Book: The Book of Urizen

Overview
William Blake’s The Book of Urizen (1794) is a prophetic, illuminated poem that invents a mythic Genesis for a fallen universe. It centers on Urizen, the figure of abstract, self-justifying Reason, whose urge to legislate all existence sunders Eternity and precipitates a world of matter, time, and moral constraint. Written in a biblical cadence and paired with Blake’s etched designs, the poem builds a counter-myth to Enlightenment rationalism, charting the emergence of law, religion, sexuality, and history as forms of spiritual exile.

Story
A shadow falls across Eternity as Urizen withdraws from the Eternals, declaring himself solitary, pure, and the source of law. He inscribes his commandments on stony tablets and compasses the abyss with measures and numbers, seeking to bind infinity in fixed forms. This act of self-closure sparks a cosmic contraction: light condenses, the elements divide, and a cold, dark globe coalesces. The Eternals recoil, while the void fills with nascent matter, deserts, and seas, all ruled by Urizen’s terrible necessity.

Los, the prophetic smith and emblem of creative imagination, pursues Urizen in pity and wrath. He forges a corporeal frame around the lawgiver, hammering out his bones, nerves, and senses, and fetters him with time so that Reason must inhabit the prison it made. But the labor of binding draws Los into the same fallen world. In his desolation he divides and engenders Enitharmon, whose beauty and spectral terror inaugurate generation. From their union arises Orc, the fiery child of revolt whose life warms the globe and whose chained body becomes a sign that even rebellious energy can be subjected and moralized.

Urizen, now embodied, wanders his creation naming skies, stars, and continents, seeking his children and finding only fear. His laws, meant for peace, breed hierarchy, jealousy, and war. A web spreads through the world, the net of religion that catches the nations and sanctifies their bondage. Humanity emerges within this lattice of sense, labor, and guilt, born into cycles of birth and death, measuring out days under the starry wheels. The poem closes on a universe sealed in night and rule, yet smoldering with Orc’s latent heat, a cosmos awaiting future convulsions.

Figures and Symbols
Urizen personifies closed system and codified thought: surveyor’s compasses, brass books, and stone tables are his emblems. Los embodies prophetic imagination and artistic labor, the furnace and hammer that shape spiritual realities into form. Enitharmon carries the powers of beauty, chastity, and moral law, instituting a “female dominion” that domesticates desire. Orc is unruly energy and historical revolution, a Promethean fire that both liberates and is endlessly restrained. Around them move the Eternals, witnesses to the fall from unbounded vision into divided form.

Themes and Style
The poem recasts creation as catastrophe: cosmos emerges not from divine harmony but from a schism inside the eternal human. Law, religion, and moral virtue appear as instruments of control when severed from vision, turning peace to oppression. Yet the same fall generates imagination, desire, and history; Blake’s myth refuses simple oppositions and dramatizes a perpetual struggle between measure and inspiration. The verse oscillates between austere, scriptural plainness and molten, apocalyptic imagery, while the illuminated plates turn abstract ideas into bodies, landscapes, and tools.

Place in Blake’s Myth
The Book of Urizen is a foundational chapter in Blake’s larger prophetic cycle, answered by The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los, and echoed throughout his later epics. It supplies a cosmogony for the human condition: a world made by law, sustained by imagination, and shaken by energy, awaiting the reintegration of its divided powers.