Introduction

The Four Zoas, William Blake's palimpsest manuscript, presents unusual exegetical problems and its formal literary structure remains an unsolved critical difficulty (for example, it has two Night's the Seventh). This study provides virtually a line by line textual analysis and critical commentary that traces the poem's mythology and plot. This methodology helps reveal Blake's conscious craftsmanship and thereby relate the poem's parts to the work as a whole.

Structurally, an important first hypothesis here is that the poem is divided into three major patterns of action that follow in linear narrative. Flanked by the protological Eden and the eschatological Eden, the three major patterns are divided by two acts of Divine intervention; namely, the creation and the Christ. Albion falls from the protological Eden into a first universe of Pythagorean form and harmony. His single consciousness thereby separates into eight component energies who establish the poem's cosmology in a philosophically rational sequence; namely, being and generation (Tharmas and Enion), time and space (Los and Enitharmon), motion and attraction (Luvah and Vala), and order (Urizen and Ahania).

The Pythagorean principles of order are not adequate to restore Albion to unity and his inner universe collapses a second time; this time into chaos, into the natural universe. In a complex analogy to the Timeaus and Genesis, the eight energies are bound to serial time and sorrow in seven successive days, the seventh of which is the nadir of Albion's fall. On the seventh day there is an act of Divine intervention which is the creation and commences this the second, or natural universe.

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