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Interpreting Blake's text is no easy thing, since the visual complexity of these works of art often compromises our attempts to interpret their characters. And characters are certainly multifaceted in such works: characters as etched letters, as narrative re-constructions of personalities, as strings of words, as visual complications within the larger field of illustrations. Take, for example, the Keynes facsimile edition of the title page of Jerusalem, where the clever addition of gold leaf makes the subtitle, ostensibly "The Emanation of the Giant Albion," also read "The Emanation of the Giant Worm." Such a trompe de l'oielis possible because the cursive glyphs of the word (and, arguably, character) "Albion" lead to interconnections where we otherwise may be disposed to presume character integrity.
This reading seems to be consistent with the blurring of narrative characters within the larger corpus of Blake's texts, to wit, the emotion "Pity" in 13:51 of The Book of Urizen, which by 19:1 has come to be the name of a character synthesized from the Eternal Prophet; "pity" is disseminated from this character by 19:10, and the character is renamed Enitharmon at 19:28. In The Book of Ahania, this character is re-synthesized from Urizen(a.k.a. the Eternal Prophet) and named Ahania, although this second genesis is predicated by the attack on Urizen by Fuzon, the child of Enitharmon and Urizen from Urizen. Thus Pity/Enitharmon/Ahania (cum Urizen cum Urizen nee Urizen neeUrizen) is born from her own son, and vis versa; metamorphosis and temporal circularity abound. Significantly, Fuzon's own birth was in the form of a worm (and so, alternatively, in the canonical interpretation, Albion). This occurs in The Book of Urizen plate 19:17-36:
3. A time passed over, the Eternals Began to erect the tent; When Enitharmon sick, Felt a Worm within her womb.
4. Yet helpless it lay like a Worm In the trembling womb To be moulded into existence
5. All day the worm lay on her bosom All night within her womb The worm lay till it grew like a serpent With dolorous hissings & poisons Round Enitharmons loins folding,
6. Coild within Enitharmons womb The serpent grew casting its scales, With sharp pangs the hissings began To change to a grating cry, Many sorrows and dismal throes, Many forms of fish, bird & beast, Brought forth an Infant form Where was a worm before.1 [Erdman ed., 79.]
Clearly even the material identity of the worm is highly unstable: is it Urizen's phallus, a growing child, a humunculously-endowed sperm, a snake, a caterpillar or the strange generative transmogrification (perhaps the ontologically- recapitulated phylogeny) of "fish, bird & beast"? It seems safest to admit all of these things; this multiplicity of identification avoids the abortion of the manifest worm, these lines of Blake's which squiggle before our eyes. To some extent, however, all of these figurations taken together allow us to recognize the constant metamorphosis of narrative and literal characters which often seems to underwrite the Blakean textual corpus.
With this sense of the mutative power of the worm in mind, notice the chrysalis/infant in swaddling clothes figure within the frontispiece to For The Sexes: The GATES of PARADISE. Here the human/boy/Blake face on the chrysalis as observed by the caterpillar/worm again seems to fuse the pupae and the papoose: man and bug are one. Incidentally, this same frontispiece recurs in For Children: The GATES of PARADISE, where it is captioned:"What is Man!" The broader implication of this duplicitous illustration is to confirm the new reading of "Albion" as "Worm" that I have proposed. From here, it stands to reason that the daughters of Albion from VISIONS of the Daughters of Albion are also the daughters of the worm, especially considering the epigraph reproduced above; "What the eye sees" in reading the imaginative figures which surround the characters "Albion/Worm" on the cover of Jerusalem is a disparate series of leafy human feminine butterflies, which are, implicitly, metamorphosed worms.
Such a re-reading of (at least the title page of) VISIONS of the Daughters of Albion is likewise warranted by the visual recurrence of slope and shape of the characters which spell Albion in Jerusalem. Whether or not gold leaf reiterates Jerusalem's Albion's palimpsest remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the transfusion of the character(istics) of the worm into Albion invariable affects one's interpretation of the hermeneutics of Albion's daughters. Neither is this mitigated by UNCLE's contention that Oothoon, the central figure among the daughters of Albion, is a type or transfiguration of the character Thel from Thel, since Thel and Thel seem to dwell in the very hermeneutical reticulations that Fuzon/Orc, Child/Caterpillar and Albion/Worm are enmeshed.
