Irrational qualities coming to urgent strength

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Irrational qualities coming to urgent strength

You gather stones as now you stand
Before the raging giant

As rational powers knot their brow
On logic they’re reliant

Yet something burns within your heart
Beyond this philistine

Irrational powers come to strength
& cross the borderline

The powers that whirl within your soul
You place them on a sling

& strike Goliath to the ground
You serve a different king

You draw your sword & cut his head
From off its bloody throne

Imagination rules your world
At last, you stand alone

‘Irrational powers’ are the powers of longing, love, intuition & Imagination
Those are pathways into ‘gnosis’ (or sacred knowing)

 In the visionary writings of William Blake; ‘Urizen’ is the name given to rationality

‘Los’ is the Divine aspect of the Imagination
In ‘The Book of Urizen,’ Los binds Urizen after Urizen suffers a spiritual fall
Blake saw rationality as having ‘fallen’ (away from the Divine) 

 In the poem; the visionary stands before the giant of rationality
The giant relies solely on rationality and is the ruling power of the age

The ‘irrational powers’ of the visionary’s; longing, love, intuition & Imagination ‘strike Goliath to the ground’

 The visionary then cuts rationalism’s head from ‘off its bloody throne’

The visionary now lives in a trans-rational world
Though he (or she) remains able to draw on rationality and logic when and where it is appropriate
 Imagination now rules the visionary’s world