The Holy City Inside Essay, Research Paper
Of the true masterpieces in the English language, one of the most metaphysically challenging and eternally relevant is William Blake’s Jerusalem. It took Blake four thousand lines etched onto one hundred plates to put his reinterpretation of the prophetic books of the Bible into an English context. The poem shows not only Blake’s new understanding of the Old Testament gained from his recent learning of the Hebrew language, but his freedom from the Miltonic tradition. In the preface to Jerusalem Blake writes that it is a, “more consolidated & extended Work,(Keynes,620)” than he has tried before. The primary reason for his ability to begin such an undertaking when he did in 1804, is from the liberating release he gained from the completion of Milton. Within the context of poetical influence, a poet must first choose to misread and distort his mentor’s poems, else he cannot function ; a broad and deep understanding of Shakespeare would paralyze one and fix them before a single word is penned. Such was the case with Milton and Blake. The new wholly free Blake seen in Jerusalem was one who had stared down the hallway of tradition into the eyes of both Shakespeare and Milton, and rather than crumble as he expected, was unshackled. To see behind Blake’s message for Albion , that is such a major part of Jerusalem, one must keep in account the notion that the poem is coming from a man in the direct line of tradition as Milton and yet totally free at the same time. This parallels Jerusalem, which is both an emanation of Albion and the bride of the Lamb at the same time; corrupt and pure.
It is with this duality that Blake makes a major plea toward his beloved Albion in Jerusalem. His desire is for his English brethren to not be so quick to generalize and deconstruct each man until he is not longer made of individual bricks, but is only a single white-washed wall. “Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!(4:6 )” Here is the initial call, the call to Albion, which is Israel, that has been superimposed on England. For as we see later, “All is Eternal Death unless you can weave a chaste/ Body over an unchaste Mind!(21:11)” He needs England to feel the way he feels, to see not just the trees in the forest but the color of each of those trees, and which have sparrows living in them. For Blake, life is Eternal Death, and only in the imagination can there be refuge. Thus the first contradiction appears; the idea that one must awaken not the physical self, but the Los within. Awake, but on the inside, keep your temporal self asleep- it does too much damage when arisen. For no immortal hand or eye can weave a chaste body over any mind. An image forms here of Blake resting his hands ever so on gently the English people to begin to sense their new directions. Herein lies the portal through which he traveled in order to exit the long Miltonic shadow- the England Blake was moved to prophesize to was not Milton’s. The factories had changed that. And though man is ever unchanged, it is democratization and technology that drag the cart of history. Blake saw then most clearly that he was not Milton, nor should he try to be. His England, his Albion was starving for something vastly different than Milton’s England was.
Enter now into Jerusalem’s second chapter, where Los is struggling to find a piece of salvation he can hold onto in the midst of the massive cyclical revolutions of nature and history. The scene is one is direct relationship to Satan’s brooding at the opening of Paradise Lost, yet it has grown more chaotic and with more potential for evil, “For had the Body of Albion fall’n down and from its dreadful ruins/ Let loose the enormous Spectre on the darkness of the deep.(40:32)” Blake knows that the unprecedented democratizing England felt could have the ability to ruin as many people spiritually as it enfranchised politically. It is this great fear that impassions the request made to the Lamb:
“Come to my arms & never more
Depart, but dwell for ever here:
Create my Spirit to thy Love:
Subdue my Spectre to thy Fear.(27:69)
It is however not a wish that will be granted. Indeed humanity is destined to be forever as Sisyphus, rolling the boulder of our time up the mountain only to watch it fall again. For Camus and Blake before him, the Salvation is never in pushing the boulder, but in the imagined victory over both the boulder and the mountain that exists in the time between when the rock reaches the bottom of the mountain again and before we start begin pushing. In that brief respite lives all the mental freedom we ever need to defeat both Adam and Satan who put us there. Just as the critics will never allow Blake away from the tradition carried by Milton, but in his head he has the freedom to move forward in his own literary undiscovered country.
The searching Spectre of Los lands in the third chapter into a trial of sorts, between those factors that would believe in a faraway God who has entrusted his children to run orderly or amok as they see fit, and Blake’s own vision of Jesus. Blake’s condemnation is far reaching in its attacks of all of organized Christianity and in fact any State religion. He rejects Bacon, Newton, and Locke as the new Gods, and those who would follow them. To replace these newfound Gods Blake provides a vision of Jesus as a Luvah who took the place of the dying Albion. It is here in Blake’s sacrificial imagery that another major dualism exists. The notion that, “The crucified Christ is a vision of irresistible fate, and illustrates what man has always done in the world…and will always be fated to do as long as he remains in the state of existence in which fate is to be found.(Frye, 400)” The insistence here is that if we could escape the painful requirements of our lives, we would be released from that fate ridden place. For Blake, the work of John Milton freed him from so many requirements; having lost and then regained paradise he was cleared to take the next step into Jerusalem. As for the rest of the sons of Albion, we have to find our own gate through temporary necessity.
It is in the final chapter that Blake removes that last of the stops that limited the force of his fire against the proponents of Natural Religion. In the brief poem addressed, “To the Christians,” that opens Chapter four, Blake reminds us of Jesus on the cross, with his cry of, “Saul, Saul, Why persecutest thou me?(77:3)” This Saul is not the scourge of first century AD Christians, but the Church of Paul, under who’s weight all of spiritual England is crushed. Blake’s Jerusalem cannot be found in visions of Tintern or Westminster Abbeys, he travels the road in search of Jesus only in order to kill him. Any Jesus on the road must not have come from inside, and as thus must perish. It is a belief in the supreme power of the Imagination, in the ability of every person, be they from Canaan, England, or Mexico to arrive in their own Jerusalem. Such is the hope that ends the final work in the Blake canon:
Human Forms identified, living, going forth, & returning wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years, Months, Days & Hours; reposing,
And the Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.(99:2)
It is the honoring of humanity, the same humanity, the same England that Blake pours contempt on throughout the poem. They have passed through the smaller sphere of Innocence and Experience, and move forward to the sphere of living then returning to Beulah. Blake himself went out from Eden, danced with Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Cowper, and returned to Beulah, to England for rest and when he rose found himself in Immortality- in Jerusalem.
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