FOUR ZOAS I / 17:1-18:17


Re-surfacing of the Tharmas/Enion Bracket


 Enion's lamentation
recounts previous narra-
 tive events in a new
 voice.

























The cycle of victim and
 victimizer


 While the verb phrase "wept upon the desolate wind" intersects the
original point at which Los and Enitharmon entered the narrative proper
as an analysis of the Tharmas/Enion plot (8:2), it is now Enion "blind &
age-bent," rather than "two little Infants," who weeps. This verb phrase
thus marks the boundary between the re-surfacing of the Tharmas/Enion
bracket and the closing of the Los/Enitharmon bracket. Consequently,
Enion's voice laments simultaneously "round the golden Feast" (18:8) and
"upon the desolate wind" (17:1). Her straightforward words are a
response to and a consequence of the massively complex "Song" at the
wedding Feast in which fertile ground was transformed into rock and
sand. Yet, because she makes no reference at all to characters in the narra-
tive proper, in the visions, or in the Song, Enion's lamentation seems
disconnected from the poem's narrative world. It nevertheless bears a
subliminal parallel to certain events that have transpired in the Song at the
Feast and in the narrative proper.
 Her lamentation begins with birds starving to death in winter, invok-
ing, by her reference to frozen "corn fields" (17:7), the shift in landscape
from the beginning to the end of the Nuptial Song. Her lamentation closes
with a "famishd Bird" eating a "Spider": "His Web is left all desolate, that
his little anxious heart / So careful wove; & spread it out with sighs and
weariness" (18:6-7). Just as the opening segment of this lamentation refers
to the desolate wintry wasteland at the close of the wedding Song, so the
conclusion of the lamentation subliminally clarifies why Urizen "sighs"
after the wedding Song is over. Though Urizen was absent by name from
the Nuptial Song, his fate, as we have noted, bears close though covert
affinity to that ofthe "Spider" who, in the wedding Song, was enjoined to
"spread [his] web!" (15:3). The Bird in Enion's lament, initially a victim of
the approaching wintry hunger, now victimizes the predatory Spider
who, in the Feast's Song, was structurally pivotal in ushering in the barren
wintry landscape. In Enion's lamentation, however, Bird and Spider are
equally sympathetic victims of the natural cycle of feeding. Like the Bird
whose "little / Heart [stops] cold" (17:5-6), the Spider's "little anxious
heart" is definitively arrested. Indeed, the Spider is perhaps more sym-
pathetic because we are forced to focus on his failure to capture the "Fly"
he so anxiously prepared to trap because he is surprised by the starving
Bird. To the extent that it parallels the Nuptial Song, this event corres-
ponds to the Spider's (Urizen's) failure to overthrow the enemy forces in
the sky (Luvah and Vala who ride triumphant) by spreading his web
because pre-empted by the unexpected and baffling actions of the ambigu-
ous "Mighty Father" (15:3-15). The clarity and straightforwardness of
Enion's story, however, utterly contrasts with the maddening confusion of
the parallel segment of the Nuptial Song, just as the sympathetic role of
the Spider in Enion's lament inverts the Spider's role in the Song.
 While the beginning and end of Enion's lamentation translate Urizen's