Simply enough, the following interpretation of Thel and Thelis infused with my understanding of certain elements of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural history and Christian theology, specifically entomology and insecto-theology. Although twentieth-century readers of Blake, well-schooled in the apparent epistemological distinctions between science and theology, might well find such associations uncomfortable, the separation of these discourses was underway, but certainly not completed by the 1790's. Further, to whatever extent that the rhetoric of a lethal, legal aristocratic masculine physical science had succeeded in dispensing with a recognized metaphysics, Blake's work stands in stark and specific contrast. For example, note that "Newton" formed the central figure of the Cereus for Blake; his metaphysics therefore seems to dispense with the rhetoric of a lethal, legal aristocratic masculine physical science.
In this Blake was not alone. In France at this time the physicist and future member of the Revolutionary Triumvirate Marat had proposed a wildly-popular theory of phlogistic aether (read: fire) which did not gain "scientific" acceptance until the membership of the Parisian Academy of Sciences had been radically altered, i.e., until the "authorities" of "science" had been re-adjusted to match the character of the wider ideological revolution. If this example seems inordinately sociological and insufficiently "internal" to any sort of logic of positivistic science, note that this same pre-revolutionary Academie de Sciences had refused to admit the existence of meteors, despite 300 affidavits of French peasants which were submitted in 1788; scientific paradigms are, ultimately, merely different sorts of beliefs.
Likewise for Blake certain types of rhetorical constructions seem unpalatable, and broadly, "Newton" serves as Blake's whipping boy in this regard. Indeed to conclude that paradigms exist with any sort of autonomy for Blake seems difficult in light of the steady metamorphosis of all sorts of characters in his work; any larger sort of construction seems inherently instable. The same might be said of our very construction of Blake. Just as the painting entitled "Newton" shows a human figure emerging from the earth as a sort of living curved crystal, at the same time the figure is submerging into the wider colored texture of the canvas. To argue that Blake emerges autonomously from his other pages, that he exists as a transcendent author, seems to be lost in the same logical fallacy of a body/soul dichotomy: is not the spirit of Blake also the sum of his tissues? The author is inextricable from the text.
That authorial intentionality is subsumed into the morass of illustrations and characters that s/he produces does not seem inconsistent with the sorts of texts that remain to compose the Blakean corpus. Again, characters freely merge throughout these works, and to assume that the character which we create named Blake is above this fray seems a disservice. The characters live in the tissue of the text for Blake, and ever since Blake our own medical epistemology of tissue has seemed to absorb this point of view; or rather, point-of-view has been absorbed by tissue: the heart seizes the eyes, and the I's. This is, of course, the inverse of the binary which Blake deployed as the epigram to the VISIONS of the Daughters of Albion[Worm], but an inversion always already made possible by Blake, not least by the characters and words of the epigram themselves, which speak for their own integrity irrespective of our hearts' cognition, although this is in a certain sense only possible by our visual perception: reader and text exist in a mutually supportive double-bind, a binary relationship or dichotomy that is infinitely reversible [and infinitely regressive].
So the character is invented by the text, and vis versa; Thel equals Thel. And the thesis has re-emerged, having come from out of the ground of this text with little enough support of the promised insecto-theology. This I now hope to excuse and redress. "Having gone to ground" is how Ebenezer Albin (formerly "Weiss," a German ex-patriot who choose to re-name himself after the colorful figure Albion rather than the banal and common translation "White" [or Blanche or Blake]) describes the metamorphic hibernation of caterpillars, which he calls "worms." Such descriptions are found in Albin's manuscripts in the British Museum; they appear as painted characters on the reverse of roughly-torn sheets of paper upon which Albin had otherwise painted his emergent moths and worms. Which side of the page deserves primacy is of course somewhat arbitrary; it may be that the characters which form words are recto and proper, and the illustrations which form the characters of worms are verso; Blake's work disenables the distinction. Albin's work, incidentally, seems to have been known by Blake, since the 1795 re(-)publication of Albin's work on spiders by Thomas Martyn included a frontispiece which Blake replicates within the text of a plate of America. Blake's awareness of Albin's still-born butterfly work remains to be seen.
