'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight,
And threefold in soft Beulah's night,
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton's sleep![77]

He says twofold always, for everything was of value to Blake as a
symbol, as a medium for expressing a still greater thing behind it. It
was in this way that he looked at the human body, physical beauty,
splendour of colour, insects, animate, states, and emotions, male and
female, contraction and expansion, division and reunion, heaven and
hell.

When his imagination was at its strongest, his vision was fourfold,
corresponding to the fourfold division of the Divine Nature, Father,
Son, Spirit, and the fourth Principle, which may be described as the
Imagination of God, without which manifestation would not be
possible.[78] These principles, when condensed and limited so as to be
seen by us, may take the form of Reason, Emotion, Energy and Sensation,
or, to give them Boehme's names, Contraction, Expansion, Rotation, and
Vegetative life. These, in turn, are associated with the four states of
humanity or "atmospheres," the four elements, the four points of the
compass, the four senses (taste and touch counting as one), and so on.
Blake seemed, as it were, to hold his vision in his mind in solution,
and to be able to condense it into gaseous, liquid, or solid elements at
whatever point he willed. Thus we feel that the prophetic books contain
meaning within meaning, bearing interpretation from many points of view;
and to arrive at their full value, we should need to be able--as Blake
was--to apprehend all simultaneously,[79] instead of being forced
laboriously to trace them out one by one in succession. It is this very
faculty of "fourfold vision" which gives to these books their