FOUR ZOAS I / 9:19-36


Los/Enitharmon: Second Phase


 The narrative proper
 itself enacts the drawing
 out and opening up
 action ofEno.











 Los and Enitharmon re-
 enact Enion's weaving.













The Lamb of God's func-
tion as the source of sex-
 ual division in Beulah
 infiltrates the details of
 Los and Enitharmon's
 wandering.




The structural inversion
of Los/Enitharmon and
 Tharmas/Enion


 Next, this transitional material is superimposed over the first phase of
the Los/Enitharmon plot, thereby drawing it out linearly and opening up
aspects that retroactively function as if they had been suppressed by the
narrative forces of the poem's prior contexts. Indeed, the narrator overtly
integrates this transitional information into the narrative proper: in the
first phase of their story Los and Enitharmon "wanderd far away" (9:1) but
the space was not named; now they delight "in the Moony spaces of Eno"
(9:19). New information emerging in this phase reveals what it means for
Los and Enitharmon to draw the Spectre out of Enion by re-enacting and
transforming Enion's weaving of the Circle of Destiny that involved her
drawing the Spectre out of Tharmas. In the first re-enactment of the
original Tharmas/Enion conversation, Enion "wove-nine days & nights
Sleepless her food was tears" (5:19). Now Los and Enitharmon live out a
blissful parody of Enion's state: "Nine Times... feeding on sweet fruits /
And nine bright Spaces... weaving mazes of delight" (9:20-21), echoing,
in addition, Enion's request for Tharmas to assume a form "in mazes of
delusive beauty" (4:25). Details pour into this segment from the Tharmas/
Enion plot and the immediately preceding phase of the Los/Enitharmon
plot. Because the extended Los/Enitharmon context adds surprising new
information, its model is the Spectre's original woven form and has "a will /
Of its own perverse & wayward" (5:21-22). Los and Enitharmon first eat
fruit; then they snare goats for milk; then, suddenly, they become car-
nivorous: "they eat the flesh of Lambs" (9:22). The reference to "Lambs"
invokes a dim resonance with the "Lamb of God" who creates Beulah, the
realm that makes possible the "Moony spaces" in which Los and Eni-
tharmon wander, which in turn makes eating "the flesh of Lambs" possi-
ble. Blake immediately follows this reference to eating of the flesh of
Lambs with a restatement of the sexual division that the creation of Beulah
also makes possible: "they eat the flesh of Lambs /A male & female naked
& ruddy as the pride of summer" (9:22-23). Only if the Lambs' association
with Beulah's sexual division is repressed does this sequence appear to be
gratuitous or incidental.
 Unlike Tharmas and Enion, whose features radically overlapped in the
very process of their division, Los and Enitharmon are distinctly born into
the narrative proper as "two" (8:2), and their explicit division as separate
characters precedes, rather than follows, their verbal interchange. Los and
Enitharmon's exteriorized sexual roles are explicitly compartmentalized:
he controls times (Eno's drawn out moment), while she controls spaces
(Eno's opened atom) (9:27-28). In addition, each is also divided internally
by a process of alternation which reincarnates the emotional conflicts of
Tharmas and Enion: he alternates between "Love & Hate," and she alter-
nates between "Scorn &Jealousy" (9:24). Despite these sexual feelings, the
narrative context seems to rule out the possibility of sexual union between
them for "they kiss'd not nor embrac'd for shame & fear" (9:25): it is as if
they are reacting with bodily denial to the sexual conversation between