NOTES


invoking and undermining the tools of the "rulers of the darkness of this world,"
including a massive revision of the way these forces make use of language to
constitute perception and sexual desire.
 2 What I am calling the "pseudo-invocation" is the sequence of propositional
statements that follows immediately upon the opening eight lines of page three
which have repeatedly halted the reader's forward movement by disruptive visual
signals such as punctuation and line endings. This second eight-line sequence in
the poem, unlike the first eight lines, seems to project a consistent narrative voice,
dispensing the privileged information that the previous lines denied the reader:
"[What] are the Natures of those Living Creatures the Heavenly Father only /
[Knoweth] no individual [Knoweth nor] Can know in all Eternity" (3:7-8). We have
already seen the effect of these lines in disorienting the reader's entry into the
poem, and, in a sense making any further reading of the poem irrelevant, unless it
is not the reader but only "those in all Eternity" who are exempt from com-
prehending the "Natures" of(supposedly) the "Four." A statement as definitive as
"Los was the the fourth immortal starry one" is especially unexpected: the lines
that follow contain a virtual overload of information, and their placement so early
in the poem, following the destabilizing beginning, makes them seem especially
important:

 Los was the fourth immortal starry one, & in the Earth
 Of a bright Universe Empery attended day & night
 Days & nights of revolving joy, Urthona was his name
 In Eden; in the Auricular Nerves of Human life
 Which is the Earth of Eden, he his Emanations propagated
 Fairies of Albion afterwards Gods of the Heathen, Daughter of Beulah
 Sing
 His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity
 His fall into the Generation of Decay & Death & his Regeneration by
 the Resurrection from the dead
 (3:9-4:5)

These lines could serve as a corrective to the disorienting eight-line sequence
which concluded with the cognitive disclaimer of 3:7-8, but instead they raise
problems of a different sort. We may connect the female "Daughter of Beulah"
most directly with the "Aged Mother," whose "Song" opened the poem, and
indirectly with the "Brotherhood" and the "Heavenly Father." The connection
between "Mother" and "Daughter" and between two kinds of singing is perhaps
the most natural one to make in this welter of information. This connection is
partially obscured, however, by the lines which precede the appearance of the
"Daughter." First Los is a "starry one," then is located in the "Earth / Of a bright
Universe": "starry"suggests night and wide, vast spaces; "Earth" suggests a planet
(or element), a member of a universe; and "bright" revises the sense of night. The
syntax of 3:9-11 renders it indeterminable whether Los is attending the Universe
Empery or whether it is attending him. In either case, the reduction of the Uni-
verse to the Earth severely restricts his field of operations or dominion. The
division into "Days & nights of revolving joy" seems to make the planetary image
clearer, but while the Earth may revolve, how can "joy" revolve? Does this image
suggest that revolving is itself a specific form ofjoy? When the name "Urthona"
appears (3:11), it is unclear whether it connects to the image of revolving joy or is a
new syntactic unit.


Note 2: page 27