WAR: PRIOR CONTEXTS


differentiates between two forms or versions of weaving, only one of
which (Enitharmon's) was dominant in the narrative prior to the Sons'
song, Urizen's woven Web apparently having receded in importance. This
large structural transformation of the weaving imagery is also closely
associated with the imagery of war, an analogous narrative element which
has lingered in the background throughout the first six Nights but which,
like the spectres of the dead, bursts into the open in Night VIIa and retains
its importance throughout VIIb and VIII.


 War
 Ever since the perfunctory confrontation between Los and Urizen in
Night I, war has been suppressed by the action of the poem, surfacing
from time to time in interpolated visions and brief glimpses in the narra-
tive proper itself. In Night I, the Demons' Song at the Feast, as well as the
report of the Messengers from Beulah, dealt with extremely cryptic wars,
while the ironic coda at the end of Night I contrasted the ambiguous "Wars
of Eternal life" with the "wars of Eternal Death." The Song at the Feast,
which both vocalized and constituted a battle between Urizen, Tharmas,
Luvah, and Los, completely eliminated Urizen's name and mentioned
Tharmas only in retreat: "Tharmas endurd not" (15:18). (Though Luvah
and Los are named in the Song, their role in the war is at least as problem-
atic.) The Nuptial Song at the Feast was organized as a musical statement
by hosts on high, responded to by Demons of the Deep. After the Song
Urizen sat with "faded radiance" (16:16), while Los and Enitharmon, who
had absorbed the Spectre from the Song that was literally the food of the
Feast, had grown "Enormous."
 This elliptical battle serves as the most rudimentary background for
cryptic references in the later Nights to the "war of Tharmas & Urizen."
The account of the Messengers from Beulah in Night I identified the battle
as a conflict primarily between Urizen and Luvah, with Tharmas and
Urthona being passive sexual victims of that war. War imagery was swal-
lowed up by architectural imagery in Night II and by the imagery of the
struggle between the "Shadow" and the Man in Night III. Warfare
momentarily erupted in the surface of Night IV when Los's labors in
creating Urizen's body simultaneously enacted "the war of Tharmas"
(52:17). The binding of Ore was likewise cryptically identified with the
Demon's flames "warring with the waves ofTharmas & Snows ofUrizen"
(61:4), but war imagery in that context was carried no further than a single
line ending the description of Orc with an image of warriors "Armed with
spear & shield they drink & rejoice over the slain" (62:7). And the Song of
the Demons at Orc's birth referred again to the Urizen/Luvah war but
transferred it to a war between Vala and Urthona.
 Orc's binding in Night V allows Urizen and Tharmas to confront one
another directly in Night VI for the first time, because Tharmas now
functions as a defensive detour of spatial landscape through which Urizen


Enitharmon mentions
"warlike clarions" prior
to the emergence of war
as an action (10:7).


War as a peripheral
dimension of prior nar-
rative contexts