FOUR ZOAS I-V / 13:11-58:25


The statement/response
format of the Feast Song
in Night I is re-enacted
 in Night V.
























Musical imagery connects
Ore's birth to the feast in
 Night I.


"Song" at the "Nuptial Feast" in Night I in which the "horns" were
"Responsing" to the soft sound of stringed instruments.
 Blake's narration of the "Child's" violent emergence transforms almost
every element from the binding passages of Night IV into a progression
toward the birth. The "living music" responds to Tharmas' promise to
provide comforting tones to Los in his "labours"; Enitharmon's howling
"chaind in ceaseless fire" (53:9) is transformed into her "groan" as the
"Earth" (not simply Enitharmon herself) labors in giving birth to the child
who emerges "howling" in "flames" and will be bound in "circling fire
unceasing"; the rocking of the convulsive earth giving birth corresponds
to the thundering pulsations of Los's hammer; the "marriage chain" of
forest and snow that dances in the wind before it settles combines the
chains that bound Urizen with the "cold infectious madness" (52:28) of
Los's dance; the coldness of winter corresponds to Urizen's tossings on
his icy bed / Freezing to solid all beneath" (52:21-22); the "wheels of
turning darkness" recapitulate the "wheels resistless" (53:4) of Los's
labors; and the image of the winter spreading his "black wings across from
pole to pole" visualizes wintry Urizen's silent voice "stretching out from
North to South." Blake thus undermines the easy assumption that the
birth of the Child is simply a pre-ordained event thatfollows Los's binding
of Urizen and constrains us to witness it as forcing onto the surface of the
text implications of Night IV that were suppressed when Los assumed
authority as a terrified and vengeful response to his vision of Urizen's
chaotic state.
 Blake's emphasis on the musical surface of this labor and birth suddenly
thrusts us back through the first four Nights. It interlaces the musical
program of statement and response that informed the Nuptial Song in
Night I while superimposing that musical sequence over the musical des-
cent ofLos and Enitharmon "among soft harps & voices" in Night II (34:2)
and over the dissonant music of Tharmas' departure and Los's binding
of Urizen in Night IV. The function of this complex superimposition is
to enact subliminally the internal relation between the Feast, Los and
Enitharmon's descent, Tharmas' flight, the binding of Urizen, and the
birth of the Child. Although on the surface these events seem quite discon-
nected from one another, the sequence that immediately precedes the birth
acknowledges that these disparate events are overlapping aspects of one
another.
 At the Feast of Night I, Blake used a musical argument between the
sounds produced by "gold & silver Wires / And with immortal Voice soft
warbling" (14:1-2) and those sounds produced by "doubling Voices &
loud Horns wound round sounding / Cavernous dwellers fill'd the
enormous Revelry, Responsing!" (14:3-4). The contrast between the
"Spirits... on high" who played the mellow stringed instruments and the
"Cavernous dwellers," the "Demons of the Deep," whose words enacted
the sounds of "Horns," is projected into the context of Night V as the
contrast between the floating living music, which interweaves the discor-
dant groans, and the "horrid trumpets of the deep," which sound as the