Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness by Jason Whittaker
Oxford University Press, 2022
Although someone who —according to the nineteenth century poet Edward Fitzgerald— was “a genius with a screw loose” and whose own youthful acolyte, the artist Samuel Palmer, openly expressed serious misgivings about his poetic vision, William Blake remains firmly established as a national treasure of considerable magnitude. Blake’s counter-cultural aura endures as an attractive proposition for those who despise the Establishment forces that seek to constantly whittle away our basic social and spiritual birthrights. And yet, for all those who revere Blake and flock with Pavlovian devotion to every exhibition of his visual art, how many have attempted to delve into the intricate labyrinth of his poetic epics only to find themselves bewildered by their recondite symbolism? We might be familiar with the better-known works such as Songs of Innocence and Experience (“Tyger, Tyger, burning bright” etc.), but such formidably arcane volumes as The Book of Thel or The Four Zoas take a lot of commitment to fathom. All the more ironic, then, that one of Blake’s most opaque compositions should yield perhaps his best-loved lyric in the shape of that anthemic crowd-pleaser Jerusalem. However, as Jason Whittaker shows in Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness, for all its perennial popularity, the origins of this most hallowed of rousing national hymns reveal it to be a significantly contested and protean echo-chamber of our consciousness.
To set them in their original context, those familiar four verses beginning with “And did those feet in ancient time” are stanzas from the preface to Milton: A Poem, written and illustrated by Blake between 1804 and 1810. As Whittaker shows, any attempt to understand Blake’s intent behind these famous lines must take into account the entire self-generated mythos around which he constructed his artistic life, as informed by certain key texts such as the Bible and, in this particular case, the major works of John Milton. In addition, another of Blake’s epics, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, is another important and (to the uninitiated) esoteric text to consult in order to arrive at some understanding of what Blake meant when he composed the lines that make up the song. An academic steeped in Blake studies, Whittaker proves a trusty guide to lead us through some intricate hermeneutic pathways, whilst making his explanations readily understandable throughout —no mean feat in comparison with some of Blake’s previous expositors. As he delves into the meaning of Blake’s words (long before we get to their musical setting), one of Whittaker’s main contentions is that the celebrated “feet in ancient time” which “walked upon England’s mountains green” were those of Joseph of Arimathea rather than, as is sometimes thought, Jesus Christ. That Joseph (a wealthy member of the Judean community who oversaw and paid for Christ’s internment) had visited England and founded a church at Glastonbury is a legend that stretches back to at least the twelfth century, and which Blake incorporates into his mythos as a means of correlating English identity with biblical Israelitism. What Whittaker also deftly shows in his forensic analysis of these stanzas is that Jerusalem, despite its subsequent deployments, is no rallying cry for jingoistic ardour in the face of perceived foreign foes. Indeed, Blake’s refusal to cease from “mental fight” stood in direct opposition to the barbarity of the physical conflict championed by the flag-waving patriots of the national press, at a time when Britain was engaged in a protracted war with Napoleonic France. And then there is the well-known and much-quoted mention in the second stanza of the “dark Satanic Mills,” which has long been seen as Blake’s acknowledgement of the Industrial Revolution’s grim inception. This is almost certainly not so, according to Whittaker, who sees this imagery as evoking Blake’s preoccupation with the soul’s entrapment in false doctrines and mechanistic Enlightenment values, the satanic mills in question being a symbolic representation of the grinding oppression that we visit on ourselves through socioeconomic and psychological conditioning.
