‘Jerusalem’ is a rousing anthem – but who knows what the words mean?

The spontaneous mass adoption of deep feeling is always interesting. Jason Whittaker has a very good subject, in the journey of the cryptic lyric section of the preface to William Blake’s incomprehensible epic Milton, written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810, to its becoming the de facto national anthem of England. ‘And did those feet…’ only took on its familiar title ‘Jerusalem’ (which has nothing to do with Blake’s poem entitled ‘Jerusalem’) after it was set to music by Hubert Parry on 10 March 1916. The following day, Parry handed over his composition to his colleague Walford Davies, saying insouciantly: ‘Here’s a tune for you, old chap. Do what you like with it.’ Since then we have indeed done what we like with it, and the story Whittaker tells goes in a number of surprising directions.

The short poem alone was slow to catch on (the preface wasn’t even included in all the copies of Milton that Blake printed) and didn’t reach much of an audience until the 1860s, when Swinburne expressed his puzzlement about it. Michael Rossetti then printed it as part of an edition in the 1870s, and it started to become more familiar when a Christian socialist editor of the Church Reformer in the following decade adopted the last stanza as the motto of the journal. Up to that point no one had recorded the folk tradition that Jewish merchants in Jesus’s time had come to Cornwall to buy tin, and that Jesus’s father might have brought him to England. So there is no evidence that Blake had done anything but make it up out of his head.

But what does the poem mean? Even now few can come up with a convincing explication, and the dizzying academic ones seem to me quite wrong. Whittaker himself, a sane and intelligent writer, thinks that the figure in the first stanza isn’t Jesus but Joseph of Arimathea.