CONSEQUENCES: WORDS OF LOS'S SECOND SPEECH


Enitharmon as as a "shady refuge [for someone else] from furious war." At
first glance this phrasing seems to imply a refuge for (the previously
"furious") Los himself (86:4) from the "war with secret monsters of the
animating worlds" (82:7) in which Los jealously lamented he was engag-
ing because Enitharmon remained sexually unavailable to him because she
was (to his perspective) "the image of Death" (81:13; 85:10). Los
immediately corrects this assumption, however, as he shifts from her
"shady" aspect to her "bosom translucent": this image (90:5-6) superim-
poses and projects onto Enitharmon the moment the Spectre entered Los's
bosom (85:26) and the moment Los "stood on the Limit of Translucence"
(87:13) as Enitharmon tempted him with the fruit.
 At this covert intersection of the Spectre and Enitharmon, Los sud-
denly projects his own present situation onto the "weeping souls / Of
those piteous victims of battle" (90:6-7). Instead of fictionalizing his pres-
ent situation by projecting it onto the primal sex scene of the Eternal Man
and Vala, as did the Shadow, and instead of recounting their own sexual
division as if in the distant past, as did the Spectre, Los creates new beings,
the piteouss victims," transforming the "Spectrous dead" of his
immediate narrative context (90:4) who themselves had been created by
the Spectre in his conversation with the Shadow (84:40). These "victims"
now become the locus of his relating sexually to Enitharmon. Los's
account is self-divided. The souls are "weeping," yet in Enitharmon's
bosom "they sleep in happy obscurity" (90:7); the price of their happiness,
however, is that "They feed upon our life we are their victims" (90:8), a
reversal which itself inverts Los and Enitharmon's earlier feeding off their
parents and nearly recreates Tharmas'situation in Night I: "We are become
a Victim to the Living" (4:8). As Los's initially positive description of
Enitharmon's nurturing role, with respect to the victims, turns back on
Los and Enitharmon, he defends himself by suddenly feeling seized with
"Stern desire...to fabricate embodied semblances in which the dead /
May live" (90:8-10), indicating the invisible influence of the Spectre.
 Throughout the concluding sections of VIIa Blake persistently incor-
porates words that are either introduced for the first time, used for the
only time here, or have been used rarely or in quite restricted contexts
before in the poem. "Stern" has generally been used in negative contexts,
meaning inflexible, unyielding. "Fabricate" is first used here and carries
with it a sense of manufacturing, of making cloth, and of making up or
fictionalizing. "Semblance" has been used only in terms of the female
counterparts of Tharmas and Urizen. "Semblance" itself carries the senses
of a trace, a copy, an outward appearance. "Embodied" first appears as
such in the poem here (and occurs only in this Night), though an alternate
spelling of the word, "Imbodied" (84:6), designating the union of male
and female, has already occurred in the Spectre's speech to the Shadow.
 As soon as Los utters the phrase, "fabricate embodied semblances," he
acknowledges or becomes aware that the "victims" are "the dead" of the
immediate narrative proper (90:4-9); Los becomes aware of their status as


The war plot enters
covertly into the sexual
conference between Los
and Enitharmon in the
form of piteouss victims
of battle," transforma-
tions of the "hidden sons
& daughters" fed by
"warlike desperation"
who wish to "vegetate /
Into the Worlds of Eni-
tharmon" (98:11-16).















At this juncture,
infrequent or previously
unused words con-
gregate in the text.