Resonating Resins: "Listning to the Voices of the Ground" in William Blake's "Book of Urizen"

Abstract

y W Then, in chapter 2 of Blake's Book ofUrizen, the protagonist longs for a joy without pain, / For a solid without fluctuation, he could have been prophetically addressing his own future in Blake scholarship, where he has been anything but a stable symbol. As Robert N. Essick documents, 'Urizen' has been variously described as a pun on 'your reason,' the Greek 'ourizein' (from which the English 'horizon' is derived), 'is risen' in the first line of The Book of chapter 1, 'your eyes in,' 'ur reason,' and 'err reason.' Essick sees this multiplicity of meaning as encouraging: But no matter what sparked the invention of the word, Urizen's role as a polysemous etymon, one of Blake's linguistic 'Giant forms,' is only strengthened by our discovery (or invention) of further punning plays upon his name.' Here I propose yet another reading of Urizen's name: Urizen as a perfect anagram and near homophone ofUrezin, in which the Rezin refers to the resinous material found in the stopping-out varnish of relief etching.2 The character Urizen appears in many of Blake's works, and although he (it) occasionally undergoes a metamorphosis (as in The Four Zoas), he generally plays the role of the tyrannical ruler and bad father, in particular the Father of Old Testament notoriety. The following reading focuses on Urizen's debut as cosmic tyrant in Blake's 1794 illuminated work The Book of Urizen.3 While has been elucidated as a work parodying Genesis,4 this reading will demonstrate how The Book of can also be interpreted, at least in certain copies, in terms of