Without the benefit of a careful consideration of the complexities of the manuscript, critics generally accept the description of Tharmas's fall as a most logical starting-point for the poem, especially given his role as the “parent Power” (4:7). The motifs of love, jealousy, fragmentation, and apostasy coalesce in his story. Moreover, the consequent creation of “the Circle of Destiny” (5:24) explains the origins of time and space, giving a context to the poem’s action, and the violent union of the Spectre of Tharmas with Enion brings about the birth of Los and Enitharmon as the inhabitants of this fallen world...

Perhaps one of the most complex and hotly debated cruxes in the entireValamanuscript appears at the moment of its own narrative crisis; Nights VII[a] and VII[b] and Night VIII recount the consolidation of error in Blake's universe, leading into the poem’s apocalyptic conclusion in Night IX. The existence of two Nights VII at this crucial moment has troubled scholars intensely since the first editorial work on the poem began; the complex narrative of Night VIII, with its use of Christian image patterns not present in the base text of the rest of the poem and its several pages...

The observation that Blake’s characters tend towards flat symbolic types rather than rounded lifelike characters has often been accepted as a weakness in his method; simple realism, however, was never Blake’s aim. A close examination of the way he revised the attitudes and attributes of his characters shows that he was keenly interested in developing them as types depicting “the Physiognomies or L[i]neaments of Universal Human Life beyond which Nature never steps” (E.570). Character, as he argues in his prospectus to the engraving of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, has a constancy to it that art tries to bring into relief:

The...

Pages 43-84, which comprise the end of Night III through the first twothirds of Night VII[a], form a discrete unit with its own special distinctions and problems. The narrative content of these pages is in large part derived from Blake’s earlier works, particularlyThe Book of Urizen,although considerably expanded for inclusion inVala.Thus large portions of this text contain a narrative that had been developed elsewhere and was, by the time Blake transcribed it inVala,relatively consistent in plot, character, and theme. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is relatively little revision of the text of...

Since Blake revised his poetics in the course of transcribing his poem, it is not surprising that he would encounter points where inconsistencies between old and new methods would clash. The creation of Rahab is just such a creative crux. It is not that her character is constructed inconsistently (indeed, inconsistency and inconstancy are central to her existence), but she does seem to have been created and modified largely after the poem was transcribed, and her character seems to be revised in keeping with a complex synchronic poetics, whereby her interconnections with Blake’s own characters and with biblical archetypes of...

In my Preface I invoked De Quincey’s comparison of the mind to a palimpsest as a fitting description of the tension between the layers of text that comprise theValamanuscript. Later layers, added in succession, threaten to bury preceding “layers of ideas, images, [and] feelings,” while the unextinguished presence of the underlying layers glows with an uneasy and sometimes unassimilated light. The tension between the “heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain,” which demands order, coherence, and intelligibility, and the “grotesque collision of those successive themes,” which seem to have “no natural connexion, which by pure accident...