WILLIAM BLAKE: EXAM STUDY NOTES
BLAKE’S GENERAL VIEWS & VALUES
Religion/Christianity
Science
Industrial revolution/Technology
Romanticism
Feminism
Enlightenment
Hegelism - dialectic
Platonism
Nature/Environment
Childhood
Class structure
Rousseau
French Revolution
From Poetical Sketches (1783):
Song [‘How sweet I roam’d from field to field’], pp.357-8
GLOSSARY
fir’d means fired
Phoebus is Apollo, the sun god
WIKIPEDIA BACKGROUND READING
The myth of Eros/Cupid and Psyche
Envious and jealous of the beauty of a mortal girl named Psyche, Venus asks her son Cupid (known to the Greeks as Eros) to use his golden
arrows while Psyche sleeps, so that when she awakens, Venus (Aphrodite in the Greek tradition) would have already placed a vile creature
for her to fall in love with. Cupid finally agrees to her commands after a long (and failed) debate. As he flies to Psyche's room at night, he
turns himself invisible so no one can see him fly in through her window. He takes pity on her, for she was born too beautiful for her own
safety. As he slowly approaches, careful not to make a sound, he readies one of his golden arrows. He leans over Psyche while she is asleep
and before he can scratch her shoulder with the arrow, she awakens, startling him, for she looks right into his eyes, despite his invisibility.
This causes him to scratch himself with his arrow, falling deeply in love with her. He cannot continue his mission, for every passing second
he finds her more appealing. He reports back to Venus shortly after and the news enrages her. Venus places a curse on Psyche that keeps
her from meeting a suitable husband, or any husband at that. As she does this, it upsets Cupid greatly, and he decides as long as the curse
stays on Psyche, he will no longer shoot arrows, which will cause the temple of Venus to fall.
After months of no one — man or animal — falling in love, marrying, or mating, the Earth starts to grow old, which causes concern to Venus,
for nobody praises her for Cupid's actions. Finally, she agrees to listen to Cupid's demands, according him one thing to have his own way.
Cupid desires Psyche. Venus, upset, agrees to his demands only if he begins work immediately. He accepts the offer and takes off, shooting
his golden arrows as fast as he can, restoring everything to the way it should be. People again fall in love and marry, animals far and wide
mate, and the Earth begins to look young once again.
When all continue to admire and praise Psyche's beauty, but none desire her as a wife, Psyche's parents consult an oracle, which tells them
to leave Psyche on the nearest mountain, for her beauty is so great that she is not meant for (mortal) man. Terrified, they have no choice
but to follow the oracle's instructions. But then Zephyrus, the west wind, carries Psyche away, to a fair valley and a magnificent palace
where she is attended by invisible servants until nightfall, and in the darkness of night the promised bridegroom arrives and the marriage is
consummated. Cupid visits her every night to sleep with her, but demands that she never light any lamps, since he does not want her to
know who he is until the time is right.
Interpretations
Key passages
Features
Sacrificing,
possessing
and
controlling
the
natural, female beauty
‘golden cage’
‘golden wings’
Repetition of ‘golden’
Female narrative voice
Male power/the gods
‘Phoebus fir’d my vocal
rage’
‘sing…wing’
‘me…liberty’
Intertextual –
mythological references
Rhyming pattern, song
form
Highlighting the darkness
in nature/mythology
1
Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au
Views and Values
The rights of women –
Wollstonecraft.
Goddess aspect of
femininity.
The neo-classical aspect
of the Romantic period.
Reassessing how to
worship and where god
exists
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), pp.55-65
BASIC SUMMARY
Oothoon was to wed Theotormon and is raped by Bromion. Theortormon, in revenge, pins up Oothoon and Bromion.
Critiquing the constraints of love and sexuality
Analogy for Blake's denouncement of enslavement in Africa and laboring children
See Color Plates 5 and 6
GLOSSARY
Abyss: bottomless depth
Albion: ancient name for England
Blightings: numerous plant diseases
Charnel house: a vault or building where human skeletons remain
Contemns: to view with contempt
Continence: self-constraint in sexual nature
Leutha: a female character in the mythology of William Blake. She stands for 'sex under law' (Damon, A Blake Dictionary).
Furrow: long, narrow trench
Marygold: ‘symbolises the first experiment with sex’ (Damon, A Blake Dictionary)..
Miser: cheapskate
Nymph: a female goddess of Nature associated with sexuality.
