LAMENT III

Blake Archive
British Museum
Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts
Object 26

Turning to the third lament of Enion which occurs near the end or Night III of the Four Zoas, we read words from 'the cold waters of despair.' One way that Blake expressed the situation in which Enion found herself was through the symbol of Atlantis, a lost continent which had been described by Plato. To Blake the deluge in which Tharmas and Enion were submerged could be represented by the mighty flood which wiped out a continent.

In Fearful Symmetry Northrop Frye gives us implications of what Atlantis symbolized to Blake:

"The fall of Albion included a deluge in which the center of Atlantis was overwhelmed and only fragments of the British Isles were left. The settlement of America by the English and revolt of America against the dead hand of English tyranny is therefore the dawn of a new age in which Atlantis begins to appear above the waves. In the meantime England still exists in the spiritual world as Atlantis, and Blake's engraved poems are on its mountains." (Page 126)

Enion's Third Lament 

Four Zoas, Page 44, Night III, (E 330)
"These are the words of Enion heard from the cold waves of despair

O Tharmas I had lost thee. & when I hoped I had found thee
O Tharmas do not thou destroy me quite but let
A little shadow. but a little showery form of Enion
Be near thee loved Terror. let me still remain & then do thou
Thy righteous doom upon me. only let me hear thy voice           
Driven by thy rage I wander like a cloud into the deep
Where never yet Existence came, there losing all my life
I back return weaker & weaker, consume me not away
In thy great wrath. tho I have sinned. tho I have rebelld
Make me not like the things forgotten as they had not been       
Make not the thing that loveth thee. a tear wiped away" 

Enion's lament in Night III expresses the further disintegration of the unified psyche. Together Tharmas and Enion were the most basic building block of the psyche. When Enion become too distant from Tharmas to hear his voice or know that he sustained her existence she asked only to be remembered.

When we think of the instinctual aspect of our minds as the Id, the part that initially incorporates the desire to maintain life itself, we get an intimation of the function of Tharmas and Enion. If Tharmas holds the desire for life to be expressed, and Enion the ability to express that desire, their integration into a unit is necessary to their existence. Tharmas without Enion is a chaotic flood which submerges Atlantis. It is as if the disorganized unconscious was threatening to withhold all psychic energy from other portions of the mind. Enion was the first to experience this loss by traveling farther and farther into nonexistence and finding it harder and harder to return.

If ordinary consciousness is lost when someone becomes mentally ill, the unconscious may gain control. Tharmas and Enion are what dominates the unconscious. For Enion to be completely lost to Tharmas would cut off any avenue to restoring order and consciousness. If Tharmas can remember Enion, she may draw him into a connection with the means of healing which the conscious mind may supply. 

Blake Archive
British Museum
Small Book of Designs
Copy A, Plate 8

Myth in Blake 8

The Spectre of Urthona, a new thing on Blake's imaginative horizon, foreshadowed the Moment of Grace which was to revolutionize his spiritual world. (Chapter One of Ram Horn'd with Gold dealt at length with these dynamics.)

Suffice it here to say that the appearance of the Spectre marks man's (and Blake's) dawning awareness that the evils of the world, which he had so deplored, exist in his own psyche. It marks what Jung referred to as the withdrawal of the projections, which Jung considered vital to the survival of the world. Blake agreed about the seriousness of the process; he stated it with great poetic intensity in the reversed writing found in the illustration to Jerusalem plate 41:

Jerusalem, Plate 41, (E 184)

"Each man is in his Spectre's power 

Until the arrival of that hour 

When his humanity awake 

And cast his Spectre into the Lake."

(Try reading lower left with a mirror!)

Yale Center for British Art
Jerusalem
Plate 41 

But in Night vii Los doesn't cast his Spectre into the lake; he embraces it, which in a manner of speaking is the same thing. In his play, After the Fall, Arthur Miller talked about "kissing the idiot', his way of expressing the same reality.

