Los and Orc

A man stands with his hands raised beside his head. Another lies spread across the rock before him, his wrists and ankles held by dark bands. Their muscular bodies belong to the same stark landscape, but the standing figure has a freedom the other cannot share. In William Blake’s Los and Orc, the space between them makes a family catastrophe visible. Tate identifies Los as the father who chained his son through jealousy, then regretted the act after the captive’s limbs had become rooted in the rock. ^[1]

The watercolour belongs to Tate, which dates it about 1792–93 and records its medium as ink and watercolour on paper. At 217 × 295 mm, it is small enough for the drawing of a hand or a mouth to carry considerable emotional weight. Martin Butlin’s catalogue records Blake’s signature at the lower left. The sheet is an independent watercolour, related to a design in America a Prophecy and to passages Blake developed in later writing. Those connections open its story without supplying a single contemporary text that explains every detail. ^{[1] [2]}

Hands that cannot meet

Los occupies the left side of the image. His feet are planted apart, his torso faces us, and his head turns towards Orc. Both palms are open, the fingers stretching towards the upper edge. The gesture creates an arresting contrast with the firm stance below it: a powerful body seems suddenly unable to act. Read beside Tate’s account of remorse, those hands can express the discovery that strength and authority have reached their limit. Los remains apart from the captive, his response suspended. ^[1]

Orc’s body runs diagonally across the right side. One leg extends into the foreground; the other reaches across the rock towards Los. His arms spread away from his chest, and his head tilts back with his mouth open. The dark restraints interrupt the pale limbs near their extremities. His body still possesses force, but its extension makes the fastening painfully clear. Blake gives him breadth without mobility. ^[1]

The two men look towards one another, yet their hands never meet. Los’s lifted palms and Orc’s lowered, open hand establish different kinds of helplessness. The father can raise his arms because he is free; the son can only spread his fingers within the reach permitted by the restraint. This makes the imbalance legible before we know either name. Knowledge of the family relation adds responsibility to an already unequal encounter. ^[1]

Blake also gives the figures a physical resemblance. Both have developed chests and strongly articulated limbs. Los appears as a vigorous man rather than a frail patriarch, while Orc’s adult musculature resists an expectation that a son must be represented as a small child. Their relation concerns one powerful being’s attempt to control another. The son’s strength helps explain the father’s fear while making the result of that fear harder to bear. ^{[1] [2]}

A landscape with little room for relief

Behind them, dark slopes cut across the sheet. A low ridge leads towards the distant horizon, while the nearer rock rises behind Orc’s head and shoulders. The broadest dark passages occupy the interval between the bodies. They make the landscape feel heavy and close, despite the view opening along its upper edge. No building, spectator or familiar domestic object softens the meeting. The family has become almost the whole inhabited world. ^[1]

A narrow band of yellow crosses the foreground beneath Los. Around Orc, cooler grey passages gather beneath and behind his body. The pale flesh remains distinct against the ground, allowing shoulders, ribs, knees and fingers to be followed readily. The subdued setting slows the encounter. Blake presents the consequences of an action through bodies held in place, with little surrounding incident to carry our attention elsewhere. ^[1]

Tate’s August 2004 caption gives an unusually specific account of the materials behind this effect. It identifies pure brown ochre across the background, grey wash in Orc’s shadow, and chalk mixed with vermilion in the illuminated flesh. It describes the foreground yellow as glossy, transparent gamboge and reports that it had not faded. The museum explicitly treats the sombre colour as Blake’s choice. Its statement about fading records its assessment of the gamboge in 2004. ^[1]

The pigment account also brings the painting’s emotional choices into focus. Warm flesh emerges from a largely brown and grey world, while the yellow ground offers little sense of escape. The colours keep the two figures visible without surrounding them with the spectacular fire familiar from some of Blake’s other mythological designs. Here the father’s gesture, the son’s open mouth and the immobility of the limbs sustain the drama. ^[1]

