Four Zoas Summary

Four Zoas, Night i, PAGE 9, (E 304)

"And then they wanderd far away she sought for them in vain

In weeping blindness stumbling she followd them oer rocks & mountains"

       The Four Zoas is a very exotic masterpiece and most definitely an acquired taste. The reader initially encounters an appalling mass of strange ideas and much that appears to be sheer gibberish. But with perseverance the strange ideas become familiar bit by bit, and the gibberish clarifies into some of the most exalted thought forms of the human mind. To the seasoned reader 4Z is a treasure house of imaginative delights. Or call it a mine that releases its gold to the pertinacious. The same could be said of the Bible. 

      Blake wrote the poem over a period of years while his mind and spirit were rapidly developing and changing. It began as the story of Vala, the incarnation of the Female Will. Later it became an account of cosmic and psychic history written in terms of the four Giant Forms--their breakup and struggle for dominion. At Blake's spiritual crisis this seed bed gave birth to Jesus and Jerusalem, his bride. Blake then made an attempt to rewrite 4Z to reflect his new spiritual orientation, but after a while he gave up. 4Z was aborted because Blake's world had fundamentally changed, and he was ready to start over. After many years of looking for the New Age he had become a New Man. The new man wrote Milton and Jerusalem using 4Z as a quarry. 4Z is fascinating in its own right, although unfinished, but most significant as a platform from which to rise to the ethereal glory of the mature poems.

       Focusing on The Four Zoas Milton Percival, who wrote William Blake's Circle of Destiny, tells us that ten characters make up his myth: Two Albions (man), the Eternal One and the One who fell asleep down here in this vale of tears; Four Zoas (Urizen, Luvah, Los, and Tharmas) and their feminine parts (Ahania, Vala, Enitharman, and Enion).

       The first four nights of this aborted masterpiece recount the fall of each of the four Zoas: Tharmas, the body; Luvah, the feelings; Urizen, the mind; and finally Urthona (Los), the imagination or spirit. These four steps in the fall of Man contain a wealth of rich detail, but  one central event Blake described repeatedly in the words of various characters: Urizen and Luvah (Mind and Feeling) struggle for dominion over the sleeping man, Albion. Luvah seizes Urizen's steeds of light and mounts into the sky. Urizen retreats into the north, the rightful place of Urthona, the imagination. 

These mistakes lead to a long series of cataclysmic disasters that condemn mankind to his fallen condition. For six nights we read an almost unrelieved account of the Fall; we read about falling, about fallenness, described in voluminous detail in a hundred ways. Blake felt intensely that we have come a long, long way from the Garden, and he explored with exceeding minuteness every step of the dismal journey, down and out. (You might notice that as extensive as this negative mood is, it closely resembles the Old Testament, a great deal of which consists of flagellations of Israel by the prophets.)

       To begin our orientation to the poem look closely at the central event of the Fall. Blake put it in the mouths of several characters and each one has his or her own particular slant. The reader has to decide for himself whose account to believe. This may depend upon the reader as much as it does upon Blake.

       The earliest description of the central event comes in the words of Enitharmon, a notoriously untrustworthy character at this point; we may call her the queen of fallen space. In a conversation with her consort, Los, the prophetic boy, she gives her interpretation of the Fall:

"Hear! I will sing a Song of Death! it is a Song of Vala! 
The Fallen Man takes his repose, Urizen sleeps in the porch, 
Luvah and Vala wake and 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 and rose into the Chariot of Day. 
Sweet laughter siez'd me in my sleep..." (Four Zoas, Night i, E 305)

      Always fiercely eclectic, Blake has gathered his symbols here from a number of sources into a new creation: sleeping man equals fallen man living in darkness; this most general symbol fills the New Testament. For example, "Awake thou that sleepest, and Christ shall give thee light". We live by the light of reason (not always Christ's light!). Urizen, the Sun God, must be asleep to allow Luvah, like the Greek adolescent, Phaethon, to seize his Horses of Light and rise into the Chariot of Day. Zeus struck Phaethon down with a thunderbolt. In Night ii we find Urizen casting Luvah into the furnaces of affliction, where there is much heat but no light. What was once eternal delight has become unmitigated hell.

       Luvah and Vala personify the masculine and feminine dimensions of feeling, and separated from Luvah Vala becomes the goddess of fallen nature. Luvah's seizure of the sun and Vala's dalliance on the pillow express in different ways the same event. The Prince of Love is bound to get his wings scorched, and the sleeping Albion is rather foolish to allow this to happen; he has lost his head over a part of himself.

       Blake used this double event to say many things to us at many levels. Fundamentally Blake is saying that Man has lost his heavenly wholeness (which he calls the Divine Image) and begun to worship the material, a relatively insignificant part of himself. In his dream of Vala he turns his back upon the Divine Vision. The former is Eternal Death and the latter Eternal Life. The dalliance of Albion with Vala leads to the Eternal Death (fallenness) that we read about in the first six nights. Blake described it symbolically in many ways, for example, "to converse in the wilds of Newton and Locke". We find here Blake's primary dialectic, between eternal vision and fallen materialism.

TO BE CONTINUED