FOUR ZOAS IX / 122:24-123:26 (16:6-123:26)


 Within the Urizen
 bracket the function
of the Trumpet under-
 goes perspective
 transformation.


finding limits and establishing an absolute perspective ground. Except for
his admission of perpetuated error, which transforms the Lamb's ontology
of self-perpetuation, Urizen's speech is a series of questions that ends,
"Where shall we take our stand to view the infinite & unbounded / Or
where are human feet for Lo our eyes are in the heavens" (122:24-25).
(That this moment parallels 72:22ff confirms Urizen's assessment that his
error remains with him, that he has not changed.) His universal glance
finally sets on the heavens Los cracked at the beginning of IX; Urizen
gazes on "the heavens" in blindness to or in evasion of the singular "heaven"
out of which Jerusalem was said to be presently descending in the Eternal
Man's speech of sexual regeneration. The intersection of these two
conflicting aspects of the heavens, which Urizen's gaze both invokes and
denies, coincides with a splitting wide open of the narrative and ushers in
the Urizen frame-an abrupt but disguised shift, less disconcerting than
the transition from the Los/Urthona to Eternal Man frame. In this shift
the locale remains roughly the same-the explosion apparently taking
place where Urizen speaks-unlike the radically different location of the
Eternal Man in the first perspective transition; and, unlike the Eternal Man
in that prior shift, Urizen has already entered the narrative proper of
Night IX.

 Bracket 2, phase 1 is suppressed (122:25): Eternal Man

 Bracket 3, phase I opens (122:26): Urizen

 The explosion of the "bursting Universe" terminates Urizen's speech
and seems to re-enact the primary apocalyptic imagery that immediately
followed Los's cracking of the heavens. Blake's use of "bursting" in such
close proximity to the "bursting" of Ahania's blood vessels (which
separates her from Urizen) re-enacts, under drastic perspective transfor-
mation, the situation in Nights II and III when Ahania functioned simul-
taneously as Urizen's separated golden female counterpart and the golden
heavens he created. The initial sexual outburst ("Eternal Birth") of the
universe begins to wear down, the "shrill" trumpet of the Los phase
becoming reduced to the "muttring" trumpet here. A syntactic ambiguity
emphasizes this shift in the trumpet's voice. The lion, tyger, eagle, and
raven-the beasts and birds of prey that were previously central to the
fleeing motif-reappear among "every species / [who] Flock to the trum-
pet muttring over the sides of the grave & crying / In the fierce wind"
(122:34-36). What is "crying"-the species or the trumpet? The syntacti-
cally intertwined fate of the animals and the trumpet at this point in the
Urizen bracket contrasts with what appears to be another version of the
same event (the response of creatures to the trumpet) which occurred in
the Los/Urthona bracket where the creatures' voices were fully distinct
from the trumpet sound (118:28-40). The line "On rifted rocks suspended
in the air by inward fires" (122:37) faintly but sufficiently echoes the