Thank you for your exposition of Blake's famous poem. My understanding is quite different. I've heard that Blake was an adherent of British Israelism; the belief that Jesus travelled to England, and that the British royal family is from the bloodline of King David; it's a fanciful theory but hardly credible. But whether Blake was a British Israelite or not, I see his poem as a prayerful plea for revival; that past revivals would be surpassed by a yet greater outpouring of the Holy Spirit; and that England would be won for for Christ. And so, from my perspective, the first two verses speak of past revivals, and the latter two are a prayer for more, coupled with a determined spirit to put one's hand to work toward that end. In Old Testament typology, Jerusalem is a type of the New Testament Church, the New Testament Church being the antitype. This fits the revival theory. I often sing out the words spontaneously at home.
The expression ‘chariot of fire’, in my interpretation, is a Bible's inspiration. In the 2 Kings, the prophet Elijah - in portuguese, my language natural, the name Elijah is Elias, same name the character the actor Willem Dafoe in the movie ‘Platoon’ - went up by into heaven for an ‘chariot of Israel’, but, in the Bible’s version portuguese, this expression in the 2 Kings, ‘chariot of Israel’, is ‘chariot of fire’ - ‘carruagem de fogo’, in portuguese.
Thanks for this, however, I think you've missed quite a few important references. I think it's quite a stretch, infact I think it's completely wrong, to say he's evoking greek mythology, the references of chariots of fire and sword in hand is a reference to Elijah(chariot) and Nehemiah 4:17-23 in regards to rebuilding Jerusalem whilst carrying a sword on the belt. This is all heavily pushing Blake's desire to see an England rebuilt and the dark satanic and industrial modernity swept away. That's why he asks rhetorically at the beginning if the feet of the lamb of God walked upon England's pastures. Blake did not like Greek or Roman religion/world view, he was a reactionary Christian: “The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all Men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible… Shakespeare and Milton were both cursed by the general malady & infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword.” He rails against hirelings in “the Camp, the Court & the University” and begs painters and sculptors not to give in to the temptation of lucre and false advertising. Then he writes something odd: “We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live forever in Jesus our Lord.”
What God really doesn't like is when a human mind is ruling by fear. There's no reason the large factories should be burnt down and disappeared from the face of the earth for good. The green lovely hills of England, the massive industrial buildings of modern society, they may (and should) coexist in harmony. Using science and engineering makes this goal achievable.
"May"...but doesn't. The planet is dying from plastic in the ocean, toxic waste in the rivers and now mother earth is going to rebel because those metaphoric "mills" have polluted our beautiful planet due to man's greed. In Blake's time children were abused and used as chimney sweeps and died of coal cancer.....there is no end of abuse and plunder.
This is beautiful hymn. I was wondering a what the "dark satanic mills" meant... Definitely a metaphor but I couldn't relate it to the Industrial Revolution, although it makes all the sense. In that way, Blake is as much a progressist as D.H.Lawrence was. If you think of the descriptions DHL makes in Lady Chatterley's Lover about the surrounding industrial mills the imagery is the same. A scorched earth by greed and industrialist capitalism that enslaved people. Were Jerusalem to become the UK national anthem, it would be a very progressive anthem, although a bit oblivious of the imperialist past. Thanks for the video and your comments on the poem, very enlightening.
Golly !! 👏👏 you sing so well Sir...Blake is comparatively easy to understand in this poem; thanks to your lucid elucidation .And then there is Jerusalem, the land of David,Solomon and Jesus of course.
You totally missed the biting sarcasm of Blake's poem! I'm stunned that people still misinterpret this portion of Blake's long form poem. It's as if you have no idea what Blake was all about.
