FOUR ZOAS IX / 137:26-34


The troublesome pas-
sage in which Luvah is
 put for dung


ages" (137:26-27), none other than that which made Luvah "drunk" prior
to the orgy (135:22), rather than the "Human Wine" soon to emerge
(137:32). The sons still sing songs (albeit solemn), and they still joy, as if
dimly aware of the burden their actions take on as the poem approaches its
close.
 Suddenly, following all attempts to decipher the discrepancies in the
previous phase, the reader is confronted with the possibility that the previ-
ous six lines were really an inset in the narrative, a dream of Luvah and
Vala.Just prior to this episode, "Luvah & Vala slept"; immediately after it,
"Luvah & Vala woke." No further reference is made to the events enclosed
between these clauses, especially to Luvah's being put as dung. This
abrupt reversal calls to our attention that Vala is appearing in two conflict-
ing contexts in the same narrative field, ascending to the looms (above)
and asleep on the floor; and Luvah appears in two conflicting contexts as
well, asleep on the floor, and as dung on the ground (beneath). Vala is,
furthermore, conspicuously absent from the episode with Tharmas and
Urthona's sons (137:22-26).
 This apparently motiveless additional separation of the narrative
frustrates the reader's attempts to apply narrative embedding rules
undialectically and generates a sense of gratuitous parallel sub-division.
Just as the weaving shunts the reader back through the poem to Night I,
the phrase "Luvah & Vala woke" (137:28) is a direct quotation of Enithar-
mon's song to Los in Night I (10:11) (with "&" in Night IX replacing
"and" in Night I) where she recounted Luvah and Vala's ascent to usurp the
Fallen Man's Brain. Despite the repetition, the perspective in Night IX is
so radically altered that it seems in no way to constitute or refer back to
Night I. Yet when Luvah's sons and daughters awake, they all "reascend"
to the Eternal Man, as if they had ascended before, and perhaps the most
subversive context of that prior ascension was Night I. Here in Night IX:
"they reascended / To the Eternal Man in woe he cast them wailing into /
The world of shadows" (137:29-31). Blake strategically places "in woe" so
that they re-ascend in woe, and in woe the Eternal Man casts them wail-
ing. In casting out Luvah, Vala, and Luvah's sons and daughters, the
Eternal Man compulsively parodies and re-performs all previous attempts
by characters to suppress aspects of themselves they wish to deny.
 The Eternal Man's act, in fact, superimposes Urizen's casting of the
seeds "wailing" (125:5, 14) downward with the descent of Luvah and Vala
through the "Gates of Dark Urthona" into the world of shadows
(126:18-23): "he cast them wailing into / The world of shadows thro the
air till winter is over & gone" (137:30-31). In the process, the narrator
assimilates those previous images to the landscape of winter which links
the Eternal Man himself (through his binding to the fate of the grass-
hopper) to the tormentors of the wine presses.
 When the next section begins, "But the Human Wine stood wondering
in all their delightful Expanses," Blake thrusts us back to the in/around
dialectic that he had thoroughly suppressed by reintroducing (and causing