SOURCE: Murray, E. B. “Jerusalem Reversed.” Blake Studies 7, no. 1 (1974): 11-25.

[In the following essay, Murray suggests that one method of understanding Blake's Jerusalem is to analyze the concepts and characters of the work as distorted mirror images of one another.]

We often need the assurances we sometimes get about the admirable clarity and order of Blake's greatest poem. Not only can the poem seem a maze to us as we enter into it, but commentators we successively turn to for directions about the best route through it may lead us instead into the byways of their own outside readings and imposed insights. We may be charmed into accepting their rendition of order and clarity and still be left with a vaguely uncomfortable sense that we have, after all, missed the way we are looking for—that Jerusalem has somehow eluded us. I would suggest that the reason it may elude us is that we have been (at best) delivered from one systematic expansion of a given commentator's insight, research, and reading only to wind up in another's. Instead of a window on eternity to look through we have been asked to look at a mirror which does not reflect Blake's mind nearly so much as it does the commentator's. No question but that this is to some extent not only inevitable but salutary: it keeps the poem imaginatively alive to have it so reflected. I would nonetheless further suggest that the nearer the mirror approaches the translucence of the window, the nearer we get as readers to sharing with Blake the specific imaginative vitality he felt and meant to convey. I would suggest further that the clarity and order of Jerusalem is least distorted if we follow Peter Fisher's advice in reading Blake by avoiding as much as we humanly can the “temptation to speak for the author when he did not speak for himself.”¹ We are well advised, then, to stick as nearly as we can to the “internal scheme of reference”² that Blake provides us with.

One such scheme of reference appears in plate 77 of Jerusalem when we are told that Blake has given us (as Christians) a golden string which we need only wind into a ball to arrive at Heaven's gate, which, he further tells us, is built in Jerusalem's wall. I would like to take Blake more literally than he has been taken by clue-tracers who have tentatively picked up the end of the string without winding it up within Jerusalem or going anywhere particular outside it.³ I would like to suggest that when you wind up a string you retrace its original course. The ball of string, that is, has been rolled out by someone who has been where he is inviting us to go. Specifically, then, Blake is telling us to go back where he came from if we want to get to Heaven. The image of reversed movement is the one which I am interested in developing as a self-referential key to the meaning of Jerusalem.

We may pick up as a projecting end of the string an obvious example of reversal which everyone agrees to find in the name of Blake's hero Los. Los is “sol” spelled backwards. He may also be the plural of “lo” in the sense of “behold” or he may be an aborted spelling of “loss,”⁴ though I see no particular reason for preferring either pun to the simple anagram which turns Blake's figure of Time and the Imagination into some latter-day variant of the Roman sun-god. It may be noted in passing that he is once referred to by Blake as the giver of the “Space of Love” (J 88:47, E245/K734),⁵ where the initial letters perhaps too happily spell his name in reverse by, in fact, spelling “Sol.”

More can be made of the Lossian anagram, but for the moment I want only to establish the principle of nominal reversal as a Blakean practice so that I can use it in a more novel but still simple application. With the possible exception of Albion, Vala is second only to Los as a principal character in Jerusalem—as an active figure she is certainly more significant than either Jerusalem or Albion. Usually no more is made of her name than Margoliouth made of it when he insisted that we pronounce her name to rhyme with “veil.” I would (without denying her veil-value) rather follow Damon's suggestion that we pronounce her name to rhyme with “Valla,” though either pronunciation could fit with the suggestion I would like to make—namely, that her name is a syllabic reversal of Luvah's.⁶ That is, “Vah-lu” is Vala and “La-va” is Luvah. She is in effect a distorted mirror image of Luvah representing the reversal of spiritual love which is now in power as natural hate.

