THE DEMONS SING OF DARK URTHONA AND PHALLIC VALA



 Let loose the Enormous Spirit in the darkness of the deep
 And his dark wife that once fair crystal form divinely clear
 Within his ribs producing serpents whose souls are flames of fire
 (59:5-16)

The Demons' song displaces the Los/Enitharmon/Child plot of the
immediate narrative proper into the more distant plot of "dark Urthona,"
in which dark Urthona's sexual division emerges as an aspect of his being
struck in twofold secrecy: Vala's arrows composed of "secret fires" (59:4)
produce dark Urthona's "secret pain" (59:8). Although the Demons'
account purports to disclose the sexual nature of dark Urthona's division,
it obscures its meaning and structure, paralleling the secresy of dark Ur-
thona's wounding. Nevertheless, the Demon's song covertly identifies
dark Urthona with the "Fallen Man" (his head on the rock) and transfers
the "sons" who fled from Urthona's "side" (in the accounts in Nights I and
IV) back inside him, as the syntax weaves the act of being torn apart by
"consuming fire" directly into the phrase, "Within his breast his fiery sons
chaind down." The deliberately obscure syntax at this point-in contrast
to the unambiguous syntax describing the music accompanying the
Child's birth-generates multiple and conflicting readings. In one read-
ing, the Demons' song traces the transformation of the chained male
sexual offspring ("sons") of dark Urthona into the release of the Enor-
mous Spirit (in this reading, Orc) and associates both images with the
"serpents whose souls are flames of fire," apparently produced within his
ribs by his "dark wife," though this relationship is expressed through
irreducibly ambiguous syntax. Indeed, the syntax twists precisely at the
point at which clarity could emerge: instead of the verb "produce," the
participal "producing" appears, located in the text so that several different
readings are possible. Consequently, these lines also suggest that the
chained fiery sons release not only the "Enormous Spirit" (who in this
reading could be either dark Urthona himself or his Spectre rather than
Orc) but also "his [dark Urthona's and/or the Enormous Spirit's and/or
Orc's] dark wife," and that their copulation, which is repressed out of the
Demons'song, produces the fiery serpents "within his ribs."
 By making the syntax intertwine Urthona and the ambiguous "Enor-
mous Spirit" with Orc and by depicting a cycle that moves from chained
fiery sons in the bosom to fiery serpents within Orc/dark Urthona's ribs,
Blake introduces a set of images that will re-emerge in the "Chain of
Jealousy" in the next phase of the poem. Serpents in Orc/dark Urthona's
ribs are mapped onto the narrative proper as Los's pangs of jealousy as a
"Chain" that forms "Around his bosom like a bloody cord" (60:11). Blake
identifies the subject and object of jealousy: dark Urthona's "torment
of the secret pain" modulates into Los's "secret sobs" (60:11) of jealousy
over Orc.
 The birth of the Child (who is named Orc [not Luvah] by the narrator as
soon as the song of the Demons has ended) initially functioned to place the


The convoluted syntax
in the Demons'song of
Night V concerning the
sexual division of dark
Urthona parallels the
overlapping syntax
describing the war in the
Demons' Song of Night
1(15:7-16).