INCORPORATING LUVAH INTO URIZEN'S FEAST


the events in Ahania's vision were embedded in the action of the Man
walking with Vala "in dreams of soft deluding slumber" (39:16). Earlier in
Night V, Urizen identified an analogous state as his own condition before
the fall: he "slumberd in the noon," "walked in the silent night among
sweet smelling flowers" (64:5-6), and "slept & sweet dreams round me
hoverd" (64:7). Ahania had explicitly identified the context or scene of her
vision as "the slumbers of Urizen / When Urizen slept in the porch & the
Ancient Man was smitten" (39:13-14).
 The allegorical vision Ahania conveyed to Urizen in Night III returns
upon him at the end of Night V in disguised and less consciously control-
lable form. In Night III it was Luvah who strove for dominion against the
Man; now Luvah embodies the delusive purity of the Shadow but also
walks on the steps as the Man did. By fusing the Man and the Shadow into
a single role Urizen confirms his own slumbrouss" state and begins to
undo his division into separate roles in the earlier phases of his speech. In
directly addressing Luvah and Urthona, Urizen displaces attention away
from himself, onto Luvah and Urthona, versions of the characters who
occupied the focus of the Demons' song and, in the forms of Los and Orc,
performed the major narrative action in this Night:
 Then thou didst keep with Strong Urthona the living gates of heaven
 But now thou art bound down with him even to the gates of hell
 Because thou gavest Urizen the wine of the Almighty
 For steeds of Light that they might run in thy golden chariot of pride
 I gave to thee the Steeds I pourd the stolen wine
 And drunken with the immortal draught fell from my throne sublime
 (65:3-8)

 At first glance, this utterance completely contrasts with the two previ-
ous gestures of avoidance. Here Urizen gives over the horses rather than
withholds them; and his "fall" is associated, not with hiding in clouds or
conspiring with the stars, but with a drunken stupor derived from drink-
ing the "wine of the Almighty." Further, Urizen connects these two
"facts" which obscure his earlier gestures by saying he traded the horses
for the wine, though he calls the wine "stolen." Under the pressure of this
altered perspective, this event also subtly transforms into the cause of his
fall the "banquets of new wine" which he so fondly looked upon as the
essence of his former world at the outset of his previous soliloquy. Urizen
again prefaces this final projection of blame onto Luvah with "because,"
signalling that as he has been uttering the changing versions) of how he
got where he is, he has been uneasy about the substance of his explana-
tions. Each explanation leads to another which in turn alters the one
preceding it until his final version totally obfuscates whatever information
might have emerged from his earlier accounts.
 The internal conflicts, discontinuities, and apparent self-contradictions
 of Urizen's speech-act as a whole verbally enact the troubled bodily ges-
 ture of Urizen struggling simultaneously to accept and reject conse-


Urizen's alignment of
Luvah and "Strong Ur-
thona" as gatekeepers
partially intersects Los's
account in Night IV
(48:19) but grants Luvah
a function that was pre-
viously unsuspected and
which is never
developed beyond this
point in the poem.





The wine feast, before
remembered by Urizen
as a marker of the state
prior to the fall, is now
seen as the cause of the
fall.









A structural schematic
of Night V appears in
Fig. B.4 (pp. 210-11).