The reversal is tenable in itself and more than tenable if its implications are even briefly explored. As the dominant female, she presents herself to us as a Nature Goddess—the indifferently cruel force behind Druidism and Deism whose reversal of roles is most emphatically illustrated when she converts her Luvah to the iron bars of the ten commands. As a cloud, she enmeshes true vision (Jerusalem) and moves with her eastward against the current of creation.⁷ She apparently participates as well in the cloudy reflection of himself which Albion variously worships and reprobates as it appears to him variously compounded of Jerusalem, Luvah, and Urizen—all of whom are reflected in a cloudy haze like that in which Vala issues forth from the Lossian furnace she has perverted to her own “natural” uses. As love reversed, she appears as self-love, as hate, as revenge, as lust, and as various incarnations of these forces when they appear in the fallen daughters of Albion. The daughters themselves, it should be noted, are not essentially evil. They are, after all, daughters of Jerusalem in their original purity. Like Jerusalem, they have been bound up in opaque forms which their own diminished spiritual inheritance is too weak to sustain without a consequent reversal of their essential goodness. Like the sons of Albion, they implicitly renounce Jerusalem as their forebear and accept Vala. The Divine Image which once they reflected now becomes A Divine Image as they go about their characteristic business, in a fallen world, of converting pity to cruelty and weeping over the evils they propagate. They so reflect the evils they create.

Vala's reversal of her emanative role is signalized when she tells us that she is now elevated inward into the region of brotherhood. That is, she has replaced Luvah as the driving force and channelling agency of man's emotional energies. As Nature Goddess, she has made the outer world the inner world. One of the consequences of this inversion is the stormy appearance of Beulah itself in the latter plates of Chapter One. Vala, with Jerusalem in her embrace, is waiting even in Beulah to devour Albion's humanities.

Anagrammatic reversal of names would therefore seem to index the reversal of the natures of those whom they name. As symptomatic of a technical device, reversal appears more dramatically and significantly at key places throughout Jerusalem. Immediately after Christ pleads with Albion to return to His bosom, Albion turns away and counterpoints in reverse nearly all that Christ had said, and thereby anticipates the reversal which will impose the opaque form of Old Testament atonement on New Testament forgiveness when “Christs Crucifix shall be made an excuse for Executing Criminals” (FZiv, erased pencil comment on p. 56, E753/K380). Vision itself becomes hallucination as Albion moves from an expansive belief in the unifying effect of love and friendship to its divisive selfish perversions as hate and war—the very “Fibres of love” (4:8, E145/K622) that Christ extols as the basis of spiritual unity later become the diabolically reversed “fibre / Of strong revenge” (15:1-2, E157/K635) that Albion's sons sink into Jerusalem as she makes her anguished way eastward in the cloudy embrace of Vala qua Vah-lu.

The first extended dramatic sequence of the poem is the confrontation between Los and his spectre. The design on plate 6 illustrating the exchange is revealing and aptly explanatory. The spectral vampire bat hangs upside-down (normal enough for sleeping bats), his back towards us and Los, his hands to his ears in order to block out whatever Los might have to tell him. Los's curse is really an effect of the spectre's own obdurate stance: “never! never! shalt thou be Organized / But as a distorted & reversed Reflexion in the Darkness” (17:41-42, E160/K639). The spectre himself has previously pronounced his own damnation in Miltonic terms which admit the justice (and perhaps the mercy as well) which he knows he deserves: “To be all evil, all reversed & for ever dead” (10:57, E152/K630). He is in all ways reversed, turned from vision, and his eventual designation as Los's self-righteousness fairly well sums up the opposed visions of Albion which the spectre and Los unfold for each other. The spectre sees everything from the upside-down, back-to-vision perspective his position obliges him to take. The source of his “prophetic” vision is memory, not imagination. His general reversal of Biblical genealogy parallels his application of Albion's sons to the cyclical pattern of twelve which Blake uses to define all the generations of men as they exist in Ulro.

Of course memory has its lessons, its justifications, and as part of comprehensive reality must be seen with as well as through—or, better, it must be seen with so that it can be seen through. Like the last Fury to address Prometheus in Shelley's poem, the spectre speaks historical fact when he points out how generations of men have misused imaginative vision to afflict it by restricting and punishing its energies—and even now the repetitive cycle of shadowy generation seems to be abstracting and generalizing “a law of sin” to punish imagination in those who, like Blake, still manifest its powers. While his backward reliance on memory as a ground for prophecy moves against the current of regenerative creation, it also suggests a home truth in Blake's meaningful mixup of Skofield and Adam in all their generations. Not only are the sins of the fathers visited on the sons but the sons who do not progress beyond their fathers revisit these same sins on the heads of their forebears as they continue to emulate their cyclical, mill-like progress to nowhere. Noah may seem to escape the deluge of time and space, but if his descendants repeat the error of those who drowned, there can be no regeneration from their generations that will justify his salvation. There is, then, a perverse, serpent-like truth in the merely memorable fancies of the spectre, and Los knows well enough that a certain portion of his own nature participates in the self-righteousness he must therefore sympathize with even as he resists its implications.