Perswading: talking
Scourge: whip or lash
Transparent: transmitting light
Usury: lending money and charging a lot of interest
Wanton: malicious/idly
Interpretations
The beauty of sexual
innocence
The various forms of
innate truth
The holy nature of all
that lives.
Celebrating as well as
mourning the living.
Key passages
Features
‘I plucked Leutha’s
flower’
‘My virgin mantle in
twain’
‘With what…?’
“Tell me…?’
‘And are…?’
Metaphor,
characterisation of
elements, strong female
narrative voice
Diverse narrative
perspectives –
omniscient and
characterised
Repetitious use of
questions
Animalistic metaphors
Similes with animals
‘whale worship’
‘the chicken shuns the
ravenous horse’
‘…everything that lives is
holy’
Views and Values
Exploitation of women
and natives
Platonic use of dialogue
to philosophise
Romantic ideals about
the power in nature
From Songs of Innocence (1789):
2
Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au
See Color Plate 1
The Lamb, p.15
SUMMARY & IDEAS
A child’s hymn
Platonic ideas of perfection
Jesus as lamb
Innocence and unity
Rhyme and repetition – child’s chant, lamb’s bleating
SPARKNOTES.COM SUMMARY & FORM
The poem begins with the question, “Little Lamb, who made thee?” The speaker, a child, asks the lamb about its origins:
how it came into being, how it acquired its particular manner of feeding, its “clothing” of wool, its “tender voice.” In the next
stanza, the speaker attempts a riddling answer to his own question: the lamb was made by one who “calls himself a Lamb,”
one who resembles in his gentleness both the child and the lamb. The poem ends with the child bestowing a blessing on the
lamb.
“The Lamb” has two stanzas, each containing five rhymed couplets. Repetition in the first and last couplet of each stanza
makes these lines into a refrain, and helps to give the poem its song-like quality. The flowing l’s and soft vowel sounds
contribute to this effect, and also suggest the bleating of a lamb or the lisping character of a child’s chant.
GLOSSARY
Mead: meadow
O’er: over
Vales: river valley
Interpretations
Key passages
Questioning existence
Answering existence
‘who made thee’
The beauty and
innocence in nature
Transcendent/spiritual
nature of existence
‘Little Lamb’
Features
Repetition of questions
Same form (5 rhymed
couplets in each stanza)
for questions and
answers
Animal metaphor
‘We are called by his
name’
Use of hymn form and
reference
Jesus/child figure –
separate stanzas – animal
and god
The Little Black Boy, p.16
SUMMARY & IDEAS
3
Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au
Views and Values
Platonic form
Rewriting the Old
Testament – questioning
creation
God in nature – Romantic
ideal
The connection between
the physical and spiritual
world
The English slave trade
Unity and peace
Body and soul
Light and darkness
SPARKNOTES.COM SUMMARY & FORM
A black child tells the story of how he came to know his own identity and to know God. The boy, who was born in “the southern wild” of Africa, first
explains that though his skin is black his soul is as white as that of an English child. He relates how his loving mother taught him about God who
lives in the East, who gives light and life to all creation and comfort and joy to men. “We are put on earth,” his mother says, to learn to accept God’s
love. He is told that his black skin “is but a cloud” that will be dissipated when his soul meets God in heaven. The black boy passes on this lesson to
an English child, explaining that his white skin is likewise a cloud. He vows that when they are both free of their bodies and delighting in the
presence of God, he will shade his white friend until he, too, learns to bear the heat of God’s love. Then, the black boy says, he will be like the
English boy, and the English boy will love him.
The poem is in heroic quatrains, which are stanzas of pentameter lines rhyming ABAB. The form is a variation on the ballad stanza, and the slightly
longer lines are well suited to the pedagogical tone of this poem.
GLOSSARY
Bereav’d: suffering a loss
Grove: a group of trees
Interpretations
Uniting opposites
through god/spiritual
Expressing the injustice
through the innocence of
the minority
Marxist, post-structural –
social constructed, not
innate, ethnicity over
race
Through death can
freedom and happiness
be found
Key passages
Features
Views and Values
‘And I am black, but O!
my soul is white.’
‘But I am black as if
bereav’d of light’
Juxtaposition between
lightness and darkness
Child-like, native
narrative voice
Challenging binary
logic/anti-rationalism
Emancipation of the
Africans in the slave
trade
‘And round the tent of
God like lambs we joy’
‘To lean in joy upon our
fathers knee’
Religious imagery –
father, son, holy spirit
Simile
Symbolic/metaphoric –
‘tent’ ‘knee’
The final judgement and
salvation of God.
