Jerusalem: The Biography

* In 1804, William Blake, poet, painter, engraver and radical, opened his poem Milton with the prefatory verses ‘And did those feet in ancient times…’ which ends ‘Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’ The poem, printed in about 1808, praises the brief heyday of a heavenly Jerusalem in pre-industrial England, inspired by the mythical visit of young Jesus accompanying Joseph of Arimathea to inspect the latter’s Cornish tin-mines. The poem remained little known until 1916 when the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges asked the composer Sir Hubert Parry to set it to music for a patriotic meeting. Edward Elgar later orchestrated it. King George V said he preferred it to ‘God Save the King’, and it has become an alternative anthem, with universal appeal to plangent patriots, churchgoers, Promenaders, sports fans, socialist idealists and generations of drunken, floppy-haired undergraduates. Blake never called it ‘Jerusalem’ for he also wrote an epic entitled Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion