FOUR ZOAS II / 25:41-28:2


The narrator's lapse into
affirming a better time
prior to the events of the
 poem is subverted by
 Luvah's immediately
 subsequent speech.






 Luvah's assertion that
Urizen is the "first born
Son of Light" intersects
the Shadow of Enithar-
mon's account in Night
 Vila that Urizen is the
 "First born of Genera-
 tion" (83:13).

 The Lamb of God first
 appears explicitly
associated with Luvah's
 garments in Luvah's
 speech from the
 furnaces.















 Luvah's voice emerges
 from the boundary be-
 tween the narrative
proper and interpolated
 visions.


where they could speak to one another only by the mediation of parables
cast in terms of the Fallen Man, Vala, Luvah, and Urizen. The lifting of
this prohibition on direct verbal interaction results from Urizen's closing
out both Enion's lament and Ahania's sexual desires by shutting himself
within the Mundane Shell, a parallel to Luvah's enclosure in the furnaces
of affliction, encircled by Vala. Similarly, in the process of feeding the
furnaces (25:41), Vala "forgot he was her Luvah / With whom she walkd in
bliss, in times of innocence & youth" (26:2-3). This sudden reference by
the narrator to a state ostensibly prior to the poem's beginning is
immediately undermined when the text calls attention to the problem of
Vala's forgetting Luvah (which parallels Urizen's forgetting Ahania in
Night I [16:16-17]) by calling into question that prior state of "innocence
& bliss" which becomes conscious only as Vala forgets that the figure she is
torturing in the furnaces is "Luvah." "Hear ye the voice of Luvah from the
furnaces of Urizen" (26:4) announces a drastically contradictory account
of the prior state of existence of Luvah and Vala as Luvah remembers it, a
state involving parasitic feeding (like Vala's feeding the fires and like the
Feast of Night I), a state far from "innocence & bliss." Although Luvah
makes no reference to Los, Enitharmon, Tharmas, or Enion, whose
actions his words most directly transform, he does refer to Vala, Urizen
(as "first born Son of Light"), and to the "Lamb / Of God clothed in
Luvahs garments" (27:9-10).
 Luvah, the most alienated character in Night II, is the only one (besides
the narrator) who acknowledges the presence of this image-complex.
Throughout the rest of Night II, the "Divine Vision" (the perspective that
grasps Urizen's creation as only ironically redemptive) always appears to
the narrator clothed in "Luvahs robes" and thus inverts and denies Uri-
zen's legitimate power. Luvah is aware of the Lamb and of Eternal Death
but seems to be unaware of the "Divine Vision" who assumes, in the
narrative proper, the robes which Luvah, in his speech, projects onto the
Lamb. Nevertheless, Luvah's concealment in the furnaces makes him con-
scious of elements unavailable to other characters. Yet the narrator who
becomes absorbed in Urizen's own perspective reductively brands (and
nearly dismisses) these important words coming from the furnaces as
"Reasoning from the loins in the unreal forms of Ulros night" (28:2).
Luvah, who can utter words about the "Lamb" at the expense of explicit
reference to the Los/Enitharmon and Tharmas/Enion plots, inhabits the
point of intersection between the level of ironic redemption and the level
of sexual frustration. It is as though Luvah comes into existence in the
furnaces as he gives voice to the feelings eliminated from previous con-
texts in Nights I and II and takes on the hidden interior form of the fictions
emerging in the gap between the narrative proper and the interpolated
visions. In the process he narrates a story with discontinuities that even
Luvah himself cannot understand.
 At the beginning of Night II, Urizen glimpsed, then suppressed, En-
ion's "craving / All rav'ning like the hungry worm" in the "Abyss"