FOUR ZOAS IX / 132:9-24 (50:3-138:19)


 Harvest feast-music
 emerges.












Multiple functions ofthe
 sexual sequences that
 issue from the near
 repetition of "The feast
 was spread..."


















 In Night I, the feast
 functioned as a warlike
 analysis of the sexual
 politics of the Los/
 Enitharmon and Thar-
 mas/Enion plots.


tion to the temporal relation of these narrative events to each other
and partially conceals their analytical relation as realizations of alternative
possibilities.
 The music that accompanies the completion of the harvesting -"flute &
 harp & drum & trumpet horn & clarion" (132:9), as in Night I-again
 generates the feast, this time a harvest feast rather than the wedding feast of
 Night I. Even though since the end of the vision of Vala's world the
 narrative's primary field of operation has been the embedded structure of
 the feast, the explicit musical imagery bridges the gap between the linear
 sowing/harvest override plot and the feast's conscious return to the narra-
 tive surface.
 The near-repetition of the lines beginning "The feast was spread..."
 (132:10-12; 133:2-4) physically surrounds and encloses the embrace of
 Tharmas and Enion (132:36-37) and the trumpet sound that coincides with
 it (132:38). This near-repetition functions in at least two different ways: 1)
 as a bracketing or setting offofthe Tharmas/Enion embrace from the events
 that surround it-a sub-embedding of this feast sequence within the feast
 bracket; and 2) as initiating two parallel event-strands which are aspects of
 each other. In the first case, the events that follow 133:2-4 function as a
 perspective analysis of the Tharmas/Enion embrace (the narrative mode
 dominant in Nights I-VI); in the second case, the events that follow
 133:2-4 constitute analternative version of the Tharmas/Enion embrace (the
 dominant narrative mode in Nights VIIa and VIII). To the extent that these
 repeated lines mark a perspective analysis, the Tharmas/Enion union is
 re-enacted as the separation of the female from the Eternal Men at the feast
 (133:5-6). To the extent that this repetition generates narrative realizations of
 alternative possibilities, lines 132:10-12 set in motion those events that make
 the Tharmas/Enion union possible, while 133:2-4 initiates male and
 female separation. Blake's strategy is to superimpose these two pos-
 sibilities by means of the linear override which suggests that the Tharmas/
 Enion union is itself the narrative precondition of the separation of female
 from male.
 Thus sexual union/separation is a fundamental aspect of the feast plot
 here as it was in the first phase of the feast embedded structure earlier in
 Night IX, in which Ahania returned (125:26-35). The sexual dimensions
 of the feast dictate the momentary return of the "Regenerate Man" in
 132:10 as the feast returns explicitly to narrative consciousness, for "The
 Regenerate Man" originally entered the poem (126:3) along with the
 "Immortal" (126:5) as soon as Orc had consumedd himself" in flames
 (126:1-3). The terms "Regenerate" and "Immortal" originally occurred
 together in the Eternal Man's Lamb of God speech to Urizen to charac-
 terize the relation of female to male: "Immortal thou. Regenerate She"
 (122:12). The division between the "Regenerate Man" and the "Immortal"
 enacted a covert division of the Eternal Man into male and female aspects,
 which were then projected onto Luvah and Vala and then denied by the
Immortal's "reorganization" speech. The return of the "Regenerate Man"