Plate 98
- . . . .
- Glorious incompreh[en]sible by Mortal Men & each Chariot
was Sexual <Two>fold [mended to] Threefold
[11]
- . . . .
- . . . & the all tremendous unfathomable NonEns
[33]
- Of death was seen in regen<ations> [mended
to] regenerations . . .
- . . . .
- . . . And I heard Jehovah speak [40]
- Terrific from his Holy Place & saw the Words of the Mutual
Covenant Divine
- . . . .
- . . . Humanize [44]
- In the Forgiveness of Sins according to thy Covenant Jehovah. .
. .
- . . . .
- . . . where are all his Human Sacrifice<s> [48]
A wretchedly mended plate. "Two", imperfectly mended in the
copper to "Three" in line 11, was doubtless a mistake of copying (note the
dropped syllable earlier in the line).[36]
There is an uncrossed t in line 13 (in "this"). The last words
in
line 33 are so crowded that "Non Ens" becomes almost a single word,
"NonEns". In line 34 Blake laboriously mended "regenations" by changing
"e" to "a" and "t" to "r" and eking out the parts of "ions" to make
"ations". And a crowding occurred in line 48 that drove the final
s of "Sacrifices" into the ornamental border; though it is
clearly
visible only in the Harvard copy, I take this to be a false deletion since the
context demands the plural.
An extremely curious double revision occurs in line 45. What Blake
originally etched on the plate was "thy Covenant Jehovah". But then he
made "thy" into "the" by cutting away the long stroke (still very faintly
visible in all copies) and mended the word "Covenant" into "Coventof" to
achieve the reading "the Coven[an]t of Jehovah". The mending is far from
perfect, possibly from technical rather than textual inattention; yet in the
latest copy, the Morgan, Blake used india ink to restore the original
reading, "thy Covenant Jehovah". Now either reading will work in the
passage, although "the Covenant of Jehovah" is what the context most
obviously suggests. In so hasty a page, the original "thy" may have been
a mistake, the mending of the plate a correction to the wording intended.
Oddly, however, in no copies did Blake repair his imperfectly mended word
"Covent" by inserting "an" or "na" above it and a caret below, as was his
usual practice in such cases. In the only copy in which he attended to the
imperfection, he restored instead the original though presumably accidental
reading—possibly because he recognized that it would work
textually. His
not perfecting the other copies does rather argue that Blake was not strongly
attracted to the reading "the Covenant of". Compare the case of Plate 69.
In each instance, the only time he attends carefully to his partly mended
text he restores a reading that preceded the mending. The case of the
restoration on Plate 37 of the original word "blue", in the British Museum
copy, is slightly different since
the printing of later copies of this plate does not leave any ambiguity about
the reading of the revision to "pale".
