"THARMAS" AND LOSS


illusion of an authentic beginning to the poem threaten to override the
anti-Newtonian strategies he marshall to subvert them. By first playing
off the role of line 4:6 as an arbitrary beginning in media res against its role
as an absolute (generative) origin and then subverting both of these read-
ings through intrusive punctuation, deleted copula, participial adjectives,
etc., Blake leaves open the possibility-even the likelihood-that the
reader will ignore the subversive role of the period following "power"
and, in order to cling to Newtonian presuppositions, persist in treating
"Tharmas" as a substantive origin/identity who just happens to be "dark-
ning in the West" at the moment the narrator begins telling the tale. In other
words, Blake has made it possible for the Newtonian reader to revert to
the more comfortable initial assumption that the poem's beginning is
arbitrary and thus that the primordial origin in itself remains beyond the
scope of the text, exempt from process and revision.
 In order to draw the reader's attention to the intrusive period in the
middle of line 4:6, Blake omits a crucial punctuation mark in the middle of
the next line (4:7) and replaces it with an extra void space in the text
("Emanations Enion"). This absence of conventional punctuation is
crucial to Blake's strategy here, for it exploits the spatial possibilities of
writing at exactly the point at which the poem moves into written drama-
tic speech for the first time. The first words of this line-"Lost! Lost!
Lost!"-apparently revert to the categories of Newtonian consciousness
by repetitively (compulsively) referring to an event which seems to have
occurred prior to (and thus is presupposed by) the beginning of the text. In
order to affirm that this event of loss is primordial (i.e., that it occurred
prior to the text), the reader must affirm a rupture between lines 4:6 and
4:7 and repress the possibility that what has been "Lost" could be the light
that was vanishing in 4:6. That is, because line 4:6 introduced "Thar-
mas" into the poem as both the primordial beginner (or narrative
generator) and a process of vanishing light, line 4:7 with its repeated
declaration of total loss, suggests that the evanescent process of "dark-
ning" has suddenly been completed-as if all light had disappeared and
along with it the identity-affirming (western) horizon itself. As soon as
(and if) this possibility becomes conscious, the Newtonian reader can
re-establish control over the first third of this line only by presuming a
continuity rather than a rupture between lines 4:6 and 4:7: now there seems
to be no problem concerning what has been "Lost!"--it is the western
light (sun setting) itself; but what the Newtonian reader is forced to lose by
this interpretive move is the presumption that the loss being lamented by
the speaker is primordial (prior to the text) for it occurred precisely in the
gap between lines 4:6 and 4:7. Among other things, then, what has been
"Lost" is the reader's firm rooting in a pre-existent primordial event.
 The next three words of 4:7, however, force the first three words to lose
even their revised stable reference: "are my Emanations ". At first
glance, it seems as though the Newtonian reader can gain control over
these words by reading the syntax as simply having been inverted: the


The textual coincidence
of the beginning of the
narrative proper and the
naming of"Tharmas"






Spatial punctuation







The "primordial" loss is
not an event that has
occurred prior to the
reading of The Four
Zoas.









The reader's loss