REDISTRIBUTION OF CHARACTER RELATIONS AT THE SONG'S CLOSE



that point, so now the Demons' musical response moves toward its con-
clusion by condensing the war back into the Los/Enitharmon plot. The
Demons arrange the narrative elements, however, in terms of Los's rela-
tion, not to Enitharmon and Urizen, as in the narrative proper, but in
relation to Luvah and Vala, as in the interpolated visions in which Los and
Enitharmon used the names Luvah and Vala as fictional substitutes to
disguise their attempts to gain sexual control over one another. In the
process of placing the fate of Luvah and Vala in the hands of Los, and
thereby enacting precisely what Urizen offered to Los if he would "obey
[his] awful Law" (12:13-17), the Demons assign Los the role of blacksmith
for the first time in the poem: Los melts and reshapes the forms of Luvah
and Vala as if they were still only fictional characters to be forged and
molded as they originally were in the interpolated visions.
 At this point the Song projects conflicting aspects of previous events as a
single new event-complex. This condensation suggests that events which
have not yet emerged concretely into the narrative proper were only latent
in the interpolated visions of Los and Enitharmon through which Luvah
and Vala originally entered the poem. Despite Vala's immediately prior
isolated residence in the wilderness, Luvah and Vala appear together here,
as in the polarized fictions of their existence in the sky-enclosed in their
globe of blood or "Triumphant." The presence of "winter" blowing the
bellows and "Ice & snow" tending the anvils acknowledges that in this
phase of his relation to Luvah Los is constrained by the "wintry woes" that
spatially surround the feast. It thus condenses the cyclic revolution in the
landscape of the Feast into character actions. Los's hammering also enacts
a version of the war because, just as in the previous account of the war,
Los's action is attended by a disappearance of the Sun and Moon and the
emergence of a landscape akin to the "desarts of dark solitude" Vala
inhabits (15:16): now the Mountains, Rivers, City, Corn-field, and
Orchard become "Rock & Sand" where nothing can grow and thus no
food can be produced. In the previous account of the war, the Sun had
rushed down, and the Moon soon vanished; in this phase the stars (key
participants in the war) vanish also: "There is no Sun nor Moon nor Star.
but rugged wintry rocks / Justling together in the void suspended by
inward fires" (16:6-7). The war, now condensed into Los's constrained
relationship to Luvah and Vala, represses sexual "fires" inward and thus
subverts the role of Los (as Groom) and of Urizen (as Victor) and of the
landscape (as harmonious, blissful, plentiful), three conditions that
occasioned the Song in the first place.
 The closing movement of the Song at the Feast radically revises Los's
"smiting" Enitharmon in the "loins" in the narrative proper (11:3;
12:40-43) which parallels Luvah's ambiguous act of smiting with the "in-
visible knife" (11:13-14) in Los's interpolated vision:

 Impatience now no longer can endure. Distracted Luvah
 Bursting forth from the loins of Enitharmon, Thou fierce Terror


The wintry imagery that
dominates the last phase
of the Feast Song re-
surfaces at the birth of
Orc in Night V
(57:1-58:18) and in the
Mills of Urthona se-
quence in Night IX
(138:1-19).