FOUR ZOAS I / 18:8-18:13


The absence ofLuvah's
 robes of blood in the
narrative shift from the
feast to Eternity (18:8-9)










Multiple significance of
"Eternal Death" at the
 edge of Eternity


bracketing than it would have if experienced in isolation from the poem.
In making this section a partial and covert re-enactment of events within
the poem, Blake provides a character-free interpretation of the preceding
narrative sequence that dramatically relocates the poem's often bizarre and
apparently distant action in a purely natural context. Enion's voice is
crystal clear here, stark and devastating in its indictment of the natural
cycle of feeding in which all creatures are simultaneously victims and
victimizers. In closing the first primary bracket of Night I with such
syntactically transparent and lyrically evocative verse, Blake retroactively
throws into even greater relief the complexities, ambiguities, and confu-
sions in syntax and reference that pervade the preceding sections of the
poem.


 Second Primary Bracket: "Eternity"32

 Line 18:9, which immediately follows the close of Enion's lamentation,
repeats almost exactly the line (12:4) that marked the entrance of the
("Wandering") Man, Luvah, Vala, and Urizen into the narrative proper
out of Los and Enitharmon's visions. This time the line opens the Eternity
bracket as it jams against the closing boundary of the Tharmas/Enion
bracket: "This was the Lamentation of Enion round the golden Feast /
Eternity grand and was troubled at the image of Eternal Death / Without
the body of Man an Exudation from his sickning limbs" (18:8-10). This
sudden leap from the "golden Feast" to "Eternity,"33 which was last seen
hovering high above the Feast (13:8), bypasses the image of Luvah and
Vala suspended in blood which was situated spatially between the Feast
and Eternity (13:4-8); yet it was Luvah and Vala's "orb of blood" that
seemed to be the immediate referent of "the Image of Eternal Death" in its
first appearance (12:3-4). At the opening of the Eternity bracket, however,
"the image of Eternal Death" must refer either to age-bent Enion's Lamen-
tation, which precedes it, or to "an Exudation from his sickning limbs,"
which follows it, as a re-enactment of the Spectre issuing from Tharmas
feet (5:15). Indeed, since the Daughters ofBeulah first identified "Eternal
Death" as the "Spectre of Tharmas" (5:41-42), Eternity groans (18:9) in
response to the overt state of Enion and the covert state of Tharmas. In so
doing, however, Eternity represses the bloody Luvah/Vala image with
which Eternity has been closely associated (12:3-4 and 13:4-9), a tendency
that persists throughout the entire Eternity bracket. Though the "Council
of God" soon meets as "One Man," they do not do so in relation to
"Luvah[s] robes of blood," as established in 13:8-9, but in relation to the
"messengers from Beulah" (21:8), whose report presupposes that the
"One Man" is ignorant of the events of the Tharmas/Enion bracket.
 The Eternity bracket orthogonally intersects the preceding narrative.
For example, the spatial directions that dominate the first primary bracket
are grounded in the sun's path, East to West (4:6,12:1), while the central