REVISING THE BEGINNING


The deleted utterance as
 an allegory for the
 poem's syntax and for
the judgement the poem
 passes on the reader





























 Revision toward
 difficulty


and thereby complicates the relation of the "Song" to the poem we are
reading. Equally significant is Blake's deletion of the acknowledgment that
the poem potentially has the power to pronounce a "Sentence" so "terri-
ble" that its comprehension will issue in immediate and catastrophic
apocalyptic consequences in the reader Blake hopes to create through the
process of reading The Four Zoas. This strategy of deletion deflects the
Newtonian reader from awareness of the immediate urgency of the poem's
radical theme-the opening up of terrifying ontological options through
the act of reading the poem's "Sentence," in all its polysemous suggestive-
ness. By withholding this information Blake refuses to call attention to
the poem's frightening urgency and thus refuses to set in motion self-
conscious ego-gratifying expectations and anxieties directed toward a
goal-of either achieving or fleeing from the judgment of the "terrible
Sentence" that the deleted segment hides from the reader and yet (by virtue
of the gaping hole left by its exclusion) simultaneously thrusts upon the
reader.
 Thus in these three lines, there is an urgent feeling that something is
 missing or lost-in this case both the vanished elements that would com-
 plete the syntax and the explicit references to the reader and to the basic
 underlying narrative pretext (hidden from the reader), the "Book of Vala,"
 whose only trace is the word "Vala" suspended over the page.
 It is no accident that such a gap or discrepancy stands at the very
threshold of the poem. It seems likely that Blake tried to undercut the clear
causal relations that the original version provided, first by renumbering
the lines to 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 4, 5 (E739, 819) with attendant changes in verb
tenses and then by completely striking the lines that fill in the causal gaps.
The original version adheres strictly to subject-predicate syntax ("This is
..," "Thus beginneth..."). The revised lines eliminate the predicateper
se but still imply that there has been a radical grammatical transformation
that has deleted and/or suppressed the predicate. The earlier version is
neatly divisible into causally connected phrases. The revised version com-
plicates even the subordinate clause ("which shook...") by juxtaposing it
with the participial form "Hearing," which is ambiguous in temporal and
spatial reference. As they stand, apparently incomplete and incomplet-
able, the revisions do not move toward a visual surface text that simplifies,
reduces problems, unpacks syntax, and clarifies the reader's response.
Blake's vision moves toward compression and complication simulta-
neously.
 In the next three lines, two periods occur22 which function to make
more explicit the subversive nature of the statements they punctuate. The
narrative voice shifts from the initial psuedo-epic diction, saturated with
imagery that hints at violent conflict, to a propositional form:
 Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity
 Cannot Exist. but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden
 The Universal Man. To Whom be Glory Evermore Amen
 (3:4-6)