He does resist them by first telling and then showing the spectre what he sees in his visionary furnace. In the uttermost distance he sees the millennium with Albion redeemed to tenfold glory. In the middle distance he visualizes a prospect even worse than that of which the spectre had just appraised him. The worst which Los sees is the full extent of Albion's defection from vision which overspreads the earth through six thousand years. All the spectre clearly sees is a vivid portrayal of the evils he has already recounted from cyclical memory, which sees all time as one and the same time—the past—his only model for present and future alike.

Like Urizen before him, the spectre recognizes his own end in the furnace of time when he recognizes Los's uncontrollable power. And like Urizen he would keep off the evil day for as long as possible. Throwing off his self-righteous indignation in ostensible defence of Los, he evidences his real purpose and character when he asks for Enithmarmon. He asks, in an applicable rendition of Enitharmon's meaning, for pity, the pity which Los has already and quite spontaneously extended to the eastward-moving Jerusalem. As the spectre has come out of the west, Enitharmon has moved east to help keep the vision in time of trouble. Blake is here providing us with an admirable example of the way pity not only divides the soul but in consequence has provided the pattern by which the Old Testament ethic (which, according to Crabb Robinson, Blake seemed to associate with the “Evil element”) continues to reverse the tendency of the New. The pattern is based in psychology, recognizably primitive, common, and recurrent. One pities an individual—in this instance, Jerusalem—then creates an invidious dialectic which demands, in all self-righteous justice, an object to punish for hurting the one he pities. Thus, pity works in reverse. It does not stem from love to eventuate in forgiveness but in hate to produce punishment. The spectre in recounting the treatment Vala accorded her Luvah has carried his version of Genesis beyond the cyclical generations of Adam and Noah to a justification of the love-hate reversal which bases his own resentment.

What the spectre really wants to claim as his own in claiming Enitharmon is the self-pity that is the reverse side of the coin his self-righteousness has just presented to Los. He does not want pity shown as, say, a species of mutual forgiveness—as a constructive and regenerative force directed towards those who suffer—unless he can qualify that pity with vengeance. This is the kind of pity Milton's God implied when he said of Adam—die he or justice must; in other words, it is a ratio or calculus in pity which must be balanced by a justice that fairly well negates its essence.

Pity related to retributive justice based in self-righteous moral codes is the first and foremost enemy to conquer, since it taints the everlasting gospel itself—the very love as charity which must condition mutual forgiveness. Los proves he possesses the science of pity when he wipes away the spectre's tears—a just due which the imagination owes to its own sense of injured merit. He then proves that he also possesses the science of wrath when he labels and attacks the spectre as the self-righteousness he must compel to serve the ends of vision—not of memory. It is only that kind of service which will aid Los and mankind to move forward to the millennium, not backward around the circular mill of destiny to repeat the same dull round over and over again. Blake has just anticipated Los in asking Christ to help him subdue his self-righteousness. The dialogue between the spectre and Los suggests that he has received enough visionary help to win round one at any rate.

Like Vala mirroring Luvah, the spectre can only reflect a distorted and reversed image of its Lossian source in imagination. As her world is predominantly a Lockean world, his is a Newtonian world. The two worlds merge in another image of reversal, the mill. The particular mill that I would like to consider in particular is the one which is run by a waterwheel. It appears most suggestively in a well-known visionary passage from plate 15:

I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Washed by the Water-wheels of Newton.                    black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.

(15:14-20, E157/K636)

The passage has several interesting if peripheral relations besides its general allusion to the rational processes and effects of the natural philosophers Blake mentions in characteristic reprobation. The “wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic” turns up later in a design for plate 22 illustrating the moral perversity of recurrent Old Testament law which insists on punishment and thereby reverses the angelic forgiveness which is the purpose of generation. It also bases the otherwise dissociated reference in plate 73 to “The water wheel & mill of many innumerable wheels resistless” (73:14, E226/K713). Less peripheral in their significance, I think, are the references to the “black cloth” and to the distinctions between wheel-motion which Blake makes. The black cloth represents opaqueness and can, though not only for that reason, be associated with Los's spectre. The fact that the wheels rotate in Newtonian action-reaction fashion can suggest as well the negative and useless cyclical motion which their countering revolutions represent. Metaphysically, the tyranny of their movements may suggest the blind necessity which motivates a material universe; morally, the exclusive self-righteousness of their locomotion reiterates their kinship with spectres everywhere.