Iconographically, Blake's frontispiece to the various manifestations of The Gates of Paradise seem to mimic Albin's simple arrangements of leaves, moths and worms, which include little or no background detail, and invariably establish the worm as a central figure; two moths hover over or around the worm. The moths are painted flat, which is to say, their wings are oriented horizontally to their thoraces; they provide dorsal and ventral views of the moths which originate from a given worm. The moths' heads point directly towards or directly away from the worm, supplicantly paying homage or angelically glorifying their ancestor. Chrysalises if present are not necessarily on leaves at all; they are positioned head-up or head to the left in null space in the lower left third or lower right third of the illustrations. Eggs merit the least pride of place; they are arrayed in very small rows in null space at the very bottom of the frame, to the extent that these same rows help demarcate a linear rather than the more conspicuous circular frame.
In general Albin's work on worms and moths is rudimentary, particularly against his published work on spiders. Nevertheless it seems possible to attribute to his work a patriarchal character, since the progeny offer pride of place to the worm which birthed them, and yet no material, placental and so maternal connection exists between the separate figures, figures which we otherwise might recognize as fully equivalent: worm and moth are two but the same. Reading such metaphors of human/mammalian reproduction into Albin's inchoate work seems possible precisely in the case of the abortion; Albin seems to lament the failure of a worm to change, of his own failure to evoke the worm encased in a box to use the nourishment (read: leaves) provided within the box, the geometric womb of his creation. In these cases the worm dies without changing, without producing a moth. Like Albin's own efforts, these re-productions come to naught; the box, like the unpublished page, becomes a sad crypt for the worthiest of characters. It is a tragedy for Albin when the worm dies without re-issue.
Albin's work on spiders is published in 1723, and his efforts to re-lease himself, to provide for himself based on the sale of another text--a text vicariously dependent on the emergence of the worm-- these ultimately abortive efforts begin the same year. Albin was thus actively engaged in natural history in London when Richard Bradley's Natural History was published in 1726. Bradley's text is interesting for our purposes both for what it says about caterpillars and what it says about sperm. Both are called worms by Bradley, incidentally, and this common name implied both a common shape and a common purpose; ontologically, these worms were intimately intertwined. Briefly, Bradley contends that because the worm metamorphs into the moth or butterfly, the shape of the worm contains the power of change. Accordingly, Bradley's answer to the contemporary debate about the primacy of the mammalian egg or the mammalian sperm is that the male sperm alone provides the power to change; the egg acts merely as a medium, a matrix in which the worm is to grow. The male is transcendent and vital; the female, earthy and sterile. Bradley's work marks a common enough theme in male-ordered eighteenth-century natural history, one which can have a very strong effect on our reading of the fragment of Chapter VI of The Book of Urizen re-produced above. But Bradley's phallocratic interpretation of the worm was not without opposition, both within the loosely-bounded discourse of natural history and beyond.
The eighteenth-century version of the folk tale Rumpelstilzchen, for example, consistently mocks and de-authorizes the primacy of the phallic character called "little wrinkly stub," Rumpenst nzchen, a character that the Grimms subsequently re-name "little spirit," in order to associate it with a devilish figure, one which seeks to subvert the patriarchal negotiation of women's bodies. Yet in its earliest extant version, Rumpelstilzchen was a story about women's empowerment; the future princess had the inherent power to spin straw into gold, rather like Dorothy's ruby slippers, and all a young girl need do is refuse to have this power subverted by the myth of the power of the male phallus. This sense was of course Grimmly over-written.
This same theme of women's power was nevertheless extant in Maria Sybilla Merian's brilliant work on butterflies, however much later "science" might try to subvert it. It is Merian's feminine sensibility about butterflies which I think emerges in Blake's Thel (and Thel), and it is to her life and work which I now turn. Maria Sybilla Merian was born in 1646, the heir and eldest daughter of Matthias Merian, a famous sixteenth-century engraver. She was formally trained by Nuremburg's finest artists, and her artwork is generally considered exquisite.2 Merian was married twice, widowed and divorced. Thereafter she joined a fringe Dutch Lutheran sect known as the Labadists, after Jean-Paul Labide, a rogue French Cardinal.
