Ginsberg on Blake continues – 52

Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s The Four Zoas continues from here 

AG:  So then we get Enitharmon’s song to Los coming up.  A long song in odd stanzas – different from the regular septenaries, the regular seven-beat lines.  Beginning on page three-seventeen, line fifty-eight – “At the first Sound the Golden sun arises from the Deep..”

Now, this is Enitharmon’s song to Los, according to (Harold) Bloom, outlining her conquest of her or triumph of female will, aspiring to dominion or power over a heaven as conceived by female mind.  A delusive heaven.  It would also be interpreted as some kind of spiritual pride over dominance of the material world, beginning at the first sound – the first Pythagorean harmony -“… the Golden sun arises from the Deep/And shakes his awful hair/The Eccho wakes the moon to unbind her silver locks/The golden sun bears on my song/ And nine bright spheres of harmony rise round the fiery King..” – (Enitharmon had gone away to Urizen and so the ‘fiery King “ here would be Urizen, and the nine bright spheres would be the seven planets and the sun and moon, according to Alicia Ostriker.  So she’s praising the creation of Urizen, the mundane shell.)

“‘The joy of woman is the Death of her most beloved/Who dies for Love of her/In torments of fierce jealousy & pangs of adoration./The Lovers night bears on my song/And nine Spheres rejoice beneath my powerful control…” – (That’s funny.  “The golden sun bears on my song,” in the first stanza.  “The Lovers night bears on my song,” in the second)

“(They) sing unceasing to the notes of my immortal hand…”  – (Is it that she is, at this point, controlling Urizen?) _ “  The solemn silent moon/Reverberates the living harmony upon my limbs/ The birds & beasts rejoice & play/ And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy..” –  (So in the midst of this creation, everybody is trying to get his rocks off, but trying to prove his inmost joy – grasping for some inmost joy in this midst of this material creation with planets, sun, stars, reason, thought, and architecture  – “Furious & terrible they sport & rend the nether deeps/The deep lifts up his rugged head/ And lost in infinite hum[m]ing wings vanishes with a cry/The fading cry is ever dying/The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy..’)

So, simultaneously the vanishings of life and whatever there is in the appearance that brings some appearance of joy – ‘Arise you little glancing wings & sing your infant joy/Arise & drink your bliss/For every thing that lives is holy for the source of life/ Descends to be a weeping babe/For the Earthworm renews the moisture of the sandy plain…” – Actually that’s a pretty fair statement, in the long run – ‘… every thing that lives is holy for the source of life/ Descends to be a weeping babe/ For the Earthworm renews the moisture of the sandy plain.”

And that sounds like Blake’s acceptance speech of existence.  At least those three lines.

Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirteen-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately eighteen minutes in

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