LUVAH: OUTWARD FLEEING / VOICE FROM WITHIN


other Urthona/Los-grounded imagery. Blake accompanies "bellows,"
which doses this sequence, with a reference to "winter beats incessant"
strengthening its connection to the Song at the Feast where "winter blows
his bellows" (16:3). Though Urizen is ostensibly in command of these
implements, his own geometrical tools are completely embedded in other
narrative elements, subverting his apparent unequivocal control at this
point. Most specifically the final cluster of four images recalls a radical
event in the Nuptial Song: "Distracted Luvah / Bursting forth from the
loins of Enitharmon" (16:8-9). In the fiction of Urizen's architectural
control, which the narrator here explicitly identifies with the fall itself
(25:6ff), these clues to Luvah's hidden presence in Urizen's machinery
itself are mapped onto the narrative surface as the deeply embedded "voice
of Luvah from the furnaces of Urizen" (26:4).
 Luvah's "voice" from Urizen's furnaces acknowledges imagery from
the Tharmas/Enion and Los/Enitharmon sexual plots of Night I and thus
directly inverts the "voice" (24:4) of Urizen from which Luvah and Vala
have just trembled and shrunk in fear (24:5). Urizen's voice makes no
reference to sexual division even though his command is to "Divide,"
which issues in a fleeing from the loins.
 When Luvah says "I hid her in soft gardens & in secret bowers of
Summer / Weaving mazes of delight along the sunny Paradise / Inextrica-
ble labyrinths" (27:5-7), he repeats the phrase "weaving mazes of delight"
(9:21) from the Los/Enitharmon plot and revises the phrase Enion uttered
to Tharmas when she asked for a hiding place ("mazes of delusive beauty"
[4:25]). "The sunny Paradise" inverts Los and Enitharmon's wandering in
"Moony spaces" (9:19); the "secret bowers" translates from Los's account
of his parents sitting and mourning "in their silent secret bowers" (9:37);
and "inextricable labyrinths" resurrects Tharmas' offer to build Enion a
"Labyrinth" (4:10). The volume of details that overlap the two sections
indicates part of the function the "voice of Luvah" performs.
 Blake deleted lengthy sections from Night I in which Enion and the
Spectre converse about many hidden details of the issues that Luvah's
voice addresses. If Luvah's speech had occurred in Night I, it would have
functioned primarily as an analysis of the relation between the Los/Eni-
tharmon plot and the Tharmas/Enion plot. As such it would have been
structurally analogous to the visions of Los and Enitharmon out of which
Urizen entered the narrative proper. The rules of perspective transforma-
tion have been modified in Night II, however: Luvah's words reveal
instead previously concealed internal connections between the Luvah/
Vala and Los/Enitharmon plots. These connections constitute the pre-
conditions for Los to identify himself with Luvah in Enitharmon's Song
(dream-vision). But here, in Urizen's (specifically not Urthona's) fur-
naces, Luvah's voice is not restricted to recapitulating previous events.
Because it unlocks power relations between Los/Enitharmon and Luvah/
Vala, Luvah's speech makes it possible later in Night II for Los and Eni-
tharmon to converse with each other as themselves, unlike in Night I,


Analysis of the array of
Urizen's tools uncovers
Luvah's hidden presence.






The narrative functions
of Luvah's voice from
the furnaces




Although the narrator
has no doubt that the
voice from the furnaces
is Luvah's (26:4 and
28:1), the speech begins
with the words "IfI
indeed am Valas
King... "











The generative power of
Luvah's voice: it creates
new plot relations in the
spaces left open in prior
narrative and inter-
polated accounts.