Labadists were strong believers in typology, and Merian was a strong Labadist. Typology assumes that pre-figuration is inherent in natural and biblical formulations, and that pre-figuration tends to prove salvation. Thus Adam emerges in the Old Testament as the first man in order to pre-figure the true savior, the Christ of the New Testament. This typological thinking is not, however, confined to the Bible; caterpillars' re-emergence, for example, both proves Christ's resurrection and confirms our own sense of re-birth. Insects become tokens to uncover the spiritually-renewing secrets of nature: insecto-theology really serves to mark our own potential for metamorphosis. Merian seems to have believed this, and to have put this belief into practice.
First and foremost, Merian's painting and publishing became both spiritual quests and spiritual teachings. Still stinging from a public and bitter divorce, Merian's seclusion into the Labadist community and later the Labadist colony on Dutch Surinam also gave her work a notably feminist character. Perhaps because of the change that this new religion and this new setting provided, the sense of femininity which emerges from her work is a triumphant one, free of the constraints of patriarchy. Indeed upon her return to Holland Merian also set up a model feminist artist colony, one within which her daughters and students painted flowers and moths on silken garments, re-iterating the circular interdependence of the plant and the silk-worm. These rainments were not only beautiful, they were worn: thus the women both produced and displayed themselves like butterflies. With this insecto-theology reached its finest form.
Merian is nevertheless best known for the paintings and accompanying words of her published texts. And here the arrangement of the Butterfly and the worm tells a much prettier story than that of Albin and Bradley. For Merian the top left of the frame of the painting is the source of light, and it is to this enlightenment that Merian's butterflies invariably turn. The worm is a necessary step in the transition to butterfly, but their is no pride of place to the dumpy and seemingly dependent worm: the worm must stay on the leaf, but the butterfly flies free. Merian's compositions seem very carefully arranged, because in one of her works she paints all of the elements in a linear array, based on their order of emergence, from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly; these same elements are then re-composed so that the worm, for one, is well-grounded, and the butterfly moves to escape the frame.
Merian's use of plants is also interesting here; her work had such scientific significance not only because she was the first naturalist to go to Surinam, but because she brought a keen mind and imagination with her. She noticed for the first time in Western culture that each caterpillar depended on a particular flower, and she judiciously followed the pollinating and egg-laying butterflies to the appropriate leaves. These she included in her paintings, careful too to include the land, the earth, the ground of the composition of the whole. In this she diverged a bit from her father, who doubtless influenced her sense of light as transcendence. For Maria Sybilla Merian always emphasized the necessary interdependence of the material and transcendent worlds. She also recognized the emotional price of her materials: she rigorously avoided painting over the clump of nascent hair on a particular piece of vellum, vellum which is made from the skin of an aborted calf; all the subsequent re-productions from this proto-type include a curious re-alignment of a Raupen's proboscis, so that the spirit of the calf is unperturbed.
Merian painted more than flowers and butterflies. She was Europe's eyes for the host of flora and fauna in Surinam, and her books and paintings heartily re-produced her discoveries. Thus her works invariably also showed off her religion: spiders killed birds and were bad; snakes lived underneath the plants and ate dirt, satanically; toads were good at heart, but often misdirected. This last becomes clearest in her paintings of Ramapipa, now known as the Surinam Toad and most recently used as the successor to the rabbit test, that modern negotiator of fate. For Merian the Rama pipa was a parable: the children which emerge from the mother's back as tadpoles or eye-less, sometimes arm-less toads were no match for the elect, those toadlings which emerge fully formed. Losing the tail, for Merian the Schwantz,and thus the snake and the penis, meant that the metamorphing toad had reached the highest state of being; by analogy, men with their tails were quite close to rudimentary. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Romantic physician Johann Blumenbach came to the opposite conclusion: it was the tadpole with legs but still-prominent tail who was ready to conquer the world.