All that being said —and Whittaker goes into much greater detail about the emblematic significance of the stanzas themselves--Jerusalem as we now know it was all but lost to posterity for three decades after Blake’s death in 1827. Indeed, it was only with the appearance of Alexander Gilchrist’s biography of this by then almost forgotten genius, first published in 1863 with the telling subtitle Pictor Ignotus or ‘unknown artist,’ that Blake was restored to some measure of public reputation. Even then our Victorian ancestors didn’t know quite what to make of this oddly dazzling rare bird, hence the Fitzgerald quote above. As for the epic poem Milton, from which the Jerusalem stanzas would eventually be extracted, a succession of literary heavyweights including Swinburne and W. B. Yeats classed it as yet more cryptic ramblings from a curious late Georgian poetaster who had once produced some noteworthy visual images. It was not until 1893, in Henry Charles Beeching’s anthology A Paradise of English Poetry, that the lines which we know as Jerusalem were highlighted as stand-alone verses. Under the section entitled ‘Patriotism,’ Beeching aligned Blake’s words with John of Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ speech from Richard II and, in so doing, set a precedent for drumming up chauvinistic enthusiasm around two of the most ironically misappropriated pieces of English poetry in the national literary canon.
In the wake of Beeching’s landmark borrowing from the Blake canon, the early twentieth century saw the inclusion of the Jerusalem stanzas in several other poetic anthologies as an example of what this apparently totally bonkers but undeniably intriguing minor Romantic poet could produce when he put his mind to it. It was also during this period that Jerusalem was first set to music by Henry Walford Davies, a composer whose importance —as Whittaker puts it— cannot be overstated in the creation of the hymn which we know today. Not only did Walford Davies devote a significant proportion of his career to the musical setting of Blake’s work, but alongside the then-Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, he also proved influential in raising Blake’s artistic profile in general on the eve of the First World War. That most of us are largely unfamiliar with Walford Davies’ setting of Jerusalem, overshadowed as it is by the Sir Charles Hubert Parry tune, is largely down to the initiative of Bridges, who first suggested to the distinguished composer Parry (a former musical tutor of Walford Davies) that he should write “suitable, simple music to Blake’s stanzas — music that an audience could take up and join in.” The setting was initially intended to provide a rousing soundtrack to meetings of the Fight For Right movement, founded in 1915 and devoted to “espousing the patriotic cause of the Allies against Germany.” Despite photographic evidence suggesting that Parry was the harrumphing epitome of a fusty old Establishment pillar, he was in fact anything but, with one contemporary stating that “I have never been able to make out whether Sir Hubert Parry is a liberal-minded Conservative or a Liberal with strong conservative tendencies. He, of course, would dub himself frankly a radical and say… ‘There’s an end of it.’”
In any case, by March 1916 Parry had composed the glorious air with which we are now familiar, handing it to Walford Davies with the words, “Here’s a tune, old chap, do what you like with it.” This in turn led to its first performance later that month at the Queen’s Hall in London, with Davies conducting a 300-strong choir. Such fulsome displays of patriotism highlight one of several inherent contradictions in the way that Jerusalem in its musical form had slipped its original creative moorings: Blake himself would no doubt have profoundly objected to his words being used to boost the war effort. And, indeed, Parry himself was distinctly uneasy with the more hawkish sentiments of the Fight for Right movement, to the point that —remaining true to his radical principles, and just before his death in October 1918— he gifted the copyright of Jerusalem to the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies.
Throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Jerusalem in Parry’s musical setting gradually achieved ever greater popularity and became something of a staple across the Anglican communion and school assemblies in Britain and further afield. In 1926 it was adopted as the National Hymn of the Federation of Music Competition Festivals, having, earlier in the decade, first been committed to disc. Its stirring rendition also became a staple element of every Women’s Institute (WI) meeting across the land, hence the well-known phrase used to sum up the WI’s supposed activities as all ‘jam and Jerusalem.’ On this point, Whittaker cites some grumblings amongst a small pressure group of disaffected WI members regarding the words of Jerusalem when the organisation first adopted it, with one particularly choleric dissident complaining that “the words convey nothing understandable to the ordinary Institute member and especially so in the Southern and Eastern Counties. We have not got ‘dark Satanic mills’ and have never seen them.” Despite such misgivings, Jerusalem continued to be sung at WI meetings all over the country, as well as at such prominent national events as the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, with Sir Edward Elgar taking the baton. Indeed, such was Jerusalem’s firmly-embedded place in the national consciousness that, when a concert organised to celebrate George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935 omitted the much-loved hymn, the King himself said “We must have ‘Jerusalem’ and if there is no room for it, I shall go down myself to the platform and whistle it.”
