Four Zoas Summary 4

Blake Archive

Four Zoas, Night ix, Page 128

Four Zoas, Night ix, Page 128, (E 397)
"Vala awoke. When in the pleasant gates of sleep I enterd
I saw my Luvah like a spirit stand in the bright air
Round him stood spirits like me who reard me a bright house
And here I see thee house remain in my most pleasant world"   

In the last Night Blake let all of his feelings out in a magnificent vision of apocalypse that bears comparison with the one John wrote: 

"Los his vegetable hands 
Outstretch'd; his right hand, branching out in fibrous strength, 
Siez'd the Sun; His left hand, like dark roots, cover'd the Moon, 
And tore them down, cracking the heavens across from immense to immense. 
Then fell the fires of Eternity with loud and shrill
Sound of Loud Trumpet thundering along from heaven to heaven 
A mighty sound articulate Awake ye dead & come To judgment from the four winds Awake & Come away"
(Four Zoas, Night ix, E 386)

     And on and on it goes, much too imposing to describe in this short review. But two things will be said:

     First, Blake draws on John's Apocalypse as he already has in Night viii. The strangest book in the Bible, utterly incomprehensible to the literal mind, has much to offer to the trained imagination. To read the end of 4Z with complete attention gives one a purchase on Blake's great source; Revelation begins to come alive in an exciting new way.

Second, as great as it is, Blake simply wasn't able to 'Christianize' his apocalypse as he had done the two previous Nights. Perhaps it was already too deeply stamped with his pre-Christian mind. Forgiveness is the soul, virtually the alpha and omega of Blake's Christ, but Night ix shows little or no evidence of this new spirit. Only in Jerusalem, in its last plates, do we find a thoroughly Christian apocalypse. Neither Revelation nor Night ix has much of forgiveness; what they do have is vengeance and retribution. Both writers had suffered much at the hands of the ungodly, and both looked with anticipation to the Day of Vengeance. So we must say that Night ix is a modern redoing of John's Apocalypse, while the end of Jerusalem is a Christian recreation of it.

     Blake's epic ends with the eternal man awake, his four Zoas back in union, each carrying out his appointed function in the harmonious consummation of the Age. In the last harvest Urizen reaps, Tharmas threshes, Luvah tramples out the vineyard and Urthona bakes the bread.

     Night ix contains much magnificent poetry. A few lines near the end will provide an appropriate end to this all too inadequate description of Blake's great poem:

"The Sun has left his blackness and has found a fresher morning, 

And the mild moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night, 

And Man walks forth from the midst of the fires: the evil is all consum'd.
... He walks upon the Eternal Mountains, raising his heavenly voice, 

Conversing with the Animal forms of wisdom night and day, 

... They raise their faces from the Earth, conversing with the Man:

"How is it we have walk'd thro' fires and yet are not consum'd? 

"How is it that all things are chang'd, even as in ancient times?"
The Sun arises from his dewey bed, and the fresh airs 

Play in his smiling beams giving the seeds of life to grow, 

And the fresh Earth beams forth ten thousand thousand springs of life."

(Four Zoas, Night ix, E 406) 

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Blake's myth is stated concisely in Blake's Four Zoas: The Design of a Dream by Brian Wilkie and Mary Lynn Johnson: 

"Albion is the whole person and mankind. His Emanation is Jerusalem, who represents the perfect freedom enjoyed by man in the unfallen state (called by Blake Eden or Eternity) where he is in harmony with himself and the world. The fallen state is a condition in which each of the four primal powers betrays what is best in himself and wars with the others." 

In The Four Zoas Blake follows the disintegration of Albion's original unity, his struggles as a divided self and the final resolution of Albion reborn as his constituent Zoas, each serving the whole.