7

Percival's tracing of "nearly twenty five hundred years"23 of

mythic thought, Frye's exploration of the psycho-sexual, archetypal

dynamic represented by Orc, and Raines' detailing of the Platonic

and Neoplatonic elements of The Four Zoas contribute much toward a

realization of an underlying unity pervading the work. Yet, it

seems the textual evidence offered by these critics does not

coalesce sufficiently throughout the work to reveal the respective

myth cycles they seek to present. Percival, for example, has no

hesitation in stating that "what goes on in The Four Zoas , after

Urizen has been bound is conjectural." 24 Frye does not see a

formal structural relationship between Night the Ninth and the

proceeding Nights; to him it seems arbitrary:

gorgeous as it unquestionably is, one eventually comes to wonder, in studying it, how far this ninth Night is the real climax of the vision, and how far it has been added as an effort of will, perhaps almost of conscience. Has Blake's Ode to Joy any inner logic connecting it with the rest of the work beyond a purely emotional requirement of an allegro finale? Certainly there is little connection between its opening and the close of the preceding Night. The Last Judgement simply starts off with a bang, as an instinctive shudder of self-preservation against a tyranny of intolerable menace.25

Harold Bloom, for different reasons, finds the apocalypse of Night the Ninth an unconvincing end to the thematic and symbolic movements of the poem.

The Four Zoas has not only given us an inexplicable apocalypse (as Prometheus Unbound did also) but it has failed to justify the sense in which Los and his

23

Percival, William Blake's Circle of Destiny, p. 1.

24

Percival, William Blake's Circle of Destiny, p. 188.

25 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 308.