OVERRIDES: THE TRUMPET


The Trumpet sounding
at the Tharmas/Enion
embrace superimposes
successive moments of
the narrative, creating a
 false sense of closure.


trumpeter as if it were simply an aside to the major action: Ore's flames
follow Urizen's feet as he sows the seeds of souls, and "all the while the
Trump ofTharmas sounds" (125:13); yet this apparent aside reaffirms the
temporal extensiveness of the previously anonymous trumpet sound of
118:17 ("all the while") at the same moment it identifies Tharmas as the
trumpeter.
 Finally, Blake reveals, at the moment Tharmas embraces Enion, that
their union, which seems narratively to resultfrom the string of events set in
motion by Los's tearing down the Sun and Moon, interconstitutes those
events. Blake even opens up the possibility that their union, by signalling
to Tharmas that the time has come to awaken the dead, is narratively the
occasion presupposed by the very events that seemed to lead up to it:

 Joy thrilled thro all the Furious form ofTharmas humanizing
 Mild he Embracd her whom he sought he raised her thro the heavens
 Sounding his trumpet to awake the dead
 (132:36-38)

Blake insists that the moment the fires fall as Los cracks the heavens is an
aspect of the moment the birds and beasts of prey flee, the Sons of Eternity
descend into Beulah, Urizen sows the seeds of souls, all creatures flock
together, and Tharmas embraces Enion. Once Blake has telescoped these
moments, the trumpet makes one oblique and minor reappearance as
Tharmas returns to fury from the mildness of his embrace of Enion and
accusingly commands "Mystery" to "Go down with horse & Chariots &
Trumpets of hoarse war" (134:9), reactivating the harsh, "Demon" side of
the music, feast, and war plots. After this reference the trumpet vanishes
from the poem, rendering the Tharmas/Enion embrace a climax that
seems to close off the causal loop of the trumpet blast/embrace from the
linear sequence of narrative events lying outside or beyond it. In other
words, the reader is led to believe that the events that follow the embrace
narratively do not recapitulate, transform, or otherwise constitute the
self-conscious circular system of events in the first two-thirds of Night IX
but are new (and possibly renovating) events that issue from the epiphany
of the embrace. To the extent that it functions this way, the trumpet blast
successfully conceals the embedded structures it so cavalierly disregards.
 In addition, as early as Night I, Blake contaminated the trumpet sound
by planting a detail that allows the reader to resurrect the lurking possibil-
ity that the events of Night IX constitute yet another false dawn. In his
speech to Luvah in Night I, Urizen refers to his primal act of usurpation as
a trumpet sound which, sounded before the true dawn, becomes a signal
of a false morning: "Till dawn was wont to wake them then my trumpet
sounding loud / Ravishd away in night my strong command shall be
obeyd" (21:32-33). A significant trace of this event remains in IX when, in
his self-congratulatory exultation, Urizen "sounding rose into the heavens"
(121:30-31), calling forth in the plot a false rebirth of Ahania, who appears
only to die immediately (121:35-37).