FOUR ZOAS IX / 120:28-121:25 (30:26-121:25)


 The Eternal Man
attempts to separate Uri-
zen's Dragon form from
Urizen's stony form, but
these two aspects coin-
cide at the conclusion of
 his speech.





 The dark deep: locus of
 the Tree of Mystery, the
 Shadow ofEnitharmon,
 the Spectre of Urthona,
 and Orc


Man evades the sexual plots and reduces the poem's complexity to a
conflict between Urizen and Luvah, claiming Urizen's religion (which
entered the poem late) is the cause of the primordial war. In shifting atten-
tion to the act of deciding whether Luvah's war or Urizen's religion is
more to blame for the present state of affairs, the Eternal Man reveals the
extent to which his perception is being constituted by the narrator's own
weariness with narrative complexity and by Urizen's desire to reassume
power. In the process, the Eternal Man exposes the univocality of his
perception by associating the image of the "windows of the morning"
(120:50) with redemption when in Night VIII this image emanated from
Urizen's Dragon form itself: "His scales transparent give forth light like
windows of morning" (106:44).
 At the outset of his wrathful speech the Eternal Man differentiates be-
tween Urizen's "stony form of death" which he commands to "Arise" and
the "dragon of the Deeps" which he commands to "Lie down before my
feet" in order to let Urizen arise (120:28-29). Throughout his speech,
however, this distinction between the stony form and Dragon form of
Urizen becomes obscured, since his statements and threats could equally
apply to either. At the conclusion of his speech he in fact collapses the two
images into one when he commands the "dragon of the Deeps" to awake
(120:51). This perceptual confusion invades the details and the syntax of
the narrator's account of Urizen's bodily response to the Eternal Man's
wrathful utterance: "Urizen wept in the dark deep anxious his Scaly form /
To reassume the human & he wept in the dark deep" (121:1-2). Urizen's
(syntactically ambiguous) anxiety is sandwiched between two references
to his weeping "in the dark deep" -the exact location of all the perceptual/
sexual confusions of Night VIIa (81:11) and precisely where the Eternal
Man now locates Luvah when he commands the Dragon/stony form to
"Let Luvah rage in the dark deep even to Consummation" (120:32). It is
significant that Urizen's words emerge out of his anxiety over the status of
"his Scaly form" -exactly the confusion in the Eternal Man's speech.
 Urizen's entire response, uttered in weeping, is one of regret, renuncia-
tion, and repentance-exactly what it takes to calm the now wrathful
Eternal Man. Though the context in Night IX seems far removed from
Urizen's violent fall into Dragon form in Night VIII, the repentance he
displays before the Eternal Man intersects Urizen's desperation near the
end ofNight VIII, where "repentant [he] forgets his wisdom in the abyss /
In forms of priesthood in thedark delusions of repentance" (107:17-18). This
prior context partially accounts for the events that issue from Urizen's
speech.
 He begins by directly contradicting the Eternal Man in a way that
conceals the contradiction. Unlike the Eternal Man, who remembers it
fondly, Urizen denounces the feast, along with his labors, futurity (revised
by Blake from "remembrance" several times in this section), the void, and
his compulsion to control the other male characters. By renouncing his
great labors (121:6-18) Urizen covertly legitimizes the Eternal Man's iner-