The Chimney Sweeper, p.18
4
Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au
SUMMARY & IDEAS
Child labour
Marx – ‘Religion is the opium of the people’
Critique of religion and government
GLOSSARY
Soot: fine black particles, chiefly composed of carbon, produced by incomplete combustion of coal, oil, wood, or other fuels
Interpretations
Key passages
Features
The misery of child
labourers
‘weep…sweep…sleep’
Rhyming pattern
The changing urban
landscape corrupting the
natural, spiritual world
‘…your chimneys I sweep’
Innocent, child narrative
voice
The freedom and beauty
within the imagination
and the afterlife
‘coffins of black’ ‘bright
key’ ‘naked & white’
‘He’d have God for his
father & never want joy’
Dream sequence –
symbolic, archetypal
images
Views and Values
The treatment of
children – against child
labour – pre-Marxist
perspective
Industrial revolution –
the treatment of workers
Critique of church and
government
Salvation from God
Infant Joy, p.25
SUMMARY & IDEAS
Innocence of new born
Freedom of the nameless
Mother and child? Who are the narrative voices?
Interpretations
Key passages
Features
The beauty and
innocence of an infant
‘Joy is my name’
Abstract noun as proper
Repetition of ‘joy’
Learning through the
natural process of child
rearing
‘What shall I call thee?’
‘I happy am…’
The use of narrative
voices – can be child and
mother
Views and Values
Those not touched by the
social institutions
(church, government) are
the most pure
Truth, reason found in
the infant – no structure
or control, only instinct,
anti-rationalism
From Songs of Experience (1793):
See Color Plate 1
The Sick Rose, p.36
SUMMARY & IDEAS
5
Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au
See Color Plate 3
Loss of innocence
SPARKNOTES.COM SUMMARY & FORM
Corruption by sexual aggressor
Feminist viewpoint
The speaker, addressing a rose, informs it that it is sick. An “invisible” worm has stolen into its bed in a “howling storm” and under the cover of night.
The “dark secret love” of this worm is destroying the rose’s life.
The two quatrains of this poem rhyme ABCB. The ominous rhythm of these short, two-beat lines contributes to the poem’s sense of foreboding or
dread and complements the unflinching directness with which the speaker tells the rose she is dying.
Interpretations
Key passages
Features
How beauty is destroyed
‘Has found out thy bed’
Allegory to loss of virginity
The connections between
beauty(‘rose’) and the beast
(‘worm’)
‘worm…storm’
‘joy…destroy’
The melancholic tone,
rhyming pattern
Views and Values
The corruption of man – the
rights of women
The cause and effect model
– reason in nature
The Tyger, p.38-9
SUMMARY & IDEAS
Opposite to Lamb poem
Ontological – what is the nature of ‘being’? What exists?
Epistemological– how do we know ‘being’? How do we know what exists and what doesn’t? What is God? What does He
create? Why does He create it?
GLOSSARY
Anvil: a tool
Symmetry: harmonious balance
SPARKNOTES.COM SUMMARY & FORM
The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind of divine being could have created it: “What immortal hand or eye/ Could
frame they fearful symmetry?” Each subsequent stanza contains further questions, all of which refine this first one. From what part of the cosmos
could the tiger’s fiery eyes have come, and who would have dared to handle that fire? What sort of physical presence, and what kind of dark
craftsmanship, would have been required to “twist the sinews” of the tiger’s heart? The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart “began to
beat,” its creator would have had the courage to continue the job. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, he ponders about the anvil and the
furnace that the project would have required and the smith who could have wielded them. And when the job was done, the speaker wonders, how
would the creator have felt? “Did he smile his work to see?” Could this possibly be the same being who made the lamb?
The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The meter (a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables) is regular and rhythmic, its
hammering beat suggestive of the smithy that is the poem’s central image. The simplicity and neat proportions of the poems form perfectly suit its
regular structure, in which a string of questions all contribute to the articulation of a single, central idea.
Interpretations
Key passages
Features
The spiritual side of all living
beings
‘Did he smile his work to
see?’
Use of questions
The destructive forces in
nature
‘fire’ ‘anvil’ ‘hammer’
‘spears’ ‘fearful symmetery’
Industrial imagery
Even the dangerous, violent
beings are created
‘Dare frame thy fearful
symmetery?’
‘Did he who made the Lamb
make thee?’