The reason Los doesn't (yet) cast his Spectre into the lake is because his humanity is not yet fully awake, but only beginning to awaken. As Blake aptly put it the redemptive union "was not to be effected without Cares & Sorrows & Troubles of six thousand years of self denial and of bitter Contition". That beautiful line points to the redemptive dimension of all the fallenness and horror we have been reading about. It was Blake's way of saying what Paul said in Romans: "All things work together for good to them that love God...." Blake and Jung and probably Paul would agree that we begin to love God (and stop trying to be God!) when we recognize and accept out own involvement in the horror around us. That's the moment when the six thousand years of change begins.

The birth of Rahab and the integration of Los lead to an intensification of a drama that has already stretched out for seven nights of excruciating intensity. In Night viii the drama has not only intensified, but it has clarified so that we can no longer fail to understand that the forces of life and of death are in bitter conflict. It has become the old, old story, and Blake leaves no doubt about who represents light and who darkness. Urizen resumes his war for control and out of his ranks of War comes Satan. Rahab conspires to put to death the Saviour who has come down from Heaven and emerged from Jerusalem. The Christian knows that this death is foreordained for final victory, but neither Rahab nor Jerusalem has that awareness, and near the end of Night viii we read these richly evocative words:

Four Zoas, Night VIII, Page 114 [111], (E 385)

"Jerusalem wept over the Sepulcher two thousand years. 

Rahab triumphs over all; she took Jerusalem 

Captive; a Willing Captive, by delusive arts impell'd 

To worship Urizen's Dragon form, to offer her own Children 

Upon the bloody altar. John saw these things revealed in Heaven

on Patmos Isle & heard the Souls cry out to be deliver'd"

THE JOURNEY IV

British Museum
For the Sexes: Gates of Paradise
Plate 2

For the Sexes: Gates of Paradise, Plate 2, (E 260) 
"2 Water 
Thou Waterest him with Tears" 


For the Sexes: Gates of Paradise, Plate 19, (E 268) 
Keys 
"2 Doubt Self Jealous Watry folly"



 



The dividing of consciousness into male and female as delineated in Plate 1, is followed by a recognition of further divisions. The next four plates portray the four elements of classical thought as ways in which the human consciousness manifests itself. 

Blake will in his prophetic works develop the symbol of water around his character Tharmas. In Plate 2 his image of man is surrounded with falling rain, his feet are touching what may be the rising water of a flood. The caption suggests that sorrow accompanies the condition of being dominated by water.

In the five words which Blake offers in his Key to this plate he suggests further separation and mistaken attitudes.

We may see this plate as a preview of Tharmas the Zoa of the Body and of sensation. Separated from the other Zoas by the flood of sense data in which he is immersed, he struggles to recover his emanation Enion whose laments reflect the Darwinian world.

Four Zoas, Night III, Page 45, (E 331)
"Enion return
Why does thy piteous face Evanish like a rainy cloud 
Page 46
Melting. a shower of falling tears. nothing but tears! Enion: 
Substanceless. voiceless, weeping. vanishd. nothing but tears! Enion
Art thou for ever vanishd from the watry eyes of Tharmas
Rage Rage shall never from my bosom. winds & waters of woe
Consuming all to the end consuming Love and Hope are ended 

For now no more remaind of Enion in the dismal air
Only a voice eternal wailing in the Elements"

Four Zoas, Night IV, Page 48, (E 332)
[Spoken by Tharmas to Los]
"But thou My Son Glorious in brightness comforter of Tharmas
Go forth Rebuild this Universe beneath my indignant power
A Universe of Death & Decay. Let Enitharmons hands               
Weave soft delusive forms of Man above my watry world
Renew these ruind souls of Men thro Earth Sea Air & Fire
To waste in endless corruption. renew thou I will destroy
Perhaps Enion may resume some little semblance
To ease my pangs of heart & to restore some peace to Tharmas"