75

Enitharmon seeks to be "Secure" from "the smitings" of Los in "clouds of sweet obscurity" and she dissolves her "beauteous form" in Urizen's order, leaving Los to "Howl" over her "body of death." As Los does not possess the living form of Enitharmon, she is 'protected' from his sexual violence. Though she is "dissolv'd in the bright God" (or Urizen), her "spirit still pursues" Los to enforce his abstinence. She still drives all the females from him and prevents him from participating in the summer excess of the generative cycle. The consequences of the alternation between Los and Enitharmon, described above, are a narcissistic trance-like state of impotence in him and a state of delusive ecstasy in her:

Los answer'd: "Therefore fade I thus dissolv'd in

raptur'd trance.

"Thou canst repose on clouds of secrecy, while o'er

my limbs

320 "Cold dews & hoary frost creep tho' I lie on banks

of summer

"Among the beauties of the World. Cold & repining

Los

"Still dies for Enitharmon, nor a spirit springs

from my dead corse;

"Then I am dead till thou revivest me with thy

sweet song.

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Three penciled additions to Night the First are significant here. The first of these is "Then Los smote her upon the Earth;

'twas long e'er she reviv'd" (K. I. 28.1), and the second reads "Los saw the wound of his blow: he saw, he pitied, he wept" (K. I. 351). In the third penciled addition, Los repents and seeks "To heal the wound of his smiting" (K. I. 354). The first penciled addition occurs before Enitharmon calls down Urizen (who set the limits to her perceptual boundaries) and the second and third penciled addition occurs after she calls him down. Los' violence, thereby, is stressed at a late compositional stage in the development of the manuscript. It seems these penciled additions indicate that Blake sought to stress the violent sexuality of the Hellenic environment of Los and Enitharmon. Further, since Enitharmon's perceptions cannot extend beyond the order of Urizen (except, as in the case of her vision of Albion's fall, in a dream state), she has known only sexual violence from Los.