Thel is a similar sort of natural parable, since Thel (and Thel) negotiates the difference between butterflies and worms. Not surprisingly, the visual composition of the text immediately complicates this interpretation, since images of children, snakes, flowers, leaves and birds abound, and, simply enough, images of butterflies and worms do not. Nevertheless the text has a host of characters which seem consistent with Merian's sense of the natural scheme, characters who in spirit inspire us like her butterflies. The first set of these characters are the many seraphim which hover within the textual frame of Thel; these include the serifs or ceriphs of the letters (the fine lines of writing) themselves, as well as the flying birds and humans which appear like seraphim. Further, to interpret these two sorts of visual characters at all is to invoke a hermeneutics which is not present within the characters themselves; we ascribe them meanings from a separate hermeneutical field, a field attached to the material textual field like heaven is to earth. This sort of theoretical play finally seems warranted in Thel because of one of the narrative characters: "Mne Seraphim": Many Seraphim. [Certainly an "a" is missing here, but "Seraphim" is a Hebrew word, after all, and one can hardly fault Thel for failing to include the necessary serifs.]
Thel is a daughter to these many seraphim exactly to the extent that Thel is a daughter to Mne Seraphim. The text invokes this angelic plurality and so a sort of plural potentiality to such an extent that it is tempting to conclude that Thel and Thel might represent "They will": "They'll." This conclusion naturally impinges upon THEL's Motto, with which the text is by convention supposed to begin; the motto marks the significance of the text which the text is then to portray, thus THEL's Motto is a promise which must be ascribed to Thel and Thel -- They will do this, and (their mother) the many Seraphim act(s) as both ideal and material causes to see this plural potentiality through. Oddly, it is only in "THEL's Motto" that the text offers an apostrophe to mark singular possession; "an infants face" [1:10], "Lillys leaf" [3:30, 4:3], "Worms voice" [4:7] and even "mothers smiles" [4:6] lack arbitration between singular and plural possession. The italicized THEL thus seems to accommodate plurality within its singularity, for otherwise the apostrophe would threaten to mark out its indeterminacy. The angelic cosmos of Thel might seem to have very little in common with butterflies, although again it has a very great deal to do with the social and theological implication of Merian's work. That people (particularly women) were like butterflies for Merian seems well-established.
The Thel character likewise negotiates the world of the butterfly in Thel. Born a daughter, Thel meets the flower, the sun, the cloud, the earth and the worm, thus Thel exhibits an order of composition exactly like Merian's. Further, at the lowest ebb Thel 'goes to ground' amidst the "fibrous roots," and her change within the hollow pit, doubtless at least implicitly narrated by the Worm, leaves her (in the end) "unhinderd," at least "till she came into the vales of Har." [6:22] And recognize that this change is indeed a metamorphosis, a (meta)physical change in form of being: a body composed of Ear [6:11], Eye [6:12] and Eyelids [6:13] curls down as if in ambush [6:14], and then sequentially unfurls itself into a creature with more and different parts-- Eye [6:15], Tongue [6:16], Ear [6:17], and Nostril [6:18].
These parts are human, however, not butterfly, and with the addition of lines 6:19 and 6:20 become specifically feminine, since the "tender curb" and "little curtain of flesh" seem to indicate the hymen:
Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy!, Why a little curtain of flesh upon the bed of our desire?, [Bogen facsimile, p. 48]
The Virgin's orgasmic "shriek" of 6:21 thereby seems to mark an opening for a young woman's sexual freedom. As seen in the illustration below the characters on plate six, Thel is literally in the driver's seat. Thus this is a "de-flowering" only in Merian's sense of a spiritual escape from the restrictions of the earth; the flower may be the intimate companion of the butterfly, but breeding and attendance upon the worm is at the butterfly's discretion. The same might be said for Thel and Thel, since the return to the "vales of Har" is indefinitely postponed. All that one might conclude about Thel's fate seems to be embedded in THEL's Motto, since here is the promise they'll have to keep. Indeed Thel rides the Worm back to the beginning of Thel, forever postponing the determinacy of "The End" [no period]
THEL's Motto is clearly interrogative, but who or what does it interrogate? The motto distributes three question marks among its four lines, seemingly, one for each rhetorical question. But because of the lack of a single question mark in line two, as many as six other questions emerge. Again, in lieu of clear denotation, two other serifs must answer the call:
Thel's Motto, Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou 'go ask the Mole; Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl? [Bogen, Plate i]
The first serif to notice is the one before "go" in the second line. This mark might be read as a sub-quotation, an apostrophe or the broken character of the "g"; in any case, this serif appears to break the line in two. If this interruption is read as another question, two immediate possibilities emerge: whether or not "thou" happen(s) to be wilting, or, alternatively, if wilt is a contraction of "willst" (since the archaic but informal"thou" marks this as second person, although the identity of this second person remains in doubt), if "thou" knows what is in the pit. In either case the Mole may also need to be interrogated on these questions, since "thou" need not know.
