Jersualem by William Blake Essay - 978 Words

Jersualem by William Blake Of the true masterpieces in the English language, one of the most metaphysically challenging and eternally relevant is William Blakes 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 Blakes 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†¦show more content†¦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 we ave 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 Miltons. 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 mo st clearly that he was not Milton, nor should he try to be. His England, his Albion was starving for something vastly different than Miltons England was. Enter now into Jerusalems second chapter,