The Book Of Urizen Chapter 6 - Analysis

A birth that is also a fall

This chapter reads like a creation story told as catastrophe: a new human form is born, but its arrival is experienced as a violent loss of Eternity. Blake frames generation itself as a wrenching division—Man begetting his likeness not as blessing but as a shuddering reduction, a copy made from a divided image. The central claim the poem keeps pressing is that once life is produced inside the conditions of separation, it carries that separation like a wound: what comes into being is not simply a child, but the Human shadow, a diminished, estranged version of the eternal.

Los’s pity meets Enitharmon’s refusal

The opening is intimate and immediately disordered: Los saw the Female & pitied, he embrac’d her, she weeps—and then, almost perversely, refus’d. Blake doesn’t let us settle into a simple story of comfort. Enitharmon’s flight happens in perverse and cruel delight, which makes the scene feel like an emotional trap: pity reaches out, desire rejects it, and pursuit follows anyway—She fled… yet he followd. The tension here is sharp: the impulse to heal (Los’s pity and embrace) becomes entangled with coercion (his following), while Enitharmon’s pain is mixed with something like relish. Creation begins not in harmony but in a conflicted union that can’t agree on what it wants.

From worm to serpent: pregnancy as corruption

When the poem moves to Enitharmon’s pregnancy, it does so through an image that is deliberately degrading and uncanny: she feels a Worm within her womb. The worm is helpless, trembling, waiting To be moulded into existence, as if life is not naturally unfolding but being forced into shape. Then the harmlessness curdles. By day the worm lies on her bosom; by night it returns within her womb—a relentless cycle that makes gestation feel like haunting. It grew to a serpent, and the language turns toxic and bodily: dolorous hissings & poisons, the coils Round Enitharmons loins folding. Pregnancy here is not radiant; it is invasion, a creature tightening around the generative body, as though what’s being made cannot be separated from poisoning and pain.

The monstrous evolution into form

The transformation accelerates: the serpent casting its scales suggests repeated shedding—versions discarded, identities sloughed off—until the hiss becomes a grating cry. Blake stacks misery on misery: Many sorrows and dismal throes, and then a burst of unstable metamorphosis—Many forms of fish, bird & beast. It is as if the womb cycles through the whole animal kingdom before arriving at something recognizably human: Brought forth an Infant form / Where was a worm before. That last contrast is doing heavy moral work. A worm is low, blind, close to soil; an infant is upright possibility. But the poem refuses a clean uplift: the infant carries the worm’s history inside it. The human arrives not as pure newness but as the endpoint of a painful, mixed, almost evolutionary convulsion.

Eternity’s recoil: the tent closes

The most decisive emotional turn belongs not to the parents but to the witnessing cosmos. The Eternals are Alarm’d with these gloomy visions, and when the birth finally happens—Enitharmon groaning producing a man Child to the light—the response is immediate and collective: A shriek ran thro’ Eternity, followed by a paralytic stroke. Blake makes Eternity itself seem capable of panic and numbness, as though this birth introduces a condition Eternity cannot absorb. The newborn is explicitly named the Human shadow, and that phrasing explains the horror: a shadow is attached to life, but it is also a dimming, a dependence on obstruction. The poem implies that to be human (here) is to be a cast-off image, something that exists because a brighter reality has been blocked.

Fierce flames, springs of sorrow, and the end of vision

The child doesn’t emerge as quiet vulnerability; it arrives like a natural disaster: Howling, with fierce flames, Delving earth in his resistless way. The birth breaks the boundary between body and world—the infant is already an agent of excavation, already plowing into matter. Then the Eternals’ action seals the fall: they closed the tent, beat down the stakes and cords Stretch’d for a work of eternity, and with that practical, almost militaristic gesture the poem lands its bleakest sentence: No more Los beheld Eternity. Whatever the tent is—shelter, boundary, cosmological architecture—it becomes the device that shuts Los out from direct vision. And the only baptism available in this new order is not water but grief: Los bathed him in springs of sorrow. The tenderness of bathing is still there, but its substance is suffering, as if sorrow is now the element creatures must be washed in to survive their own existence.

The chapter’s hardest question

If the child is received with a shriek and a paralytic stroke, what does that say about the world that calls itself eternal? Blake makes it possible to suspect that the real scandal is not the child’s fierce flames, but the fact that Eternity responds by shutting a tent and withdrawing sight—turning a birth into exile, and exile into the definition of the human.

What the poem leaves us with

By the end, the chapter has moved from erotic struggle (embrac’d, refus’d) to biological horror (worm/serpent), to cosmic shutdown (No more Los beheld Eternity). Its tone is prophetic and darkly physical: bodies coil, cry, groan, howl; visions are gloomy; the universe stiffens. The contradiction that keeps vibrating underneath is that the same act that generates a man Child also generates blindness and separation. Life happens—but it happens as the making of a shadow, and the poem dares to treat that not as a metaphor but as a literal condition of being born into time.