NARRATOR/NARRATIVE: NIGHT AND MORNING


deal to decontaminate the image of morning. The simile that connects
the Sun to Man through the agency of morning-that is, the renovated
Sun is like "a New born Man" only in the morning-does just the oppo-
site; it reintroduces the "New born Man," a term used only once before
in a moment of crisis in the poem: the moment at the feast when the Eter-
nals, turning away from the separate female, embraced the "New born
Man...sounding loud their instruments of joy / Calling the Morning
into Beulah" (133:27-30).
 Though the presence of the images of "Morning," "New born Man,"
and musicaljoy discloses the intersection of these two narrative moments,
the elimination of Beulah from the end of Night IX is decisive, as is the
narrator's choice of a simile ("like a New born Man") that simultaneously
distances the two events. Thus this moment near the end of Night IX both
intersects and deflects the moment at the feast when the Eternals called
forth a dawn that was, with considerable narrative probability, false. The
complete absence of conscious reference to the feast (despite the repeated
references to consumed") to Beulah, and to the separate female reveals the
emergent narrative world's power either to eradicate authentically or to
repress/deny aspects alien to its internal organization. The next line, "Call-
ing the Plowman to his Labour & the Shepherd to his rest" (138:29),
situates this present moment of dawn at a boundary, specifically between
"Labour" and "rest" (recalling the single line on page two of the man-
uscript, "Rest before Labour"), and makes this boundary a point of tran-
sition caught, nevertheless, in the natural cycle. This moment is the
interface between the Plowman and the Shepherd (though no character
names appear, Urizen and Tharmas are most likely implied).
 Further, "New born Man" and the "songs & Joy" which recall the
Eternal's "Calling the Morning into Beulah" with "their instruments of
joy" parallels the transition back to audible language from musical sound:
"with songs & Joy / Calling the Plowman...." Just as in the previous
segment "Man walks forth," so here "He walks upon the Eternal Moun-
tains raising his heavenly voice / Conversing," drawing into his act of
walking the auditory/verbal communication absent in the previous six
lines. Though "He" seems to be the Sun, it is not possible to rule out the
possibility that it is Man. This indeterminacy arises because the Sun has
become syntactically indistinguishable from Man in the previous six-line
section by means of the simile, "like a New born Man[.]"
 The appearance of "Conversing" simultaneously raises and denies the
desperation of Vala's attempts to converse with the Sun and then with her
flocks and brings into existence in this aspect of the narrative the Sun/Man
"Conversing with the Animal forms of wisdom night & day," creatures
which emerge at exactly the moment those songs and Joy are undergoing
transformation into verbal conversation. This "Conversing" is not
restricted to morning but extends throughout the diurnal cycle, "night &
day," returning to the earlier image of the "Angelic spheres arising night &
day" (138:23). These "Animal forms of wisdom" created by "Convers-


The simile of the "New
born Man" does not
purify the contaminated
image of morning in
prior contexts but rather
recalls one specific con-
text ofnarrative crisis.






















The intersection of
music and speech
through "Calling"