FOUR ZOAS I / 13:13-14:4


 The role ofLuvah's
 robes in the shift from
 the Feast to Eternity

















The landscape surround-
 ing the feast is Beulah-
 like.


the sky, and Eternity above them in Luvah's robes of blood-generates a
crisis at the shift from the Tharmas/Enion bracket to the Eternity bracket
(18:8-21:8). There, the narrative leaps from the Feast to Eternity as "One
Man," completely bypassing (repressing) Luvah and Vala; and there Eter-
nity assumes the form of "One Man" not in reference to Luvah's robes,
which are absent from the scene, but as a response to the distress call of the
"messengers from Beulah."
 The vision of Luvah/Vala and Eternity (which Blake inserted by revi-
 sion) thus intrudes into the apparently benign landscape of the Feast and
 freezes the prior sexualjealousy ofLos/Enitharmon into the characteristic
 attitude of Tharmas/Enion during their opening conversation, locked
 perpetually into each other's examining glances. Luvah and Vala thus
 operate as one condensation of elements that have been analyzed out of the
 narrative proper and codified into ritualized roles, another such condensa-
 tion being the age-bent Enion who will reappear to close the Tharmas/
 Enion bracket of Night I.
 The narrator's explicit comparison of the entire Luvah/Vala/Eternity
 "Vision" to the sun shining down "on the misty earth" is disturbingly
 close to Enitharmon's false "dewy morn" and emphasizes that this intru-
 sive image-complex is potentially an elaboration of Enitharmon's bloody
 false morning. This revelation seems almost inadvertent on the narrator's
 part, however, for instead of exploring it, he returns to the hypnotic
 delusion of the Feast, only to be constrained to acknowledge that the
 beauties of the Feast are indeed delusive. The light descending there dis-
 plays spaces in the clouds "like paradises... With towns & villages and
 temples, tents sheep-folds and pastures" (13:13-14). This visual "har-
 mony" (13:15) cannot be sustained, however, for it constitutes only one
 half of the primary alternation of being that was hinted at in the earlier
 phase of Los and Enitharmon's wanderings (9:1ff). The "children of the
 elemental worlds" (who function as covert analyses of Los and Enithar-
 mon's prior state of existence) become victims of the pastoral bliss they
 inhabit: "Not long in harmony they dwell, their life is drawn away / And
 wintry woes succeed; successive driven into the Void / Where Enion
 craves: successive drawn into the golden feast" (13:16-18).
 As a narrative structure, as opposed to an event in the narrative, the Feast
 thus allows previously unknown details to surface concerning Los and
 Enitharmon's mystifying power to draw strength and delight for them-
 selves by driving Enion into the Void. The primary mechanism of their
 power is now revealed to be feeding, which manifested itself early in their
 wanderings as an eating of the "flesh of Lambs" (9:22); that initially inci-
 dental action now emerges as a vast but spectrous communion. The delu-
 sive, tantalizing light hovers over the Feast as a false summer while "the
 children of the elemental worlds" are shunted back and forth cyclically
 between Los and Enitharmon feasting and Enion craving. The Feast forces
to the surface an elaboration of that earlier context in which Los and
Enitharmon sat and talked of scorning their parents in order to feed Los