FOUR ZOAS IX /BEYOND 139:10


 "End of The Dream"

 The words "End of The Dream," stand at the extreme boundary of the
Four Zoas text, beyond which no more verbal information of the poem
appears. Although Blake deleted the word "Dream" from the poem's title,
he let it stand as a condition of the poem's "End." The word "End,"
however, has at least three meanings in this context: 1) the closure of the
text or narrative, 2) the fulfillment of some desire or narrative sequence,
and 3) a gathering of events into their most extreme possibility. At first
glance, "The Dream"-whose "End" is marked by these words -seems to
be the entire poem itself retroactively revealed to be a dream only at the
moment it ends, closes, or ceases to exist.10 Such a conventional reading of
"End" as closure would project the words "End of The Dream" as merely
a textual marker and would thus undermine the role of this detail as
instrumental in enacting an event in both the reader and text through the
agency of the narrative."
 Because Urthona has taken "his repose in Winter in the night of Time"
 (138:19) following the dismal Mills/Ovens sequence and immediately
 prior to the sudden eruption of ostensibly positive imagery, line 138:20
 could mark the beginning of Urthona's wish-fulfillment dream of being
 unequivocally restored to his "ancient strength." As we have seen, how-
 ever, the apparently positive, resolving vision in the last thirty-one lines,
 culminating in the restoration of Urthona in the last 7 lines, is shot
 through with subversive resistances from prior contexts of the poem.
 Images reappear without acknowledgement of their previous associations
 with sleep, delusion, and withdrawal from consciousness: the rising Sun
 and energized pastoral landscape reappear from the "sweet delusions"
 sequence with Vala in her Garden and with her flocks, a vision which
 entertained the "sleepers" on the "Couches of Beulah" (131:20-21); the
 "mild moon" also reappears from Beulah; and Tharmas' "sweet Science,"
 associated with fleeing or departing into the "Void," reappears at the end.
 These internal resistances allow the confusion between "Eden," "Beu-
 lah," and "Eternity," which has haunted key points in the poem (notably in
 Nights I, VIIa, and IX itself), to intrude almost unconsciously into this
 closing sequence. Near the beginning of the poem, Eden is announced as
 the place where Los's name was Urthona (3:11-4:1), the place where male
 immortality derives from female deaths (5:1-3), and the place of "Perfect
 harmony" for the "one Man /They [those in Great Eternity] callJesus the
 Christ" (21:4-6). There is, however, no mention of "Eden," or "Eternity"
 or "Jesus" in the last thirty-one lines of the poem. Indeed, much of the
 imagery prior to the last thirteen lines, especially flocks, the tent of Man,
 and plains, seems more congruent with "Beulah" than with "Eden" or
 "Eternity," although the name "Beulah" is likewise absent from this clos-
 ing sequence. This imagery of flocks, the tent of Man, and plains specifi-
 cally recalls the Shadow of Enitharmon's account in Night VIla of the
preconditions in Beulah of the Luvah/Urizen conspiracy: "Urizen grew