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Night Dreams: the Four Zoas 4 Night Dreams: The Four Zoas ‘The Bible of hell, in nocturnal visions collected – Vol. 1. Lambeth’1 To begin with the title. The first, VALA, The Death and Judgment of the Ancient Man a Dream of Nine Nights by William Blake 1797 was crossed through, with, written above: ‘The Four Zoas: The Torments of Love & Jealousy in The Death and Judgment of Albion the Ancient Man’. This was followed by the next page, ‘Rest before labour’ with a pencil-drawing of a male nude, and on page 3, a Biblical quotation (Ephesians 6.12), and the title, ‘VALA: Night the First’ with the text beneath. Below that comes a picture of a sexually provocative Vala, reclining in a posture analogous to Michelangelo’s awakening Adam, which she parodies.2 The idea of the dream, a night thought, remains as a palimpsest, while ‘night’ appears some hundred times, in a work called neither a book, or a prophecy; and because not engraved, remaining incomplete, non- centred renderings of thoughts whose lack of organization and incom- pleteness point to the melancholia in ‘torments of love & jealousy’.3 The term recalls Theotormon in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. The Four Zoas combines two things impossible to unite: narrative, which implies consistency of space and time, and night thoughts, moments in ‘an aweful pause’ which brings narrative to an end or else makes it exfoliate irreconcilably. Torments of love and jealousy (like energy and reason) violently change or annihilate the self, but the subject is division within ‘Man’ – the ‘Four Mighty Ones’ – Urthona, named Los, in his state of loss of Eden, Tharmas, Luvah, and Urizen. Tharmas is, in one beginning, ‘Parent power, darkning in the West’ (4, 4.6, E. 301, K. 264): he is father of Los. ‘Dark’ning’ has associations of the loss of the day, and Tharmas 71 J. Tambling, Blake’s Night Thoughts © Jeremy Tambling 2005 72 Blake’s Night Thoughts sinking into the sea evokes the west, the evening (the German Abendland), and so night and night thoughts. However many accounts of the fall appear, the concept of a fall is already apparent in the name ‘Urthona’, for possessing the earth as owner initiates jealousy since jealousy implies possession (in two senses of that word). Urizen’s name first appears, in Visions of the Daughters of Albion 5.3 (E. 48, K. 192), with the qualifier, ‘Father of Jealousy’ (7.12, E. 50, K. 194). ‘Jealous’ compares with its cognate, ‘zeal’, as with ‘In trembling zeal he siez’d his hair’ (the Priest in ‘A Little Boy Lost’, E. 28, K. 218). Jehovah shows ‘zeal’ in For the Sexes; a text which also supplies the term: ‘Self Jealous’, for the man under the tree of whom the emblem says, ‘Thou Waterest him with Tears’: the tears being Tirzah’s, who appears in Night the Eighth. Jealousy in Young, in the context of male friendship, is controllable: since Friends grow not thick on ev’ry bough, Nor every Friend unrotten at the core, First, on thy Friend, deliberate with thyself: Pause, ponder, sift; not eager in the Choice, Nor Jealous of the chosen. (2.581–5) In Blake, jealousy, implying possession, and the fear of losing that, with its feeling of identity-loss, cannot be so moved away from. ‘Jealous’ and ‘jealousy’ appear some twenty-six times in the text, the first a deleted ‘jealous despair’ (1.27, E. 819, K. 264). Whenever jealousy appears, as in Blake’s noticing it in his patron William Hayley (who will be, Blake writes, ‘no further My friend than he is compelld by circumstances . As a poet he is frightend at me & as a Painter his views & mine are opposite’ (letter of 30 January 1803, E. 725, K. 819)), it seems Urizenic. Gender splittings in the text are part of wider splittings which make it impossible to trace The Four Zoas through its several re-writings. I shall not attempt to follow what is now called ‘the genetic text’ as opposed to the ‘reading text’ but to read it as it currently stands, though a unified text put together chronologically in terms of actions or in terms of writing, is an impossible dream, and nothing can be made to depend on arguing for acceptance of one order of events. Night thoughts presuppose splittings within the text, which argue not for an originary psychic split, but that there can be nothing but a split state to start with. Night Dreams: The Four Zoas 73 Night the first The first splitting, assuming the priority of the First Night over the Second, is between Tharmas and his Emanation, Enion, who, accusing, finds ‘Sin’ in Tharmas (1.45). Division means, according to Tharmas, Enion anatomizing the ‘infant joy’, so finding nothing but ‘Death, Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy’ (4, 1.49, 51, E. 302, K. 265). This is male sexuality put under scrutiny. Tharmas’s loss and his replace- ment by the Spectre means that Enion is held by his ‘jealous wings’ (1.176, K. 269). These give birth to Los, and to Enitharmon, whose name includes elements of the names of both Tharmas and Enion. The children are twice associated with the number nine, as was Enion (5, 1.86, E. 302, K. 266), as if following Young who, in his turn, follows Milton on the Fall of Satan: ‘Nine times the space that measures Day and Night / To mortal men, he with his horrid crew / Lay vanquished’ (Paradise Lost 1.50–2). ‘Nine’ implies a growth of intensity, which cannot be separated from, which means that Los and Enitharmon, as the next generation, do more than simply replicate the conflict in sexuality that Tharmas and Enion have experienced: ‘Alternate Love and Hate his breast: hers Scorn & Jealousy’ (9, 1.237, E. 305, K. 270). The revised subtitle of the poem appears here, but it will be noted in this ranking of qualities that it is worse to be the woman than the man. Enitharmon sings a Song of Death, a Song of Vala, perhaps saying in that that she is Vala, who is associated with Luvah. Her song conveys the sense of people sleeping and in doing so allowing usurpation, another taking the place of one self, confounding identities and splitting: The Fallen Man takes his repose: Urizen sleeps in the porch Luvah and Vala wake & fly up from the Human Heart Into the Brain; from thence upon the pillow Vala slumber’d. And Luvah siez’d the Horses of Light, & rose into the Chariot of Day Sweet laughter siezd me in my sleep! silent & close I laughd For in the visions of Vala I walkd with the mighty Fallen One I heard his voice among the branches, & among sweet flowers. Why is the light of Enitharmon darken’d in dewy morn Why is the silence of Enitharmon a terror & her smiles a whirlwind Uttering this darkness in my halls, in the pillars of my Holy-ones Why does thou weep as Vala? & wet thy veil with dewy tears, In slumbers of my night-repose, infusing a false morning? Driving the Female Emanations all away from Los (10, 1.261–73, E. 305–6, K. 271) 74 Blake’s Night Thoughts Luvah, like Phaeton, has grasped an opportunity, while Urizen, who may also be the Fallen Man, slept. Vala possesses the brain, and Luvah, embodying passion, has possessed the horses, so that the sexual holds the power of the intellect. But there is a split between Luvah and Vala, while it seems that the Fallen One, Urizen, is also collusive with Vala, who may also be Enitharmon (who ‘weeps as Vala’), and who in a show of power has separated the Female Emanations from Los. The woman is associated with night, since she is dark in her ‘dewy morn’, a phrase contrasting with the ‘dewy eve’ of Mulciber’s fall (Paradise Lost 1.743) and inviting the thought of renewal. The point is repeated from line 253, where Enitharmon is ‘frowning / Dark as a dewy morning when the crimson light appears’. The colour recalls ‘The Sick Rose’. Her ‘dewy tears’ invade the slumbers of masculine night repose with the thought of a joyous dawn that cannot come. Dawn is promised but is baffled by her: night remains. But Urizen’s alienation seems worst since, as Los says, he refuses to behold the Divine Image, so that he has sunk down into a deadly sleep (11, 1.290, E. 825, K. 272). The ‘Divine Image’ recalls the Songs of Innocence poem (E. 32, K. 117), where it appears twice, and there is a comparable phrase in the last Night: If Gods combine against Man Setting their Dominion above The Human form Divine. Thrown down from their high station In the Eternal heavens of Human Imagination: buried beneath In dark Oblivion with incessant pangs ages on ages In Enmity & war first weakend then in stern repentance They must renew their brightness & their disorganizd functions Again reorganize till they resume the image of the human . (126, 9.366–72, E. 395, K. 366) The section implies that the nature of a God is to be an abstract force different from and therefore dangerous to ‘the human form divine’. ‘Setting their dominion’ comes, like much in this poem, from Isaiah 14.12–20 where Lucifer aimed to take his place ‘in the sides of the north’: the gods are Lucifer and Milton’s Satan. The passage centres, and validates ‘the human form divine’. ‘The Divine Image’, which does not, unusually for Innocence, involve children, which would give it empirical specificity, invokes moral virtues, Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love, which it calls ‘these virtues of delight’.
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