NOTES


These lines both clarify and conflict with the subsequent action of the poem, all the
way through Night VIII. One thing they do is implicate Los and Enitharmon's
drawing of the Spectre out of Enion with their drawing of the Lamb into a mortal
form, which is surprisingly congruent with the Lamb's assuming the role of the
Spectres woven by Enitharmon in Night VIII (103:32-104:4). The inclusion of
these lines not only would have made Los's fictional parable involving his sexual
relationship to Enitharmon into something quite different, it would have given
Los access to information that he could not possess at this point in the temporal
unfolding of the plot.
 32 The page numbering of the text follows that of the manuscript as bound in the
British Museum, and Erdman follows the conjectural arrangement made by
Keynes and Bentley: 18, 21, 22, 19, 20. This arrangement is now generally
accepted, and my argument depends on this ordering. It does raise serious prob-
lems, however, for the kind of structural weight I attribute to the pages as they
stand in this order. For example, Blake wrote "End of The First Night" following
18:15 and again following 19:15. The material on page 20, which I use as the basis
of the second division of the "Eternity" bracket, may have been deleted by Blake
(see E, p. 747, 827). Thus my reading is certainly conjectural but makes excellent
sense in terms of the narrative strategies Blake uses elsewhere in the poem. All of
pages 18-22 seem of relatively late composition.
 In Night IX the plots of the "golden feast" and "Eternity," which are divided
in Night I, collapse into one at precisely the moment the female separates from the
suddenly multiple "Eternal Men": "And Many Eternal Men sat at the golden feast
to see / The female form now separate They shudderd at the horrible thing"
(133:5-6).
 34 See Concordance, p. 399.
 35 The shock of Enion's murdering Enitharmon (22:22-24) is somewhat diluted
by the inclusion of Enion's conversation with the Spectre in the 1982 Erdman
edition: "I thought Tharmas a Sinner & I murder his Emanations" (7:1). Blake's
inclusion of"Embalmd in Enions bosom / Enitharmon remains a corse such thing
was never known / In Eden that one died a death never to be revivd" (22:24-26) still
renders this account in the second primary bracket fundamentally incommensura-
ble with the accounts in which Enitharmon remains in Tharmas' bosom (4:13-14)
and in which Enion gives birth to Enitharmon (8:1ff).



 Region B

 Below 9:33 guided in from the margin, Blake wrote "Night the Second," and
W.H. Stevenson takes this as the beginning of Night II for his The Poems of William
Blake, (New York: Norton, 1972). Since Blake wrote "End of The First Night" on
both page 18 and page 19 (see Note 32, "Region A"), Erdman, Keynes, and Bentley
(though less certainly) take page 23 as the beginning of "Night the [Second],"
which ends unambiguously on page 36. Page 23 was headed, in order, "Night the
Third," Night the First," "Night the First" but never "Night the Second." Accord-
ing to Erdman, it would have been "Third" when Night II began on page 9 and
was apparently tried and rejected twice as "First" (E. p. 747, 827).
 2 "Albion" originally read "The Man" (E, p. 747, 828).
 Erdman notes that this extended disruptive insertion was "obviously fair
copy from a working draft" (E, p. 748, 828).


Note 32: page 94












Note 33: page 94





Note 34: page 98
Note 35: page 102


Note 1: page 113









Note 2: page 117
Note 3: page 119