The reversed design in America

Butlin connects the watercolour with the first page of the Preludium to America a Prophecy. That book’s title page carries 1793. The related composition reverses the two men’s positions and includes a female figure absent from the Tate sheet. Butlin treats the reversal and the missing woman as reasons to suggest that the watercolour came first. They support a proposed sequence; they do not establish the exact day or circumstances in which either design was conceived. ^{[2] [14]}

The difference can be seen in the plate held by the Yale Center for British Art as B1992.8.2(3). Orc lies at the upper left, his limbs stretched over the rock. The man with raised palms stands at the right, beside a woman whose head is bowed and partly hidden by her hands. A great tree curves above them. Below, the opening words of the poem occupy most of the page, with further figures and ornament along the margin. The watercolour gives the confrontation a broad horizontal field; the book places a related group at the head of an inhabited page of writing. ^[15]

The words change what the reader brings to those bodies. The Preludium begins with the shadowy daughter of Urthona standing before Orc after fourteen years have passed over his dark dwelling. She brings his food and drink in iron vessels. Her helmet, quiver and bow give her a formidable presence, although she cannot speak. Orc tells her that her father rivets his chains. Even in confinement, his spirit takes the forms of eagle, lion, whale and serpent across an immense geography. The chained body contains a power that exceeds its place of imprisonment. ^[14]

The second page makes that power disturbing as well as expansive. Orc breaks his links and seizes the struggling female in a sexual encounter. The poem moves through her pleasure and newly acquired speech into pain, mingled fire and frost, and an announcement of eternal death. The transformation refuses an uncomplicated story in which broken chains guarantee a happy release. Its violence also makes it unsafe to treat Orc’s association with energy as a certificate of moral innocence. ^[14]

Erdman’s transcription additionally preserves a bracketed, deleted ending in which the bard becomes ashamed of his song, breaks his harp and turns away in lamentation. That discarded passage belongs to the poem’s textual history, rather than an unqualified continuation of every surviving printed page. Alongside the published movement towards torment, it shows why the Preludium rewards a more searching reading than a celebration of youthful rebellion. The related image enters a poem whose acts of liberation are already difficult. ^[14]

How jealousy becomes a chain

The later manuscript poem Vala, subsequently called The Four Zoas, supplies the fuller account of parental remorse used in Tate’s interpretation. Blake never published it. Butlin dates its first drafting to 1795–97 and places the rewriting of the relevant passage about 1802–03. That poetic formulation therefore postdates the watercolour. It can illuminate Blake’s continuing work on the subject, while the earlier sheet remains an image made before that particular poetic account had taken its surviving form. ^[2]

In Night the Fifth, Los and Enitharmon have already endured a terrifying birth. Los takes the child in his hands, shuddering and weeping; Enitharmon nurses him in darkness. Los builds around her under the fear of extinction. These acts give the later imprisonment an intimate prehistory. The parents have cared for the being they will bind, and their fearful labour has helped construct the world in which the family lives. ^[16]

Fourteen summers and winters pass. Los sees Orc embracing his mother and perceives a threat to his own life in the boy’s eyes. The account makes the threat part of Los’s apprehension: the reader encounters the son through the father’s dread. A girdle tightens around Los’s chest. He breaks it, but another forms the next morning. As this repeats, its fallen pieces join link by link into an iron chain. A feeling within the father has acquired an external instrument. ^[16]

Enitharmon names it the “chain of jealousy”. Los carries Orc up the mountain, followed by the weeping mother. A dark Spectre holds the boy while Los binds his limbs and hammers the rivets. The violence has helpers, tools and a sequence of deliberate acts. Although fear has generated the chain, the actual confinement requires Los to use it. This distinction gives the poem’s mythic transformation a recognisable moral pressure: suffering does not release the sufferer from responsibility for what he does to someone else. ^[16]

