FOUR ZOAS I / 5:41-8:2


Eternal Death insinuates
itselfinto the narrative in
various roles by attach-
 ing itself to different
 names and events.
















 Textual indeterminacy:
 see note 16.




 Second perspective
 analysis of the first re-
 enactment (weaving)






 The Spectre's appear-
 ance assumes both
 male and female
 characteristics.

On page 142 of the man-
uscript, a similar bodily
 union is even more
 explicitly sexual:


absolutely no reference in their speech to their primary task, assigned to
them by the narrator, of protecting sleepers from falling into Eternal
Death. Instead, they focus on the "Spectre ofTharmas / [who] Is Eternal
Death" (5:41-42), because this particular Spectre is so radically different
from the Spectres to whom they can give a form of vegetation that its
emergence ruptures their weaving process.
 The narrator's information thus significantly conflicts with that pro-
vided by the Daughters. In the narrative proper, Enion has just woven the
Circle of Destiny out of the Spectre of Tharmas; now, according to the
narrator, the Daughters give the Circle a space exactly as if it were like
other "sleepers." Yet from the Daughters' perspective the Spectre ofThar-
mas is Eternal Death, something they view with fear as utterly different
from the Spectres they are able to vegetate. These two overlapping fields of
information imply that the Daughters have actually created a space for
Eternal Death itself rather than acted to protect sleepers from falling into
Eternal Death. In order to evade the implications of this perspective
conflict, the Daughters call on "God" and close the "Gate of the Tongue,"
retroactively revealing how the conditions for Tharmas and Enion's ina-
bility to communicate verbally in their initial conversation follow directly
from the Lamb of God's creation of Beulah.
 Blake incorporates this transitional material concerning the Spectre,
Eternal Death, and Vegetation into the immediately following section
(6:1-8:2), which constitutes the final phase of this narrative analysis. Now
Enion's loom, as if feeling the reflex of the Daughters' speech, becomes
one of "Vegetation," which it had not been before. The intervention of the
"Beulah" transition allows the sexual nature of the Spectre threading
through Enion's loom to become explicit. In 5:16-17, the Spectre was
"drawn out by her lovd fingers every nerve / She counted...." Now, fol-
lowing the Beulah transition,'1 this event is re-enacted and analyzed again:
"She drew the Spectre forth from Tharmas in her shining loom / Of
Vegetation weeping in wayward infancy & sullen youth" (6:1-2). In the
previous analysis, Enion's woof itself had begun to "animate," "having a
will / Of its own perverse & wayward" (5:21-22). Now it is the warp, the
Spectre threading through, which is "wayward," but nevertheless absorb-
ing the metaphor that associated "infancy" with Tharmas' state ("The
infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy / Horrible..." [4:31-32]). This sec-
ond narrative analysis of Enion's weaving of the Spectre avoids reference
to the Circle of Destiny and replaces it with a violent sexual union depicted
as an inorganic form ravaging the organic-recalling the atom/flower
dichotomy in Tharmas' earlier speech. The Spectre partially assumes the
shape Enion had earlier desired in order to "look upon [Tharmas] & live":
he is "A shadowy human form winged" (6:6). He fuses light and darkness,
knowledge and obscuring vision: "in his depths / The dazzling as of gems
shone clear" (6:6-7); yet when his "rocks" are open there is "horrible
darkness" (7:2). Enion and the Spectre of Tharmas unite in physical (and
oblique, though in the context of Beulah, unmistakable, sexual) union
which is also a version of the weaving: