FOUR ZOAS 1 / 20:12-15


 Night I does not
 unequivocally end lines
 20:12-15. See Note 32,
 "Region A."


































 The irreducibility of
 Night I to competing
versions of the war plot


 Terrific ragd the Eternal Wheels of intellect terrific ragd
 The living creatures of the wheels in the Wars of Eternal life
 But perverse rolld the wheels ofUrizen & Luvah back reversed
 Downwards & outwards consuming in the wars of Eternal Death
 (20:12-15)
 In its attempt to summarize the total structure of Night I, this coda
 reverses the original narrative order, with the first two lines ostensibly
 referring to the world of the Eternity bracket and the last two lines refer-
 ring to the warfare that came into narrative existence in the Nuptial Song
 of the Tharmas/Enion bracket. Pressing problems immediately arise,
 however, in this coda's functioning as a closure of Night I. First, there is no
 evidence whatsoever thus far of the "Wars of Eternal life." The Eternal
 characters hover, listen, watch, withdraw, enclose, and follow, but there is
 no hint of their zest for vigorous intellectual warfare. Indeed, "rage,"
 which seems to be a defining attribute of the intellectual war celebrated in
 the coda, occurs in Night I only in extremely problematic and negative
 contexts-the massive confusion of the Nuptial Song (the "rage" of the
 "Mighty Father" [15:12] and the indeterminate "rage" at the close of the
 song [16:12]); Luvah's violent destructive "raging" (22:13, 22:36); and the
 "raging" serpent body that fell from Urthona (22:29). Second, the image
 of "Wheels" has been contaminated by its only previous occurrence-in
 the context of Los and Enitharmon's sexual craving: "But Los & Enithar-
 mon sat in discontent & scorn / Craving the more the more enjoying,
 drawing out sweet bliss / From all the turning wheels of heaven & the
 chariots of the Slain" (16:18-20). In thus consolidating the imagery of rage
 with the imagery of wheels to express the state of intellectual war, the coda
 immediately undermines its authority to constitute an unambiguously
 positive interpretation of the actions of those beings we have witnessed
 inhabiting Eternity. Third, by locating the origin of "Eternal Death" in
 war rather than sexual division the coda voice reveals a bias for the explana-
 tions of the Eternity bracket, a bias so strong that it effectively excludes the
 sexual perspective of the Tharmas/Enion bracket.
 This coda therefore focuses on Urizen and Luvah at the expense of the
complex interweaving sexual plot out of which war itself was generated in
the Tharmas/Enion plot. These lines totally ignore "The torments of
Love &Jealousy" announced on the title page, much as the elliptical Vala is
utterly excluded from the Messengers' report. Any such polarization of
"Eternal life" to "Eternal Death" must be structurally unsatisfying,
though we may yearn to flee to its apparent schematic simplicity in order
to withdraw from the overlapping/discontinuous complexities of Night I.
Indeed, these lines themselves formally enact a withdrawal from "Intellec-
tual Battle" by asserting that the poem's dynamics can be reduced to a
battle of simple opposites. Blake's closing gesture can satisfy us only if we
have not grasped the perspective structures of Night I and have con-
sequently repressed all but certain selected narrative details. To see how
these lines enact a false closure is to have learned the rudiments of Blake's
narrative technology in The Four Zoas.