67

As Urizen builds his palace, Blake shifts the focus of the poem to describe the role of Christ, who preserves the state of the sacrificed Luvah:

On clouds the Sons of Urizen beheld Heaven walled

round;

They weigh'd & order'd all, & Urizen comforted saw

The wondrous work flow forth like visible out of

the invisible;

For the Divine Lamb, Even Jesus who is the Divine

Vision,

Permitted all, lest Man should fall into Eternal

Death;

For when Luvah sunk down, himself put on the robes

of blood

Lest the state called Luvah should cease; & the

Divine Vision

265 Walked in robes of blood till he who slept should awake.

(K. II. 258-265)

Although Tharmas and Luvah are dissolved into Urizen's order they are in abeyance, for Blake retains the continuity of their energies. The mundane shell "Look'd out into the World of Tharmas, where in ceaseless torrents/His billows roll, where monsters wander in the foamy paths" (K. II. 256-257) as Tharmas, outside the mundane shell, rolls his seas of chaos. So, when Urizen's shell, bounded by Tharmas' circle of destiny, breaks, chaos will reign again. The "state call'd Luvah" is maintained by Christ who puts on Luvah¹s "robes of blood "(which are cut off from Christ to reveal eternal life}.

The mathematical configurations in which the planetary movements are bound bear a striking resemblance to the corpuscles of earth and fire of Plato's mathematics in the Timaeus and so reinforce the Pythagorean nature of Urizen's order:

Thus were the stars of heaven created like a

golden chain

To bind the Body of Man to heaven from falling

into the Abyss.

Each took his station & his course began with

sorrow & care.