Abstract
As in The Book of Urizen, a disaster opens The Four Zoas, and also like the earlier poem, the catastrophe is shadowy and unknown. G. E. Bentley transcribes the heavily revised opening of The Four Zoas thus:
[The Song of the Aged Mother] which shook the heavens with wrath
[Hearing the march of long resounding strong heroic Verse
[Marshalld in order for the day of Intellectual Battle]
The heavens shall quake. the earth [was] shall move[d] & shudder[d] & the mountains
With all their woods, the streams & valleys: wail[d] in dismal fear1
And the vast form of Nature like a serpent roll’d between.
Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we know not.
(Blake, The Four Zoas)
Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?
(Blake, The Book of Thel)
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Notes and References
‘Vala or the Four Zoas’, A Facsimile of the Manuscript, a Transcript of the Poem, and a Study of its Growth and Significance, edited by G. E. Bentley (Oxford, 1963) p. 3.
E. Larrissy, William Blake (Oxford, 1985) p. 143.
P. Middleton, ‘The Revolutionary Poetics of William Blake: Part II — Silence, Syntax and Spectres’, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (1983) p. 44.
J. Lacan, ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’, in Ecrits: A Selection (London, 1977) pp. 2–3.
B. Webster, Blake’s Prophetic Psychology (London, 1983) p. 208.
J. Rose, ‘Introduction — II’, in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (London, 1982) p. 29.
For an interesting discussion of the depiction of the Spectre in batlike forms, see Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (California, 1983) pp. 147–72.
For a useful reading of the idea of the ‘Garment’ in Blake’s epic poems, see Morton D. Paley, ‘The Figure of the Garment in The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem’, in Curren and Wittreich (eds), Blake’s Sublime Allegory (Madison, 1973) pp. 119–46.
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© 1993 Steven Vine
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Vine, S. (1993). Excesses of Joy and Grief: The Veil, Sexuality and Apocalypse in The Four Zoas. In: Blake’s Poetry: Spectral Visions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22619-1_5
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