FOUR ZOAS III / 38:10-39:10


 Urizen's speech act
 recoils on him.












 Recalling the passive
"Seven / Eyes of God" in
 Night I (19:9-10) and
 anticipating the seven
 ages of "dismal woe" in
 Night IV (54:15-55:9)

 But the clouds return as
 the product of her mys-
 tifying vision.

 Ahania's voice is
"heavenly" (38:14)-she
is the voice of Urizen's
"golden heavens" which
 trembled at Enion's
 voice.


 "Obscure": the term
 "Eternal One" has not
 entered the poem prior
 to this point, nor does it
 appear again (except as
 deleted in 41:2).


obtain in the narrative are in the distant future (so that he will have time to
subvert his own servitude somehow) and replaces Los, his narrative
enemy, with Luvah, his enemy according to the Messengers' report. Uri-
zen's verbs then progress from "shall become" to "laying" to "to issue,"
making relationships successively difficult to grasp, as syntactic connec-
tions become more elliptical. The next to last line of his utterance ellipti-
cally contains no verbs at all, and one could wonder what verbs would be
appropriate. Inserting "will become," we get "Luvah... will become a
dark and furious death," which does not account for Urizen's anguished
cry at the end of his speech. If we try "laying," we get "Luvah laying in the
loins a dark..." which similarly fails. Finally, if we try "to issue forth," we
get either "Luvah to issue forth in the loins of Los a dark and furious
death" or "Luvah in the loins of Los to issue forth...." As Urizen speaks it
occurs to him that the result of his decree could well be worse than present
servitude, that it will issue in a dark and furious death for Urizen himself.
Urizen withholds the verb in this line in order to deny the tangle of
interrelations that its specification would drag into the open. Finally,
Urizen places himself in the future, making himself the passive object of
"will become." His created future is unfilled for him, a void, like the
Abyss, which he cannot know. This lack of knowledge, this darkness,
makes him assume that the day of reckoning will be a "dread time."
Indeed, this explicit creation of the future was already presupposed in
Night II when he labored "urg'd by necessity to keep / The evil day afar"
(25:42-43).
 Urizen's creation of the future is immediately mocked in the narrative
 proper by reference to the seven days Ahania wept (an ironic diminish-
 ing of the days of creation into days of sad inactivity). Although the
 unfolding of his clouds on the eighth day reflects the fact that the patience
 Ahania displays is possible only in a world of linear time, this unfolding is
 simultaneously a symptom of time come around in a cycle: the Ahania/
 Urizen confrontation will now be re-enacted, but this time without the
 explicit presence of Urizen's mystifying clouds. In this version of their
 confrontation, the mystification is Ahania's tale itself.
 Ahania immediately acknowledges again the "futurity" with which she
ended her first speech by now addressing Urizen as "Prince," possibly
diminishing his status from King, yet asserting his present authority: "0
Prince the Eternal One hath set thee leader of his hosts / Leave all futurity
.to him" (38:15 and 39:1). At the beginning of this utterance Ahania
resumes her flattery of Urizen by referring to him as a leader chosen by the
obscure "Eternal One," rather than the specifically named "Albion" at the
beginning of Night II, again to attract his attention so she can communicate
her vision ofEnion to him. It is significant that, in spite of her flattery, she
never refers to him as "King" -only the narrator and Urizen himself do
that. Once she has resumed her gesture of consoling Urizen (which is
nevertheless different by virtue of her addressing him as "Prince"), she
invokes a corollary of Urizen's future, the past, and shifts into a memory