r (i s ^? AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY ^^ VOLUME 20 NUMBER 4 SPRING 1987 BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SPRING 1987 CONTRIBUTORS P. M. S. DAWSON teaches at the University of Manches• ter and is the author of The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (1980). He is working on a study of John Clare and his historical background, as well as edit• ing a number of Shelley's notebooks for The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts (Garland). CATHERINE HAIGNEY is a doctoral candidate at the AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY University of Virginia and a lecturer in English at VOLUME 20 NUMBER 4 SPRING 1987 Vanderbilt University. She is writing a dissertation on Chaucerian dream vision. NANCY M. IDE, Assistant Professor of Computer CONTENTS Science at Vassar College, received her Ph.D. in English with a minor in Computer Science from Pennsylvania 116 Vala's Garden in Night the Ninth: Paradise State University in 1982. She is president of the Associa• Regained or Woman Bound? by Catherine tion for Computers and the Humanities and is complet• Haigney ing a book on computer programming for literary and 125 Image Patterns and the Structure of William linguistic analysis. Blake's The Four Zoas by Nancy M. Ide 134 Blake and Providence: The Theodicy of The Four PETER OTTO teaches English at the University of Zoas by P. M. S. Dawson Adelaide. He recently completed Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction, a doctoral dissertation, concerned with the relationship between Los, Time, and DISCUSSION Eternity in Blake's later poetry. 144 Final States, Finished Forms, and The Four Zoas STEVEN GOLDSMITH is Assistant Professor of English by Peter Otto at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research investigates the strategies by which English romantic writers resisted the lure of internal and ahistor- REVIEWS ical apocalypse. 146 Robert F. Gleckner, Blake's Prelude: Poetical DONALD H. REIMAN, Editor of Shelley and his Cir• Sketches, reviewed by Michael J. Tolley cle, is writing on Byron and Countess Guiccioli for 151 James King and Charles Ryskamp, eds., The volume 9 of that edition and transcribing materials for The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts (Garland). letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, reviewed by Donald H. Reiman MICHAELJ. TOLLEY, Reader in English at the Univer• 154 Thomas J. J. Altizer, History as Apocalypse, sity of Adelaide, is at work on the page-by-page Night reviewed by Steven Goldsmith Thoughts commentary. NEWSLETTER 15 8 Blake Exhibition and Conference at the Hunting• ton, Collaborators Invited, Blake in Buffalo, A "Musical Illumination" of Blake's Songs All illustrations in this issue are from The Four Zoas, reproduced by permission, courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. SPRING 1987 BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY EDITORS INFORMATION Editors: Morris Eaves, University of Rochester, and Managing Editor: Patricia Neill. Morton D. 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An . /It,,. .,£» mJll |^ — ,/i»r PAGE 116 BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY SPRING 1987 Vaia's Garden in Night the Ninth: Paradise Regained or Woman Bound? BY CATHERINE HAIGNEY The "pastoral" dream in the last pages of William Blake's It is not at all easy to see exactly how Blake's Four Zoas lies at the center of Night the Ninth, whether Beucolic vision fits in with the rest of Night the Ninth. you count lines or Blake's own pages.' The fact that this The dream begins with Luvah and Vaia's descent to the apocalyptic pastorale occurs at the Night's exact middle, "Gates of Dark Urthona," a descent which: "those upon dividing one half of Blake's upheaval of the universe the Couches viewd ... in the dreams of Beulah / As from its tortured other half, makes it seem very much they reposed from the terrible wide universal harvest" the hurricane's calm eye, and so most scholars tend to (126:375, 383-84; E 395). It fades away with a tense take it. Blake's reapers, resting "upon the Couches of union between Tharmas and Enion as "shadows ... in Beulah,"are "entertaind" (131:558; E 400) by his vision Valas world"; "the sleepers who rested from their harvest of Vaia's Garden, a kind of Beucolic dream. (Note the work" still watching "entertaind upon the Couches of useful neologism: "Beulah" + "bucolic" = "Beucolic") Beulah" (131:556-58; E 400). The narrative dream se• Yet the "dews of death" in this dream, its "impressions quence in between these lines seems at first entirely at of Despair" (126:389, 377; E 395), convey a subtle odds with the rest of Blake's cataclysmic Ninth Night: uneasiness, a disturbance especially noticeable when the pervading imagery comes from traditional pastoral, and visionary imagery condenses around Blake's female fig• a rich lyrical language echoes Latin myth, the lore of ures. For the Emanations undergo curious sufferings. paradise, the Song of Songs. Critics intent on bending Male Zoas seem to encircle them with doubt, fear, and Night the Ninth into coherent shape describe this Beu• anxiety—the very atmosphere they move in disconcerts lah dream as an interruptive "pastoral interlude," an our expectations of pastoral. A reader who pays close innocent dalliance or "masque"' dished up by Blake as attention to Blake's females will find it hard to accept welcome relief from the terrifying earthquake tumult of the traditional interpretation, put forth by Northrop his final Night. Yet even when his language recalls pas• Frye, Harold Bloom, and others, that this Ninth Night toral and hymn, even as he soothes us, like the har• vision is a joyful celebration of innocence amid the throes vesters, into a reverie of fantastic loveliness, Blake lulls of final universal regeneration.2 By questioning the gen• us into a false sense of security. der conflicts in Vaia's Garden, this reader will also ques• The poet's description of Vaia's Garden strikes at tion critics' attempts to inflict "closure" on the Four Zoas its outset a jarring note unheard in conventional pas• as a whole. How can there be universal regeneration toral, however melancholy: "in the shadows of Valas when male and female remain at war? garden / ... the impressions of Despair & Hope for This paper will argue (against a number of scholars) ever vegetate" (126:376-77; E 395). Such lines remind that through its female figures the dream subverts rather us, before we succumb to the roseate vision of Vala than celebrates pastoral as usually defined, and that this frolicking with her docile flock, that only fourteen lines subversion compromises the rest of Blake's Ninth Night. before their descent into this garden, Luvah and Vala With a bizarre repetitive effect, near-identical episodes were "the flaming Demon & Demoness of Smoke. "The of sexual conflict disperse throughout the poem. Blake's transformation, as so often in Blake, has been from one females seem doomed to a cyclical, not a linear narrative, extreme to another, but one wonders in what sense the and in reenacting failures, they set a pattern that detracts pair have changed. For Luvah and Vala actually preserve from the finality of apparently apocalyptic events in something of their smoky, demonic natures in a sub• Night the Ninth. For too long we have viewed the poem terranean world quite foreign to the setting of pastoral, as somehow forward-directed in time: the recurring events normally a hill in the open air. It seems odd that Blake of Blake's recycling poetry overthrow that tendency and should bury his fields—his "garden"—beneath the ground, along with it the tendency to view male Zoas and their and beyond the dark hellish gates of Urthona.