The preceding account enumerates and organizes the challenges Milton poses: material form and production, textual variation, text-image interaction, narrative, the imagination. In the aesthetic encounter with Milton, however, these various elements exist in simultaneous unity or tension, rather than in a clearly distinguishable series. In order to reconcile these aspects of the book, I begin here by looking at the internal structure of the narrative.

Blake's work fundamentally insists on the formative power of perception. For Blake, time and space are rationalizations of experience, its reduction to Frye's “lower limit of normality” that constitutes the Selfhood, and Milton attempts to unfix these rationalizations by unmooring and pluralizing physical location and temporal sequence. We see this in the layering of Hebraic and British geography, in the poem's approach to chronology@The plot of Milton unfolds in a single moment:

Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery
Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years.
For in this Period the Poet’s work is Done: and all the Great
Events of Time start forth & are conciev’d in such a Period
Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery. 28:62 - 29:3, E127.

Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1982., and in the disorienting form of the narrative. The challenge here is to imaginatively link apparently disconnected events and themes into a unity, as Grimes suggests: “Visionary relationships are the opposite of deterministic relations, and each event is a 'miracle' in the sense that its cause is not immediately evident if one looks only on an empirical level. Events are somehow related, but not causally related. The problem is to find out exactly how they are related@Grimes 64-65.

Grimes, Ronald L. “Time and Space in Blake's Major Prophecies.” Blake's Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem. Eds. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973. 59-82..” The Blakean schema insists on an ontological wholeness in which the separation of self from others and objects becomes ultimately illusory. Throughout the poem, characters fuse or bifurcate at various moments, and these developments exist not in sequence but rather in a sort of mythical evental circularity. One such pattern follows the character of Elynittria as she reappears throughout the Bard's Song. If we take recourse to an archetypal key, we can immediately derive an intelligible pattern, but we then skip over the process through which meaning develops - the process that I contend produces the significance of Milton. This reading will deal exclusively with the imaginative reconciliation of the text, while the next section will apply the same logic to the relationship between narrative and image. Our trajectory begins:

Palambron with the fiery Harrow in morning returning
From breathing fields. Satan fainted beneath the artillery (5:1-2, E98)@Citations appear in the text here because textual proximity or distance is a central concern in this section.

The causal relation between Palambron's return and Satan's fainting seems entirely obscure. It remains so until it appears again, in different form, at the bottom of the same plate, this time apparently as a sort of time-stamp for another seemingly unrelated event:

James calls for fires in Golgonooza. For heaps of smoking ruins
In the night of prosperity and wantonness which he himself Created
Among the Daughters of Albion among the Rocks of the Druids
When Satan fainted beneath the arrows of Elynittria
And Mathematic Proportion was subdued by Living Proportion (5:40-44, E99)

Satan has fainted again, and while we still don't understand the entirety of the context, the “artillery” of the previous instance reveals itself here as the “arrows of Elynittria,” who appears for the first time at this moment, and promptly disappears for another five plates. If the event itself has received a little illumination, the relationship between Satan, Elynittria, and Palambron remains mysterious. In the meantime, Los the Imagination and his emanation (or female essence), Enitharmon, identify their offspring Satan as Urizen, the rationalizing enemy of inspiration. In grief and anger, Los chastises the suddenly present Elynittria, for reasons to this point unknown:

Elynittria! Whence is this Jealousy running along the mountains
[...]
Every thing in Eternity shines by its own Internal light: but thou
Darkenest every Internal light with the arrows of thy quiver
Bounds up in the horns of Jealousy to a deadly fading Moon (10:14-18, E104)

We've seen Elynittria rout Satan with her arrows, but we don't yet know why, or what this has to do with jealousy – a consequence, as we know, of possessive Selfhood. This pattern fills out with the descent of Leutha, “[o]ffering herself a Ransom for Satan,” who finds himself on trial for feuding with Palambron (11:30, E105). Leutha will claim responsibility for deluding Satan, in the process furthering the plot:

Blake's Milton, then, stands as a history devoid of causal structure, which must reveal in its unique particularity to each act of inspired perception, to each reading by each reader. In the following page, I apply this thinking to the intersection of text and illustration.