Entering Blake’s Jerusalem

Half friendship is the bitterest enmity, said Los,
As he entered the door of death for Albion’s sake inspired.

Notes on an image
by Mike Marqusee

This image (right) fills the first of the one hundred pages (each a separate engraved plate) that comprise Jerusalem, the last, longest and most ambitious of William Blake’s illuminated books, an epic summation of his artistic, political and psychological interests.

Often obscure, sometimes blisteringly transparent, Jerusalem is many things: an illustrated book, an epic poem, a mixed media performance, a visionary prophecy, a political manifesto. In the end, like Blake’s other illuminated books, it is uncategorisable. What is certain, however, is that Jerusalem is a monumental material testament to human imagination and human labour, manual and mental.

Jerusalem was written, designed, illustrated, etched, printed and hand-coloured by Blake (with help from his wife Katherine) between 1804 and 1820. Not surprisingly, given the labour required to produce even a single copy of the book, and the lack of any appeal to the publishing market of the day, only a few copies were completed, of which eight still exist. This image is the frontispiece (page one) of ‘Copy E’ and is in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. (Copy E can be viewed in full at the wonderful Blake digital archive.)

The frontispiece is an invitation to the labyrinthine, liberating journey embodied in the book, a journey through inner and outer worlds, the ancient past, the hellish present and an imagined future. The figure is Los, protagonist of Jerusalem, who in Blake’s mythology represents human imagination and human labour and their capacity to transform an inhuman universe. Los is the poet-prophet who seeks to awaken his friend, Albion (England), to his own humanity and the humanity of others, to the “fibres of love from man to man / Through Albion’s pleasant land.”

In this introductory image, Los is portrayed as a London night watchman entering the dark regions – beginning the journey that is the book – through a gothic doorway, partially illuminated by his glowing orb-like lantern. In the William Blake Trust / Tate edition of Jerusalem, Blake scholar Morton D. Paley comments:

“The dark coat, broad brimmed hat and lantern identify Los as a London night watchman; but the sandal links him with antiquity… As is always the case with Blake’s major figures, there are multiple references here. The sandal and lantern recall ‘our friend Diogenes the Grecian,’ as Blake’s Isaiah call him in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the Bible, both Isaiah and Ezekiel are addressed by God as watchmen. Later in Jerusalem, Los is a watchman who puts on golden sandals (Jerusalem 83:75-6) and in Jerusalem 85-86 he sings his Watch Song. These roles as Prophetic watchman and seeker are conflated further with those of Elijah and of the Saviour… Los is engaged in an act of self-sacrifice in descending into the interior of Albion, as is made clear in some of the lines originally incised in this plate and later expunged.”

The expunged lines are visible in a unique early proof, now in Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. They read (in part):

Half friendship is the bitterest enmity, said Los,
As he entered the door of death for Albion’s sake inspired.
The long sufferings of God are not for ever, there is a judgement…

For Blake, the figure of ‘Jerusalem’ is at one and the same time the living organism that is London, a redeemed ‘nation’ (Jerusalem as the “emanation of the Giant Albion”), and a renewed global society. On Plate 26, he declares unequivocally:

Jerusalem is named liberty
Among the sons of Albion

‘Liberty’, at this time, was the watchword of the movement for the democratic transformation of the English system. Not surprisingly, critics such as Peter Ackroyd who like to portray Blake as essentially apolitical ignore this plate and its ringing slogan .

Part Two of Jerusalem, addressed “To the Jews” (the other three parts are addressed to “the public”, “the Christians” and “the Deists”), includes one of Blake’s major lyrics, which begins (to the delight of north Londoners like me):

The fields from Islington to Marybone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint Johns Wood:
Were builded over with pillars of gold,
And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

This happy state of affairs does not endure. Albion and Jerusalem are, as it were, divorced.

Albion slept beneath the Fatal Tree
And the Druid’s golden Knife,
Rioted in human gore
In Offerings of Human Life…

Albion’s sleep unleashes his “spectre” – the calculating power that seeks to make human beings instruments of a self-aggrandising will: “He wither’d up sweet Zion’s Hill / From every Nation of the Earth… He wither’d up the Human Form, / By laws of sacrifice for sin…” The upshot is a ruthless quest for domination and ceaseless world war:

The Rhine was red with human blood:
The Danube roll’d a purple tide;
On the Euphrates Satan stood:
And over Asia stretch’d his pride.

An indignant Blake roars at Albion and his ’spectre’:

Is this thy soft Family-Love
Thy cruel Patriarchal pride
Destroying all the World beside.
Planting thy Family alone?

The relevance of these lines to today’s global order will be obvious to readers of this site. The lyric concludes, however, with a counter-vision, which I hope would have a similar relevance. Albion and Jerusalem have been re-united, and the relationship between London and the world, between self and society, has been transformed:

In my Exchanges every Land
Shall walk, & mine in every Land,
Mutual shall build Jerusalem:
Both heart in heart & hand in hand

The lyric looks forward to the climax of Jerusalem as a whole, in which, after much struggle and many convolutions, an aroused humanity rejects an inhuman system: “the kingdoms of the world & all their glory that grew on desolation / The fruit of Albion’s poverty tree”. Jerusalem’s final lines offer a vision of revolution bringing together the political, the social, the personal and the ecological.

All human forms identified even tree metal earth & stone. All
Human forms identified, living going forth and returning wearied
Into the planetary lives of years months days & hours reposing
And then awaking into his bosom in the life of immortality.
And I heard the names of their emanations they are named Jerusalem.

Mike Marqusee