URIZEN'S TRANSFORMATION: AHANIA'S DEATH


formational residues of his oppressive labors and sexual division from
Ahania in Night II: "pyramid" has previously occurred only in the context
of Urizen's oppressive cosmology (28:26; 33:25); and Ahania was
associated with "mists" and "misty garments" when she first entered the
poem to divide from Urizen (30:25-26, 34). Despite the uniqueness of
Urizen's transformation, this scene intersects Urizen's other primary
moment of exultation, when he was called from the Feast in Night II to
take the sceptre: "Urizen rose from the bright Feast.../ Exulting at the
voice that called him..." (23:9-10). But that exultation, too, was
immediately reversed; he was suddenly "No more Exulting for he saw
Eternal Death beneath" (23:14). Urizen's exultation in Night IX is analo-
gously reversed when Ahania, whom he cast out in Night III, suddenly
returns to him in joy only to burst her blood vessels and die (121:32-39).
Urizen's "sounding" (paralleling the trumpet ofjudgment) as he rises into
the heavens in his joyous exultation inadvertently intersects the outer
conflagration (the Los/Urthona bracket) and introduces elements of the
ambivalent last judgment into this apparently removed event. Ahania's
sudden death re-enacts, in utterly disguised form, Urizen's now deeply
hidden desire to cast out Ahania. Blake makes it clear that it is Ahania who
is "Exulting in her flight" to reunite with Urizen while Urizen betrays
absolutely no emotional response to her reappearance at all, only to her
death. The narrator's reductive epigrammatic explanation-"Excess of
Joy is worse than grief" (121:36)--distracts him from Urizen's hidden
indifference to Ahania's return. This event extends Urizen's earlier refusal
to acknowledge Ahania or his sons and daughters at the feast (120:16-17)
and emphasizes his focus on the negative, non-sexual feast as the locus of
"dark mortality" (121:3-4). In the Eternal Man's next speech he empha-
sizes the sexual ground of "Eternity," which Urizen completely evades in
his response. Urizen's continued indifference to his primordial sexual
constitution is borne out when his "daughters" (a sexually generated
analysis of Ahania, cast out in Night VI and then recalled by Urizen in
Night VIIa) appear to guard Ahania, "in tears & howlings & despair /
Calling upon their fathers Name[.]" Urizen makes no response
(121:41-42).
 Although in his next address to the Prince of Light, the Eternal Man
equally ignores Urizen's daughters, Ahania's death seems to make the
Eternal Man partially aware that he had previously repressed the poem's
sexual plot by casting all blame for his condition onto Urizen and Luvah.
This remarkable speech, in which the Eternal Man is suddenly aware of
both the Lamb of God and Jerusalem, his "bride & wife," swings to the
opposite extreme, however, and excludes reference to the problem of the
relationship between males. In this doctrinal speech, the Eternal Man is
only dimly aware of the network of narrative possibilities he is invoking.
 The Eternal Man attributes what he perceives to be his awakening--
most immediately occasioned in the narrative by Ahania's death-to the
Lamb of God who (passively) "Is seen tho slain before [Jerusalem's] Gates


"intersects the outer
conflagration": which
Urizen is aware of as
caused by Los
(121:24-25)



The narrator's attention
is deflected from Uri-
zen's indifference to
Ahania's exulting
return.


The reference to Uri-
zen's daughters is
inserted in the margin of
page 121 as a revision,
thus bringing into exis-
tence Urizen's failure to
respond: without the
revision, there would be
no request to which Uri-
zen fails to respond.

Ahania's death awakens
the Eternal Man's aware-
ness of sexual division.