73

295 [Now del.] For Los & Enitharmon walk'd forth on

the dewy Earth

Contracting or expanding their all flexible senses

At will to murmur in the flowers small as the honey

bee,

At will to stretch across the heavens & step from star

to star,

Or standing on the Earth erect, or on the stormy waves

300 Driving the storms before them, or delighting in

sunny beams,

While round their heads the Elemental Gods kept harmony.

CK. II. 295-301)

The earlier infinite range of expansion and contraction now is "all flexible." Though Los and Enitharmon can expand and contract their senses at will, they can only do so within the circumference of the circle of destiny. Within it, the earth they walk on is "dewy," an ominous image, for when Jerusalem fell, she "fell cold from Lambeth's Vales in groans & dewy death/The dew of anxious souls, the death-sweat of the dying" (K. II 45-46). Further, the `harmony' that the elemental Gods bring to Los and Enitharmon is perverse. It is the 'harmony' described in the song at the feast of Los and Enitharmon, and so is engendered by a cycle alternating between excess inflamed by excess at one extreme (because there is no vintage), and winter, famine and death at the other [because there is no harvest).

To compound the inversion described above even further, Los and Enitharmon have not consummated their marriage. Here, while the two do explore the 'sensory delights' of the imaginative order of their Arcadian environment, they do so in a perverse, merely cerebral inter­play. Their delight lays in a sublimated gratification derived from the suffering of the other Zoas and Emanations. Thus, distorted by their perversity, Los and Enitharmon are themselves victims of the impotence of the first universe.