CONFLICTING PERSPECTIVES AT THE CLOSE OF URIZEN'S CREATION



Vision in Luvah's robes of blood (32:14) diverts the anxiety of the reader
and the narrator away from concrete narrative tensions to a glimpse of a
providential, elusive, nearly context-free action which glaringly contrasts
-by virtue of its lack of internal connection-with the desperate,
intertwined situations unfolding in the preceding narrative.
 The most mathematical version of Urizen's universe ironically springs
from the activities of "Planters" and "Sowers" (32:16). At the point where
agricultural imagery collapses into geometrical, the "Paradises of
Delight" (30:18) which surrounded Urizen's halls (and which are versions
of Luvah's "sunny Paradise" [27:6])are subtly transformed into a mon-
strous chaos: "many a window... / Lookd out into the World of Tharmas,
where in ceaseless torrents / His billows roll where monsters wander in
the foamy paths" (33:5-7). Since this is one of only two references to
Tharmas in Night II (the other, in Los's speech, associates him with pas-
toral "flocks"), it is important that Tharmas does not appear here as a
character but as the inhabitor of a "World." The "World ofTharmas" is the
world into which Enitharmon called Urizen in Night I, and that world is
the way the "Paradises" which "surround" Urizen's creation (30:18) look
when seen through the windows of Urizen's creation. Tharmas' world is
the male residue of Enion, from whose lament Urizen recoiled at the
beginning of Night II. The transformation of the "Paradises" of Urizen
into the monstrous chaos of Tharmas repeats (as if off stage) Tharmas'
own disintegration. Tharmas' fleeting appearance in Night II bridges a
gap between the perspective techniques of the first and second Nights.
 Although Urizen's name almost disappears from Night II's narrative
surface, Blake does not abandon Urizen's own persistent vision that his
creation is unequivocally redemptive. In Urizen's final appearance in
Night II as the workmaster, Blake directlyjuxtaposes Urizen's perspective
with the "Divine Vision":

 They weighd & ordered all & Urizen comforted saw
 The wondrous work flow forth like visible out of the invisible
 For the Divine Lamb Even Jesus who is the Divine Vision
 Permitted all lest Man should fall into Eternal Death
 For when Luvah sunk down himself put on the robes of blood
 Lest the state called Luvah should cease. & the Divine Vision
 Walked in robes of blood till he who slept should awake
 (33:9-15)

To Urizen, his world is genuinely redemptive because he perceives it to be
a creation of visible out of invisible, something out of nothing, but this
very creation appears as such to him because what before was visible to
him (his sexual delight) is suppressed and rendered invisible by the
emergence of his substitute artificial geometrical heavens. The narrator's
use of "For" (33:13) places responsibility for Urizen's "comfort" in the
hands of a version of the "Divine Vision" that is constrained to permit "all
[i.e., even the oppressive universe Urizen fantasizes] lest Man should fall


From the perspective of
Urizen's universe, the
"Paradises" surrounding
the halls become the
monstrous world of
Tharmas: the narrative
origin of Tharmas' wa-
tery world as inhabited
by "monsters."






















A problematic intrusion
of consolidated redemp-
tive language







Parallel between Uri-
zen's Sons and the
Divine Vision: "They
weighed & ordered all,"
and "the Divine Vision /
Permitted all."