The bound Orc nevertheless continues to sustain an immense world of life. His body contains forests, animals, harvests, flowers and rivers of delight, as well as terror and rage. The language enlarges the captive far beyond an individual prisoner. What has been restrained is also a source of energies on which living things depend. Blake keeps those powers mixed. The son can nourish and terrify, and the father’s attempt to control him damages a vitality he cannot simply replace. ^[16]

Remorse arrives after the damage

Back in Golgonooza, Los and Enitharmon weep towards one another. Los repents and prepares to return to their son. His change is substantial: he is prepared to restore Orc to Enitharmon even if doing so causes his own death. The fear that helped produce the imprisonment has ceased to govern his decision. For nine days the parents travel through darkness towards the mountain, hoping to reverse what they have done. ^[16]

They find that the young limbs have struck roots into the rock. Fibres have grown from the chain and interwoven themselves around the cave and Orc’s body. The parents struggle to unchain him, but tears and even the imagined sacrifice of their lives cannot remove it. In the continuation onto manuscript page 63, the chain extends beneath the earth and becomes a living bond sustained by the captive’s own life. The mechanism of restraint has entered the being it confines. ^[16]

Los changes his intention, but the world does not instantly change with him. His earlier action has acquired consequences that survive his repentance. Read with the watercolour, the passage makes the raised hands feel terribly belated: the power to inflict the restraint has proved easier to exercise than the power to undo it. Tate’s caption concentrates that predicament into the encounter of two bodies. ^{[1] [16]}

Enitharmon’s absence from the watercolour matters here. In the poem, her grief helps bring parental love back into Los’s conduct, and she travels beside him towards the son. The sheet leaves the viewer with the father and captive alone. It can therefore sharpen our attention to their unequal freedom, while the later writing restores another participant whose suffering and intervention are essential to that version of the story. The difference between their casts helps us see what each version brings to the encounter. ^{[2] [16]}

Names that change with their relations

The connection between these works also asks for care with Blake’s names. In America, the shadowy woman is the daughter of Urthona, and Orc names her father as the maker of his chains. In The Four Zoas, Los and Enitharmon are Orc’s parents, while the hammer of Urthona and Urthona’s strength remain part of the surrounding action. Butlin explains Los through his connection with Urthona and associates him with poetic genius. These relations develop across Blake’s writing; they do not form a fixed family chart that can be applied without adjustment to every earlier image. ^{[2] [14] [16]}

The same care applies to moral definitions. Los’s imaginative capacity does not prevent him from becoming a jailer. Orc’s expansive energy does not make every expression of his desire liberating. The watercolour is powerful partly because its standing figure has the capacity to recognise a wrong he cannot repair. A simple division into good father and evil son, or innocent imagination and wholly benevolent rebellion, would remove the conflict the encounter allows us to examine. The broader movement of these figures belongs to Blake’s mythology. ^{[2] [14] [16]}

Butlin also places the sheet beside the Bedford watercolour of The Good and Evil Angels, dated about 1793–94, and the later large colour-print design of 1795. He traces the Bedford design back to plate 4 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The comparison identifies a continuing concern with powerful bodies, restraint and divided relationships. The Tate watercolour remains its own object, distinct from those works and from Blake’s 1802 relief etching The Chaining of Orc. The history of the large print’s making and competing identities is explored with The Good and Evil Angels. ^[2]

The sheet’s early descriptions preserve the human encounter with unusual directness. Butlin cites William Michael Rossetti’s nineteenth-century description of one young man looking remorsefully at another bound to a rock. Its later sale from John Linnell’s collection in 1918 used a more general title describing a figure chained to a rock. The watercolour passed through Apsley Cherry-Garrard and later Howard Samuel before Jane Samuel presented it to Tate in her husband’s memory in 1962. The changing descriptions leave the visible predicament intact: someone stands free before a person he has helped make helpless. ^{[1] [2]}