SWERVING FROM THE MAN'S TRANSFORMATIONS


regeneration (122:19), the plot which has been absent from the narrative
proper. This shift in action following the repulsion by the flames parallels
Urizen's prior arousal from lethargy: while being reminded of his past
glory by the Eternal Man, Urizen remained inert and silent; but when the
Eternal Man threatened to cast him out, Urizen was goaded into concilia-
tory action. Later, Urizen was able to evade the Eternal Man's doctrinaire
speech which extolled the virtues of sexuality, but now he is roused
(through the mediation of his "Sons"), by the vision of the Cloud and his
repulsion by the flames of Consummation, with the same kind of activity
the Eternal Man admonished him to perform in order to live the sexual life
of Eternity -seasonal agricultural labor.
 Urizen's response is, however, narratively delayed and detoured
through his Sons, the male sexual offspring who suddenly appear as a
reflex to the failure of the "Redeemd Man" to "enter the Consummation."
The verb Blake uses to make the transition to the Son's activity is "siezd,"
which Blake previously used at the moment the "Lions of Urizen" subtly
usurped the forging activities of Urthona (28:25). In addition, Blake has
used this verb repeatedly in the context of political and sexual usurpation
(especially in Luvah's seizing the horses of light from Urizen and most
recently in the accusers' seizing the oppressors in revenge [123:5]); now
Blake smuggles this verb into his narrative argument at the moment the
narrative appears to be undergoing a decisive positive transformation-
Urizen's Sons' taking control of the "Plow" and the beasts turning from
battle to song: "They Sing they sieze the instruments of harmony"
(124:17). Because the events transpiring here claim to reinstate a prior
(presumably rightful and productive) power structure, the Sons of Ur-
thona suddenly appear, as if to reclaim their work of forging; but they
disappear just as suddenly, absorbed into the activity of forging itself.
Because this sequence-the forging of instruments of war into farming
tools -so obviously inverts the scene in Night VIIb (92:17-33) where rural
tools are forged into war implements, it conceals the subservient and
nominal role of Urthona's Sons, a lingering but repressed residue (or
precondition) of Urizen's plot in Night I to claim Urthona's northern
region for his own (21:23). This remnant of the earlier plot is betrayed by
Urizen's apparently incidental laying of his "Plow in the northern corner"
exactly at the moment he turns "the horses loose" (125:1), thereby covertly
enacting his plan to relinquish his horses to Luvah in that same conference
in Night I.
 Even though this sequence, unlike events surrounding it, is narrated
under the fiction of linear causal order, with its reiterated "Then...
then...," its final phase subverts the univocality of such causal order.
When Urizen vividly drives "the Plow of ages over Cities... Over the
Planets / And over the void Spaces over Sun & moon & star & constella-
tion" (124:26-29), the power of the imagery makes it easy to forget that
this event should not be possible at this point in the narrative since the
universe has recently burst apart in Urizen's own presence (122:26), and


In Night V Urizen says,
"We fell. I siezd thee
dark Urthona In my left
hand falling /I siezd thee
beauteous Luvah"
(64:28-29).















Residues of Urizen's
usurpation plot in Night
I