On the other hand, perhaps the Mole need not be consulted, because the end of the line is just as indeterminate as the middle. Line two ends with two marks, a dot above a triangle, but this triangle might be read as a comma (producing a semi- colon) or a dot (producing a colon). Either way, THEL's Motto contains another limited break, another half-rest, and so the Mole may be the reference mammilian for the first series of questions--about the Eagle and the pit, about the wilting or about what "thou" will know-- or for the second series-- about Wisdom and Love. And these sorts of textual indeterminacies are not trivial, for if Thel plays out the life of a butterfly, it is this very sort of rhetorical metamorphosis which may be under interrogation in the motto. It may well be that "the Eye sees more than the Heart knows."
Again, the different narrative possibilities which emerge between the challenges to the knowledge of the Eagle, the Mole and the "thou" are so significant to Thel because Thel meets these same sorts of characters in the text: the cloud, the worm and herself. Indeed it is only through her growing understanding of her dual nature --half creature of the air, half creature of the earth-- which will allow her to choose her third way. Further, this metamorphosis occurs in Thel's "own grave plot" [6:5] amidst a "land of sorrows," [6:9] the moment at which one literally and figuratively wilts. Here again the possibly absent wisdom of the Mole comes into play, since during the metamorphosis Thel "heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit" [6:10]. The very hollowness of the pit excludes its inhabitance, although the hallowed ground of the grave, its holiness, imbues (and embeds) it with a spiritual presence; this same balance of emptiness and promise is at stake in the indeterminacy of "wilt" and "will" in THEL's Motto, an indeterminacy that continues with the possible roles of the Mole.
Even if the Mole is not interrogated about the final two questions of the motto, they'll still have to have answers, and Thel (and Thel) will have to provide them. But "Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl?" [i:3-4]. Nancy Bogen remarks that these objects conventionally refer to civil and religous authorities, respectively: the royal sceptor and the holy chalice. Certainly this reading [like many others] is possible, but provides scarce little relevance for any holistic hermeneutics of Thel. By contrast, internal evidence might suggest that the golden bowl is the cup of the golden flower on the title page of Thel from which Thel and, above her outstreched arms, the characters of Thel, emerge. A naked figure emerges from a second golden bowl to embrace her. Is this not the Love of Thel? And how then do the other flying figures relate? It may well be that the Eagle and the Angel, the flying mother and child, the wingless valkyire and the figure resting on the leaf on the next leaf [i.e., Plate 1, top] also all emerge from these golden flowers [and references to Churchs and Kings do not]. In a sense all of the other characters also emerge from these same fertile grounds, since [and this seems clear from plate three] the leaves of the text bear leaves and characters quite prolifically! The Love of Thel becomes the Love that is the text as a whole, its many serifs and Mne Seriphim, its Thel and Thel and more.
Is this, then, the Wisdom of the silver rod? This is not simply a reference to the phallus of the cloud man, for the cloud man too is a butterfly, a rider of winds and so at root a worm:
look'st thou on my youth, And fearest thou because I vanish and am seen no more. Nothing remains; O maid I tell thee, when I pass away, It is to unfold3 life, to love and peace, and raptures holy; Unseen descending. weigh my light wings upon balmy flowers: And court the fair eyed dew, to take me in her shining tent; The weeping virgin, trembling kneels before the rising sun, Till we arise link'd in a golden band, and never part; But walk united. bearing food to all our tender flowers. [3:8-16] [Bogen, Plate 3]
Here Thel very strongly associates the little Cloud man with a butterfly, with a death that leads to an unfolding into a new life, with new light wings and a whole new approach to flowers:
he "court[s] the fair eyed dew,4 to take me into her shiningtent;" the little Cloud as butterfly suckles on nectar, fresh buds weeping their virgin fruit. In the same way new butterflies emerge from the cocoon into the sunlight, drying their wings before tentative first flights. Does not the silver cocoon provide the little Cloud with this Wisdom? And does he not as sagely pass it along? Thel's own pit was likely as silken, and Thel's song is clearly as strong.