NARRATIVE INTERRUPTIONS AT TEXTUAL BOUNDARIES


 Bracket 6, phase 2 closes (131:19): Tharmas and Enion as Children


 Bracket 5, phase 2 opens (131:20): Luvah and Vala

 Bracket 5, phase 2 closes (131:21): Luvah and Vala
 The narrator's explicit demarcation of embedded structures at this point
is the most obvious in the entire poem and calls attention to how exten-
sively we ourselves have been lured into the dream. We too have
suppressed the wracking confusion; our own senses have become orbed;
and we too have been entertained by these perverse visions, which Blake
will now proceed to eradicate just as totally as Vala's world succeeded in
repressing its immediate narrative context, the harvest. Blake accom-
plishes this feat by turning his narrative inside out.


 Bracket 4, phase 2 opens (131:22): The Feast
 Immediately after referring to the sleepers on the "Couches of Beulah"
(which officially closes the previous phase), Blake shifts to one of the most
complex and compressed sequences in the entire poem, an episode which
is conceptually, narratively, syntactically, and imagistically almost
impenetrable. While it fuses together multiple references from through-
out the poem, it simultaneously introduces an apparently utterly new
element-the exhalation of "the spirits of Luvah & Vala thro the atmos-
phere" (131:33).
 Blake initiates this phase by making, between this embedded structure
and the one preceding it, one of the most explicit transitional connections
in the poem: When Luvah & Vala were closed up in their world of shadowy
forms," as if what follows ("Darkness was all beneath") is to be a tempo-
rally simultaneous aspect of that which has just been narrated. While the
imagery of light and darkness connects the upper and lower spatial worlds,
the near absence of light "beneath" separates this lower dark world from
the upper (131:22-24). These neat temporal and spatial connections are
interrupted, however, by a simile: "Such as glows out...." Then suddenly
the temporal and analogical functions fuse to become a temporally
embedded simile, "As when the wind sweeps over a Corn field...," which
is never unambiguously completed in the text. Does the "As when" clause
continue the "When Luvah & Vala..." clause or the "Such as glows..."
clause? Does it start a new simile and establish expectations for its closure?
How does the harvest relate to the "torrent Floods of heaven" (which
suddenly force back to the surface a version of the bloody torrents
[119:5-12] as ifa reflex to the simile of glowing light itself)?
 The syntax that purports to expand this simile treats the events of the
harvest in the narrative proper as if they were hypothetical and interfuses
several disparate contexts into it:


Emergence into narra-
tive importance of the
conflict between above
and beneath at the bound-
ary of withdrawal from
the Luvah/Vala bracket.




Syntactic interruptions at
the boundary of re-entry
into the Feast bracket