WHO OWNS A POEM? BLAKE'S 'JERUSALEM'

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

 

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded her

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

 

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of Fire.

 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green & pleasant land. 

 

 

Swift wrote a savage political satire that included – with the Yahoos – the ultimate (literary) attack on the human race.  Contrary to his intentions – and to his wishes, had he lived to see the result – it became (suitably expurgated) a children’s classic.   A similar sort of fate has befallen Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.

 

See it without explanation in an anthology, and you would probably take it to mean something like this.  Did Christ ever visit England?  If he were to visit now (ie 1804), what would he make of all those mills that keep appearing?  I’m going to fight, and keep fighting, to ensure that industrial ugliness isn’t allowed to ruin the pastoral landscape: some sort of synthesis between city and nature as you find in the Heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation.   That, more or less, is what the British public take it to mean when they hear it sung. 

 

Actually, what Blake meant when he wrote it is something rather different. (Which isn’t to say he wasn’t aware of horrible social/industrial conditions.  Just look at ‘London’, or ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ from Songs of Experience.)

     Blake is one of those difficult writers who employ a private mythology.  And to compound the confusion, mixed in with his own mythological characters like Nobodaddy and Urizen are words from the public domain like ‘clouds’, ‘mills’ and ‘Jerusalem’.

     Clouds, for Blake, represent religious obscurantism.  The ‘mills’ are the altars of the churches – there is a statement somewhere that is specific about this – on which the natural instincts of humanity are sacrificed/ground down.  He is thinking of the old, biblical-style corn mill rather than anything industrial. (Or Milton’s “Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves”.)  Jerusalem, most confusingly of all, represents the state of mental freedom: which, of course, also incorporates sexual freedom.

     ‘Jerusalem’, then, is more in the tradition of the sexual-liberation poems – ‘The Garden of Love’, ‘A Little Girl Lost’, ‘The Sun-Flower’ – than in the tradition of ‘London’.

 

A further confusion is that the poem we think of as ‘Jerusalem’ is not Blake’s Jerusalem at all: which is a long experiment in several “chapters”.   What we call ‘Jerusalem’ is actually the preface to the poem Milton.

     In the introductory prose polemic, Blake rails against the classical models that have limited Milton.  In other words: foreign influences that have had a restrictive influence on the instincts.  For although Milton was probably Blake’s favourite poet, Blake disliked Milton’s Puritanism.  Perhaps he saw it as something that stifled natural impulses.  For the poem that follows the prose Preface and precedes Book the First seems to have exactly that theme: the restrictive influence of Christianity (as misinterpreted by the Church) on the old druidic nature religion it superseded.

    Following this sort of line, we end with something rather different from a critique of the Industrial Revolution.  The advent of Christianity destroyed the old nature religion of the Druids.  It is their feet that are referenced in the first verse/stanza.  You can’t have mental/sexual freedom when the churches stifle vitality.  Blake will fight the Church for the freedom of the impulses, and will continue to fight until said freedom has been obtained.

     Milton, Blake goes on to say, wrote in chains because he was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.  Blake puts him right with the proper way of reading Paradise Lost.

     Not that it matters that much if old Johnny got it wrong:  Heaven and Hell are one and the same thing if only we can cleanse the Doors of Perception and see things as they really are. (This from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)    You can see why Jim Morrison admired Blake, and named the group in Blake’s honour. 

 

To sum up, here we have the same poem with two quite incompatible readings.  So… who owns the poem?

     In the past, we would have said the poet.  You tried to understand what the poet was getting at, and modified your own views accordingly.

     Modern literary practices like Reception Theory, or Reader-Response Criticism have changed all that.  Meaning now resides with the reader, not the writer.  the text means what we, the readers, say it means.  What if different readers disagree with one another as well as with the author?   Welcome to the modern world.

     As an author of sorts myself, I’m on the side of the author.   With this particular poem, though, I prefer the interpretation of the general, unenlightened reader.  An instance in which ignorance is bliss, but I  – regrettably – have eaten of the apple of knowledge, and lost my Blakean Innocence by falling into Blakean Experience.