our heads back and forth. There was very little sound, except for the whoosh (the ball hits the racket, the player grunts). Where are they going? Henry asked. Oliver, being Oliver, yelled, They're on the highway to hell. When no more came we continued our way north, to home. We learned that there were protests in Hollywood, that marchers were heading north. We learned that earlier in the day, the police in tactical gear had been shooting beanbags at protesters that had gotten violent in the Crenshaw district, less than three miles from my home. My sons' friends who live in that district posted Instagram photos of events unfolding in their neighborhood. Nothing substantial did happen, but we saw it about to happen and we saw the response and it was silent and methodical and very, very powerful.

I wondered how, if I were caught up in an angry mob, I would convey my solidarity with the protesters. How I could possibly convey my feelings of shame about the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict. How I could possibly convey my conviction that violence is never right. I am white. I am privileged, as are my sons, my daughter, and my husband. How could I convey these convictions without seeming like I have them out of fear or self-preservation?

Here's the thing. This culture of violence, of guns, of those who think people kill people and not guns, who believe that their liberty and freedom is at risk unless they can kill, or have the option to kill, is madness. It's insane madness. It's the highway to hell.




****Read that whole article by Pierce that I quoted from above. It'll knock you off your perch to the floor.

Now that my ladder's gone

William Blake

I rode down 5th Avenue at three in the morning in a taxi, new to the city and enraptured, already. Much was broken but much was beginning, and when the taxi came to a stop, I peered through the windshield from the dark back of the car and wondered aloud what was going on. The circus is in town, the driver said, in a thick accent, and just then I saw them, the animals, giraffes and elephants, some horses, a zebra, walking across 5th Avenue in an orderly line, making their way toward Madison Square Garden, horns honking, lights shining, eyes blinking, a fantastical mirage.

This morning, I'm thinking that we make art and beauty, literally, out of shit. That that is my impulse and, I imagine, many others'.

Here's a Yeats poem that I haven't thought about in a while.

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I.

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last, being but a broken man, I must be satisfied with my heart, although Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what. II What can I but enumerate old themes, First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams, Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose, Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems, That might adorn old songs or courtly shows; But what cared I that set him on to ride, I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride. And then a counter-truth filled out its play, 'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it; She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away, But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. I thought my dear must her own soul destroy So did fanaticism and hate enslave it, And this brought forth a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love. And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea; Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of. III Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.  -- William Butler Yeats

Two Things, Pathologizing and Mythologizing

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

This morning as I got Sophie ready for school, and the usual happened, I thought that I cannot write about any of this -- again. I thought that I am beginning to sound like the broken record that plays a seizure soundtrack. I thought that even my post about my newest health insurance and anti-epileptic medication woes is repetitive, incredibly repetitive except for the number of photos that depict me as tired, so tired, with seemingly fat fingers. I haven't included many photos of myself in posts, and when I look at these I see the toll, the toll. 

I thought that you could probably troll through the more than two thousand posts that I've written over the past four years and find only three or so topics that I've written about, maybe even two. As I pulled away from Sophie's school, I watched as one of the aides, a wonderful man in a straw hat, bent over Sophie and gently spoke with her and I felt overcome. Tears pricked my eyes and they were not just from the seemingly endless depths of sadness but also ones of gratitude, that people like this exist, that they help to make my daughter's life a good one. I wasn't going to write about this, though, another track on the endless loop.

 But then I got home and read Lisa's comment about the significance of the red dragon in Taoist philosophy. Here it is on my recent Dragon Mom post:

At the risk of sounding like a complete wacko, just wanted to share some of my latest discoveries with you since they seem to have an interesting relevence to your experience. 
The Tao is a Chinese philosophy (not the religion) that discusses the principles of yin and yang energy. These are opposing life energies that rely on one another to define themselves. 
The Yin is sometimes represented as a green dragon, it is the inactive, intuitive, female energy (or perhaps mermaid-like?) The Yang energy is sometimes represented by a red dragon. It is the active, action-based, masculine energy that is necessary to balance the Yin.
A dragon swallowing its tale is an image used to represent the Yin Yang philosophy of the continuous cycles of life. 
The red dragon is also used sometimes to represent Sheng Qi a type of inner energy that Taoists use to fight disease and promote long life. Just thought this reading and symbolism had an interesting connection to your dragon vision..for whatever it is worth...wishing you and Sophie much peace always.

I am very familiar with Taoist principles and philosophy having studied it quite a bit in my college years, but I had never heard about the significance of the red dragon. When I had that vision of myself as a fuming dragon, sitting on the side of Sophie's bed as she seized and began to write about it, I thought, too, of the inimitable art of William Blake, the great nineteenth century poet, and I remembered that somewhere in his vast archive there was a painting of a woman and a dragon, and sure enough there it was: The Great Red Dragon and Woman Clothed by the Sun. Lisa's comment, read at just the right moment, reminded me again of the great power of synchronicity, that, perhaps, there are no coincidences. I am just swallowing my tail, at times, living over and over my life, but I am also red with fire, fighting this godawful disease and helping Sophie to live a better, longer life.

After reading Lisa's comment, I read Verna Wilder's:

I am always so moved by your posts, and when you use Blake's images, I know I'm in for a powerful experience. I love what Lisa shared about the Tao and dragon energy. I heard Jean Houston speak once about mythologizing our lives instead of pathologizing our lives. You mythologize, you and your mermaid daughter and the deep poetry in your heart, your dear dragon heart. You show us how it's done, and your words tear me apart and put me back together again. I appreciate you more than I can say.

Mythologizing is nearly effortless for me, and I had always thought it made me more wack-a-doodle than healthy. I'm going to think otherwise, now, even on this day of seizures and tears and gentle, bent-over heads and whispering, kind words.