Use of alliterated fire
metaphor – ‘burning bright’
London, p.41
SUMMARY & IDEAS
Social critique – against monarchy and Church
A city of lost or unfound promises of freedom
Miasmic atmosphere – blood pollution, plague,
6
Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au
Views and Values
The questioning of how to
praise God through religion?
Institution?
The unnatural creation of
life – blacksmiths,
galvanism, and other
industry
An acceptance of the dark
and fearful – they too are a
part of nature/natural cycle
GLOSSARY
Blights: to seriously disease
Hearse: large car used for carrying a coffin
Mind-forg’d manacles: Church and state
Thames: a major river flowing through southern England.
SPARKNOTES.COM SUMMARY & FORM
The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his observations. He sees despair in the faces of the
people he meets and hears fear and repression in their voices. The woeful cry of the chimney-sweeper stands as a
chastisement to the Church, and the blood of a soldier stains the outer walls of the monarch’s residence. The nighttime
holds nothing more promising: the cursing of prostitutes corrupts the newborn infant and sullies the “Marriage hearse.”
The poem has four quatrains, with alternate lines rhyming. Repetition is the most striking formal feature of the poem, and it
serves to emphasize the prevalence of the horrors the speaker describes.
Interpretations
Social constraints are
repressing the voice and
beauty of the individual
citizen
The spiritual/natural side
of humanity is gone
Protest against the new
urban landscape
Key passages
Features
Views and Values
‘ban’ ‘mind-forg’d
manacles’ ‘Palace walls’
‘charter’d’ ‘blackning
Church’
‘Harlots curse’ ‘blights
with plague’
‘Man…ban’
‘Fear…hear’
Symbols of Church and
State as well as disease
Critique of Church and
royalty – hierarchy in
general
Rhyming pattern,
observing/omniscient/Godlike narrative
‘charter’d’
‘marks’
‘In every’
Repetition, chant,
generalisations, acrostic
(HEAR)
The spiritual is only found
within nature (Romantic
ideal) and London as a
city with no God
Social/workers equality
as a result of the
Industrial Revolution
Infant Sorrow, p.43
SUMMARY & IDEAS
Innocence of birth
Basic needs
How one enters the world; who are the major figures? What are the sorrows?
See Color Plate 2
GLOSSARY
Fiend: evil person
Swadling bands: snuggled in a blanket for warmth and security
Interpretations
Key passages
Features
Innocence of birth
‘wept…leapt’
Rhyming couplets
Child narrator
The natural position of
men and women
‘fathers hands’
‘mothers breast’
Feminine and masculine
connotations/symbols
Views and Values
Finding truth and insight
in the beginning, rather
than the end of life
Feminist perspective have these roles altered?
Should they be altered?
From the Pickering Manuscript (1805):
Mary, p.400-01
SUMMARY & IDEAS
7
Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au
Views of femininity
The destruction of beauty and innocence by vengeance
Who is Mary? Virgin? Feminist (Wollstonecraft)?
Who is included and excluded in society? Why?
Change in narrative voice and tone very significant – how society corrupts
GLOSSARY
Augment: to increase in size, amount and value
Bespatterd: to dirty something
Bountiful: plentiful or generous
Climes: a place with a particular climate
Mire: swamp
Oer: over
Bier: coffin
Interpretations
Key passages
Exploring the stories told
and their meanings
Challenging perspectives
and questioning social
authority
‘there…Fair’
‘whore…door’
‘Sweet Mary’
‘I will humble my Beauty’
Abusing and victimising
the beauty of the
feminine
‘With Faces of Scorn &
with Eyes of disdain’
‘…tis the Month of May’
Features
Views and Values
Rhyming couplets
Reworking folk tales
Changes in narrative voice
– omniscient (3rd), Mary
(1st) to omniscient (3rd)
Mary – virgin?
Wollstonecraft?
Physical descriptions to
capture emotion – face,
eyes
Flower/natural/seasonal
symbols/metaphors/figures
of speech
The many ways to find
truth/God
Auguries of Innocence, p.403
SUMMARY & IDEAS
Blake’s future world vision
Consistent rhyming pattern
Use of binaries – the infinite in the finite
Cause and effect model
8
Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au
The treatment of women
- double standard and
social hypocrisy , finding
feeling in the physical
‘A series of paradoxes which speak of innocence juxtaposed with evil and corruption.’ Wikipedia.org
GLOSSARY
Auguries: signs of what may happen in the future
Cherubim: angel
Emmets: ant
Farthing: a coin of low value
Gnat: flying insect
Labrers: labourer
Miser: someone unwilling to spend money
Newt: small water animal, similar to a lizard
Palsied: medical condition that makes your muscles shake
Polar Bar: The highest point of excellence or importance – reference to heaven? Last judgement?
Red Robin breast: bird
Swadling bands: wrapping a baby tightly
Wren: small brown bird
Wrung: squeeze our
Interpretations
Key passages
Features
The importance of feeling
and experiencing through
nature – natural
order/cycle? Or critiquing
the belief in this?
‘A truth that’s told with
bad intent/Beats all the
Lies you can invent’
Reworked proverbs
Dogmatic tone
How diverse living beings
relate to one another
‘…sweet delight…endless
night’
‘Wolfs & Lions…human
soul…deer’
‘We are led to believe a
lie’
‘Some are…’
Rhyming pattern
Animal symbolism
Natural law will prevail
Repetition
Inclusive language
Views and Values
The connection between
the natural and human
environment.
New philosophy alternative belief –
radical Protestantism
preoccupation,
sectarianism (relates to a
religious group)
Uniting life and death
affirming forces –
thanatos and eros
Social critique of
urbanised lifestyles, new
values
From The Four Zoas (1797–1805):
Zoa is a Greek word meaning ‘living one’. This unfinished epic poem is part of Blake’s mythology.
See Color Plates 11 and 12
Background information on The Four Zoas
Although it was left in manuscript, Blake named his longest poem The Four Zoas: The Death and Judgment of Albion The
Ancient Man. It is a symbolic recreation of the story of revelation - the drama that speaks of the fall and redemption of
humanity with the divine - the human spiritual journey. The epic story is told about a giant man named Albion, Blake's symbol
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of universal humanity, who fell from his divine station and "whose real humanity [was] slain on the stems of vegetation."
Albion, Blake says, "was originally fourfold but was self divided" and "[how] he became self divided is a subject of great
sublimity and pathos."
Albion's fall represents a division of his four primal faculties: the four Zoas. Blake gives each of the Zoas a fallen name (a
name in time) and an eternal name. Their eternal names are Tharmas, Urizen, Luvah and Urthona.
Tharmas: he is instinct and power - the labourer. In the world of time and generation he holds the power of reproduction.
Urizen: intellect, mind, form, reason. Writing in the shadow of the Age of Reason, Blake sees reason, science and
experiment as becoming the new symbols of truth. Urizen is a God to the new age, the God of reason. Urizen's name is a pun
on his limited vision - it sound like your reason or horizon.
Luvah: emotion, passion, the God of Love. In a perverted form on Earth he is the spirit of revolution and repressed desire a demon named Orc.
The last Zoa is Urthona: imagination, inspiration and wisdom - "the eternal prophet". In Blake poetry, Urthona is more often
called "Los" because Los is his manifested form in time - what Blake calls his "vehicular form". Los is the form he appears as
on earth: art - poetry, painting, music. It is Los who holds the key to the recovery of Albion's humanity and to the reunion
of the Zoas. In the Fall, Urizen usurped the place of Los. Urizen speaks:
We fell. I seiz'd thee, dark Urthona. In my left hand falling. I seiz'd thee, beauteous Luvah, thou are faded like a flower....
Then thou didst keep with Strong Urthona the living gates of heaven but now thou art bow'd down with him, even to the
gates of hell.
Of all the Zoas it is only Los who "keeps the vision" of Albion's divinity and through whom God's Spirit still speaks to direct
Albion to history. In the poem Jerusalem, it is Los who unceasingly hammers his way through chaos trying to awaken his
friend Albion. (There is a particularly Blakean moment in the final vision of Jerusalem when Albion and Jesus meet wherein
Albion says that Jesus resembles his friend Los.)
In Blake's vision of the Apocalypse, all the Zoas lie as in the Book of Revelation. We may see in this vision of humanity's
resurrection that the Zoas are the members of the mystical body of the God-Man - the "human form divine" - whose head is
Christ and whose body is humanity.
"Four Mighty Ones are in every Man" says Blake and in light of another kind of symbolism, Tharmas is the hands, Urizen the
mind, Luvah the heart and Los the Spirit. For as much as Blake's Zoas tell a spiritual history they also represent an order of
the soul, a "perfect unity". Hence, they may also represent the spiritual state of each person and be a guide for a journey of
self-understanding.
http://www.watershedonline.ca/literature/blakeszoas.html
What is the price of Experience (35:11–36:13), p.410-411
SUMMARY & IDEAS
Contrasting images of prosperity and poverty
Social criticism – can those who prosper feel the pain of others?
