CONTEXTUALIZING AHANIA'S REAPPEARANCE


are precisely the aspects of Urizen that are suppressed in this episode: "the
Prince," in Night III, had fallen to the "places of Human Seed" (44:3),
while "the King" had folded himself in despair (43:23); then in Night VIII
"the King" himself had fallen into the Dragon form (106:41).
 The dominant sowing plot almost completely obscures the entrance of
the feast as a bracketed structure, which Blake marks with two lines he
later added to the poem, in which Urizen's "daughters" arrive with wine,
bread, and "delicate repasts." This inconspicuous entrance establishes false
expectations and belies the significance the feast is to have. Later in Night
IX, when the "feast" is conspicuously introduced by name and extended
beyond the feast framework itself, it retroactively obscures even further
this emergence of the bread, wine, and music as the narrative origin of the
feast as an embedded structure in Night IX. As the feast bracket opens, an
aspect of agricultural work continues as if it were an aspect of a linear plot
(the "Then's" continue), though technically agricultural work is at this
point a function of the feast.

 Bracket 3, phase 1 is suppressed (125:14): Urizen

 Bracket 4, phase 1 opens (125:15): The Feast

 The reappearance of music should reassure the reader (at least sublimi-
nally) that the feast is emerging, since from Night I on the feast has been
literally constituted by music. At first, the music ("ravishing melody of
flutes & harps & softest voice" [125:18]) seems to be an incidental accom-
paniment to the harrowing, an action which itself concludes with another
loop in time: the souls "look out from their graves," (the "places of Human
Seed" [44:3; 91:1]) as if the trumpet had never sounded, confirming that
the opening of the feast bracket, in one sense, shifts perspective tempo-
rally backwards, to before the trumpet sounds. Tharmas' Trumpet
appears and disappears precisely at the interface between the Urizen and
feast frames. The brass is replaced by woodwinds and strings.
 As soon as Urizen "sits," the perceptual inertia that infects all perspec-
tives begins to reappear. Urizen-who had earlier rejected the feast
(121:3-4)-now drinks and sings and enters into "sweet repose." This
context mystifies the sudden reappearance ofAhania, as does the fact that
she returns not in the spring as the Eternal Man had insisted she must, but
"like the harvest Moon" (125:26). Before they enter into "sweet repose,"
which is as much a place as a state of mind, Urizen and his Sons passively
"view" Orc's flames and the harvest springing up. Ahania's reappearance
is, however, not couched in the syntax of"viewing," but simply asserted
as if it were an unambiguous event. This shift could imply her appearance
is a "fact" and not a delusion-or just the opposite, an absorption into the
dream so complete that it no longer seems to be a dream. Blake thus
renders it impossible for the reader to know whether or not Ahania's
resurrection is a dream, because the narrator refuses to make the distinc-


The lines that initiate the
feast bracket (125:25-26)
were inserted as a revi-
sion between two other
lines and up the right
margin of the man-
uscript.


Ahania's return in the
context of sitting and
viewing at the feast