I don't have more to say but would, rather, put my hands together in a prayer-like pose and bow my head to you, Lisa, and to you, Verna and to all of you.

To you.

Rampage on the Summer Solstice

Nope, this isn't going to be a rant or an angry post. I read a bunch of daily words and inspirationals this morning, Buddhist thoughts and mantras. I even meditated. But as Sophie's humming wore on this morning, and I stripped her bed for perhaps the millionth time (she'd wet through, again) and I looked at the detritus of a school year lying everywhere, just everywhere, the adrenaline kicked in and I told Sophie to be quiet while I fix your breakfast. I got a white piece of paper and used a Sharpie to create the above sign and I threw out the Lego salt and pepper shakers that have been sitting on the windowsill in the kitchen for years, never used, and I didn't look behind me. I had a Kurtzian the crap, the crap moment and moved on. The Brothers sleep on, oblivious to the jungle that surrounds them, the Summer Solstice secure.

Laughing Song


When the green woods laugh, with the voice of joy
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by,
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.


When the meadows laugh with lively green
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily,
With their sweet round mouths sing Ha, Ha, He.


When the painted birds laugh in the shade
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread
Come live & be merry and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of Ha, Ha, He.


William Blake

Blueberries stain the floor on Mondays, but it's a new world

William Blake

So far, it's about 11:20 in the am and the refrigerator/freezer has already broken and been fixed by a very nice man; I've mopped the floor where the bag of blueberries fell out as I was emptying the freezer and stained it, two loads of laundry are in and out, Nina Simone is singing her song (thank you twisted knickers), and I've filled out some camp forms for Oliver. Summer is coming, I think, which is a good thing because I'm really tired of pumping these boys of mine up each morning to do their best. Nina Simone says it's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me, and I'm feeling good. I'm not sure I feel as good as Nina Simone because I need to do a whole lot of stuff, still, but dragonfly out in the sun you know what I know, but this old world is a new world --

The River of Stones

Yosemite, 2009

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite

William Blake

To begin this new year, I am joining A River of Stones for the month of January. Each day I will post my own small stone, a very short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully engaged moment. 

January 1 - Small Stone

From the corner chair this morning, the light streamed through glass, the back of the chair and down the table, illuminating porcelain, the curve of his cheek.

Desire

illustration by William Blake, 1793

Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones. When you have laboriously accomplished your daily tasks, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

Victor Hugo

Tuesday Poetry

William Blake - America, a Prophecy (1793)

My God, I loved this poem today when I read it on The Writer's Almanac:

Tuesday 9:00 AM

A man standing at the bus-stop

reading the newspaper is on fire
Flames are peeking out
from beneath his collar and cuffs
His shoes have begun to melt

The woman next to him
wants to mention it to him
that he is burning
but she is drowning
Water is everywhere
in her mouth and ears
in her eyes
A stream of water runs
steadily from her blouse

Another woman stands at the bus stop
freezing to death
She tries to stand near the man
who is on fire
to try to melt the icicles
that have formed on her eyelashes
and on her nostrils
to stop her teeth long enough
from chattering to say something
to the woman who is drowning
but the woman who is freezing to death
has trouble moving
with blocks of ice on her feet

It takes the three some time
to board the bus
what with the flames
and water and ice
But when they finally climb the stairs
and take their seats
the driver doesn't even notice
that none of them has paid
because he is tortured
by visions and is wondering
if the man who got off at the last stop
was really being mauled to death
by wild dogs.

--Denver Butson

Ditto

William Blake's Angels Hovering Over the Body of Jesus Christ

My good friend Claire, the mother of Canadian Sophie has a post up today that I'm just saying:

Ditto

Tiger, Tiger

Comparing oneself to a tiger is trite stuff, but I'm going to do it. I am a tiger and not the sexy kind. This morning, Sophie woke up and had her usual bout of seizures. I felt angry about it, really angry. Ferocious, actually. I've yelled and screamed before, even while Sophie has been seizing. I'm always alone, of course, wild and free. It doesn't feel good at all, though, this unfettered energy. It's not a release. It's as if I'm a beast, a woman with only primitive urges. I hate the way I feel afterward. Sorry and ashamed in all my humanity.

I've been rereading Barbara Gill's Changed by a Child - Companion Notes for Parents of a Child with a Disability, and wouldn't you know I'd open it to this page:

Tiger Mothers

...We hear, see and feel things others don't even notice. Our experience -- with its pain, vigilance, and hard work -- has heightened our senses when it comes to our child. It is as if we have developed extra nerve endings. We are tiger mothers -- ever watchful, ever ready -- tireless to protect, provide, defend.
Sometimes we sense that others are wary of us. They feel -- and fear -- the great power within us, the fire burning in our eyes. We are tuned in to something extra, something they don't hear.

You might think that I'm proud of or happy to be a tiger. And I think most mothers have it in them to be tigers -- whether it's ever unleashed or not is beside the point. But what struck me about that passage was the sentence "Sometimes we sense that others are wary of us. They feel -- and fear -- the great power within us, the fire burning in our eyes." I am sad, sometimes, that I have become this tiger because in becoming full of fire and strength I have lost someone else. I am out of balance, my yin overcome by yang.

My fears and worries about Sophie are eclipsed by love, though, and this love is unreasonable, in a way. It's unreasonable to experience these things for over thirteen years, so unreasonable that it must be love that carries me forward.

I studied William Blake, the poet, in college and learned a lot about him from a dear person I knew a long time ago. But to round out the tiger cliche, I find it fitting to include Blake's famous poem here:

Tiger Tiger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye.
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile His work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger Tiger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?