10
Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au
Enion is the narrator
WIKIPEDIA BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON ENION
Enion is an Emanation/mate of Tharmas, one of the four Zoas, who were created when Albion, the primordial (prehistoric)
man, was divided fourfold. She represents sexuality and sexual urges while Tharmas represents sensation. In her fallen
aspect, she is a wailing woman that is filled with jealousy. After the Final Judgment, she is reunited with Tharmas and able
to experience an idealised sexual union.
GLOSSARY
Dolor: sadness
Marrow: soft substance in a bone
Withered: dry and dying
Interpretations
Key passages
Glorification of country
lifestyle/farmer’s life
A need to understand
diversity within one
another, regardless of
experience
Natural order ruling
human order
Features
Views and Values
‘Wisdom is sold in the
desolate market where
none come to buy’
‘…the farmer plows for
bread in vain’
‘tents of prosperity’
Abstract nouns – wisdom
– personified
Rural imagery
Knowledge through
simplicity/humble life
Abstract nouns –
prosperity– personified
‘To see a god on every
wind & a blessing on
every blast’
Animal symbolism
Social conscious –
encouraging the
prosperous to see the
poverty
Human life dependent on
nature
From Milton (1804; c. 1810–18):
Background information on Milton: A Poem (pp.144-45)
See painting – Color Plate 13
‘Critique of life, writings and cultural influence of the poet, Milton’
‘Milton returns to our world to reenvision God and his ways and complete his life’s work.’
WIKIPEPIA SUMMARY
Milton a Poem is an epic poem by William Blake, written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810. Its hero is John Milton, who
returns from heaven and unites with Blake to explore the relationship between living writers and their predecessors, and to
undergo a mystical journey to correct his own spiritual errors.
And did those feet in ancient time (lines 1–16)
SUMMARY & IDEAS
The spiritual nature of a land form
Patriotically appealing
Need for change; a rebirth, almost a reincarnation of the natural
Critique of Industrial Revolution and its corruption to the natural environment; its ripping away of
the spiritual
WIKIPEPIA SUMMARY
11
Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au
"And did those feet in ancient time" is a short poem from the preface to his epic Milton a Poem. Today it is best known as the anthem
"Jerusalem", with music written by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916.
The poem was inspired by the apocryphal (mythical) story that a young Jesus, accompanied by his uncle Joseph of Arimathea, travelled to
the area that is now England and visited Glastonbury. The legend is linked to an idea in the Book of Revelation (3:12 and 21:2) describing a
Second Coming, wherein Jesus establishes a new Jerusalem. The Christian church in general, and the English Church in particular, used
Jerusalem as a metaphor for Heaven, a place of universal love and peace.
In the most common interpretation of the poem, Blake implies that a visit of Jesus would briefly create heaven in England, in contrast to
the "dark Satanic Mills" of the Industrial Revolution. Analysts note that Blake asks four questions rather than stating a visit to be true.
According to this view, the poem says that there may, or may not, have been a divine visit, when there was briefly heaven in England. But
that was then; now, we are faced with the challenge of creating such a country once again.
Interpretations
Celebrating the natural
environment of England
Mourning the loss of
glory
Inspiring a more spiritual,
mythical and natural
prosperity
Key passages
Features
Views and Values
‘England’s mountains
green’ ‘England’s
pleasant pastures’
‘dark Satanic Mills’
England as new
Jerusalem – holy place
Natural imagery
Industry as metaphor for
slavery
Patriotic – holiness of
nation and legacy
‘Bring me…’
Anthem, chant
Creating a greater nation,
hopeful for a greater
future through following
the mythical past
Against industry
SECONDARY READINGS ON BLAKE
E.P. Thompson’s ‘Witness Against the Beast’
In London in the 1780s – and, indeed, in Western Europe very generally – there was something like an explosion of anti-rationalism,
taking the forms of illuminism, masonic rituals, animal magnetism, millenarian speculation, astrology (and even a small revival in
alchemy), and mystic and Swedenborgian circles. (p.xviii-xix)
http://www.online-literature.com/blake/
Though it is hard to classify Blake’s body of work in one genre, he heavily influenced the Romantic poets with recurring
themes of good and evil, heaven and hell, knowledge and innocence, and external reality versus inner. Going against
common conventions of the time, Blake believed in sexual and racial equality and justice for all, rejected the Old
Testament’s teachings in favour of the New, and abhorred oppression in all its forms.
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Presented by Christine Lambrianidis
lambrianidis.christine.c@edumail.vic.gov.au