William Blake and the Imagination in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“The joy of woman is the death of her beloved,

Who dies for love of her,

In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.

The lover’s night bears on my song,

And the nine spheres rejoice beneath my powerful control.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “I think this mysterious song utters a faith as simple and as ancient as the faith of those country people, in a form suited to a new age, that will understand, with Blake, that the holy spirit is ‘an intellectual fountain,’ and that the kinds and degrees of beauty are the images of its authority.”
  2. “he believed inspiration a kind of death; and he could hardly have helped perceiving that an image that has transcended particular time and place becomes a symbol, passes beyond death, as it were, and becomes a living soul.”
  3. “O Thou effulgence of burning love, who pursueth the dawn as a youth pursueth a rose-lipped maiden; rend me with the fierce kisses of Thy mouth, so that in the battle of our lips I may be drenched by the snow-pure fountains of Thy bliss.”
  4. “In the pure Outrush of Love in Desdemona for Othello was no Flaw; but his Love was marred by his consciousness of his Age and his Race, of the Prejudices of his Fellows and of his own Experience of Woman-frailty.”
  5. “Give Ear, give Ear attentively; the Will is not lost; though it be buried beneath a life-old Midden of Repressions, for it persisteth vital within thee (is it not the true Motion of thine inmost Being?) and for all thy conscious Striving cometh forth by Night and by Stealth in Dream and Phantasy.”