However, for all that Jerusalem might have been claimed by the British Establishment as a focus for patriotic unity in the early decades of the twentieth century, it has equally been commandeered as a heartfelt plea for the radical reformation of national consciousness by more progressive elements of the country’s political spectrum. Its associations with the Labour movement crystallised around a text published by future Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1920. In The Social Worker, Attlee’s brand of “patriotically infused, sentimental socialism” saw him quote Blake’s words to underpin his criticism of “the discontent caused by this failure [of society] getting stronger and stronger as the fruits of modern industrialism began to ripen.” In a similar vein, the frequently cited ‘dark satanic mills’ became a metaphorical reference point for such divergent writers as J.B. Priestley and D.H. Lawrence in bemoaning the bitter fruits of modern commercialism and its cultural scarring of England. However, by the very nature of its abiding protean appeal, during the Second World War Jerusalem became yet again something of a malleable signifier, to be brandished in some quarters as a nostalgic call to arms for those who sought to recapture a nebulous image of an England before Nazism shattered the peace, or by those with a more egalitarian bent as the anthem of a post-war community which would champion enlightened, progressive patriotism.
In any event, a few years after the end of the war Jerusalem’s status as an alternative national anthem was reaffirmed when, in 1953, it became a mainstay in the final portion of the Last Night of the Proms, under the flamboyant conducting of Sir Malcolm Sargent (aka ‘Flash Harry’). In the ensuing years, Jerusalem has attracted a wide variety of musical interpretations across a number of genres, ranging from a spirited brass version by the Black Dyke Mills Band, via The Fall’s fashionable dishevelment, to a full-on Progressive Rock epic courtesy of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Meanwhile, on film Jerusalem has served “as an ironic or metaphorical trope” in films such as The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and —to splendid effect— Derek Jarman’s provocative punk history lesson Jubilee.
Whittaker ends his study of Jerusalem by considering the hymn’s fortunes during the period 1997 to 2016, when it became popular at weddings across the land, a trend no doubt encouraged by its featuring in 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral and inclusion in the marriage service of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011. As Whittaker notes, Jerusalem’s exhortation not to cease from mental fight can be seen —depending on your point of view— as either very apt or totally inappropriate when speeding newlyweds on their matrimonial journey. One aggrieved pundit at the Daily Mail (a publication ever eager to court controversy in order to stir up dissension) suggested that “Blake is a controversial figure for Anglican wedding ceremonies since he not only rejected 19th century religious orthodoxy but was also a critic of traditional marriage and an advocate of free love,” whilst in America a zealous member of the right-wing press vented about Blake’s words spiralling “into the heights of paranoid grandiosity,” this being “the sort of verse one can imagine Charlie Manson concocting if he was a better hand at rhyme and indeed Blake’s poetry was enormously popular in the drug-addled 60s.” How disappointing that no-one from the WI was on hand to ferociously repel such slander.
Hypothetical free-love, druggy connotations notwithstanding, Jerusalem continues to feature at national occasions, such as in English sport. As shown in the film Building Jerusalem, it became a pre-match anthem for the English Rugby Union team, while in the wider socio-cultural arena Whittaker describes a plethora of Jerusalem appropriations for all manner of both popular and distinctly niche purposes —including, sadly, its recent adoption by the fringes of right-wing British politics.
One of the enduring fascinations of Blake’s creative output is its tendency to elude any sort of definitive explanation or interpretation. His stanzas from the preface to Milton: A Poem are a case in point. As Whittaker shows, almost everything about the poet’s meaning in these four stanzas has been misinterpreted at one time or another —which is not to say that we are any closer now to reaching unassailable conclusions about what exactly Blake intended in this or his other flights of mythical vision. However, the exquisite marrying of Blake’s words to Parry’s spellbinding tune to create Jerusalem has given us a culturally enriching hymn, evoking a diverse national consciousness in pursuit of the equally ineffable: what it means to be English.--Mark Jones
