‘Among the Flocks of Tharmas’: The Four Zoas and the Pastoral of Commerce

Abstract

This account of The Four Zoas attempts to historicize the poem by providing a reading of the roles of Tharmas and Urizen in the context of earlier eighteenth-century philosophical, economic and poetic texts. The intention is not to be prescriptive nor to circumscribe the many potential and possibly contradictory interpretations that can be applied to these two Zoas or, indeed, to the poem as a whole. Blake’s mythic figures are constantly in a state of flux, forever being transformed in response to their immediate dramatic context within a poem, or, particularly within The Four Zoas, to Blake’s shifting attitude towards contemporary political events.1 However, it is the critic’s inevitable task to fix this state of flux during the act of critical commentary. The reading offered here, then, necessarily fixes the roles of Tharmas and Urizen in this way but does so in the knowledge that the roles thus defined constitute only one aspect of the wider dynamics of the poem. My initial emphasis is a generic one and my starting point is John Dyer’s georgic poem The Fleece which was first published in 1757.KeywordsRural LabourRural WorkerContradictory InterpretationSpectrous SidePoetic TextThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.