Most important and not a bit peripheral is the underlying cause of this motion, which Blake leaves to our inferences. George Mills Harper infers that the wheels are driven by materialism. He feels that “without exception … these symbolic references to water are derogatory. …”⁸ There is, however, one obvious exception—rivers, most of all the rivers of Beulah, are positive and lifegiving. Their currents in themselves flow freely and in the right direction unless in some way impeded. The reference to the universities is of some help. Earlier, in plate 5, we are told that “Cambridge & Oxford … / Are driven among the starry Wheels” (5:3-4, E146/K623) and that Cam has become a little stream. They participate in the general chaos that resulted when Albion turned from vision. All human perfections are shrunk up and rendered opaque. Albion's turning from vision is, as always, a continuing cosmic act repeated through manifestations such as Locke and Newton represent. The “rivers of learning” is a trite phrase but it seems the appropriate one. Not only have the rivers been shrunk up to small streams when cut off from their visionary source but those streams themselves have been perverted and reversed so that the rivers of life have effectively become the rivers of death. What I am suggesting of course is that the Newtonian waterwheels are run by spiritual rivers whose influence they reverse. …

Here Blake tells us the resultant woof of Lockean philosophy moves east to spread its opaqueness over Europe. Elsewhere he will make Rousseau and Voltaire effects of this misdirected use of spiritual (or imaginative) energy by the reason working on the senses to produce, among other limits, natural religion.

The waterwheel image is a very helpful one. It suggests that Blake felt that there was a spiritual agency for mechanical effects—and of course he stated as much more than once. It also suggests that there is an appropriate unimpeded course for the river of life (or learning or imagination or spirit) to take. There is a way, that is, to break out of the circular effects that the mill and waterwheel, Newton and Locke, the druids and the Old Testament law, seem intent on producing from spiritual causes. That way is in the expansive west, now cut off from us; it lies through the imagination, and its goal is regeneration. At the moment, we live a waterwheel existence wherein we convert all of our spiritual energies to mechanical routines which move against the current of creation.

The current of creation brings us to the fiery wheel in the sky (plate 77) which also moves in reverse from east to west and has a specific relevance to religion. The fiery wheel appears to Blake as he stands in his valleys of the south apparently looking north as was Ezekiel during a comparable vision. The wheel is a devourer; it is called Caiaphas, the dark preacher of death. Like the waterwheel, it converts life, which is here forgiveness, into death, which is here retribution. It creates the light of common day by rolling the sun into an orb—the same sun which Blake could see each morning as a perennial incarnation of the heavenly host. In its devouring capacity the wheel of religion is clearly related to the spectre who defines himself to Albion as Albion's “Rational Power” at the beginning of plate 29. He is later called “the Devouring Power” (29[33]:24, E173/K659). There are at least two other images or associations which connect this spectre with the waterwheel and the fiery wheel—that is, with Newton, Locke, and Natural Religion. He is first called an “Unformed Memory,” a “Spectrous Chaos”—which gives him a natural affinity with the spectre moving from west to east as Los's self-righteousness. His initial speech is mainly concerned with debasing Albion in his own conceit and, while interesting in its own right, may be bypassed to get into his further description as the “Great Selfhood” or “Satan”—who is then opaqueness itself. Essentially, he springs from “a white Dot calld a Center from which branches out / A Circle in continual gyrations” (29[33]:19-20, E173/K659). This becomes a heart which in turn produces a hydra-headed monster with “innumerable” limbs, depending on the capacity of a given perceiver to bring them into being. And it is precisely this penchant to perceive into being in the manner of Locke that causes the contemplator himself to be devoured. That is, he is devoured as the sun and moon are by the wheel of fire which destroys their visionary life in the minds of their perceivers. The rational power has previously indicated how he performs this act of devouring the spiritual existence of Albion and all which he may inhabit when he says that he destroys the communities of men by passing over them with his “deluge of forgotten remembrances over the tablet” (29[33]:16, E173/K659). The precise import of this last phrase is not clear but the reference to memory and the flood suggests the account of the generations of men which Los's spectre gives and to which we shall return shortly. The point is that reason devours vision by making dogma of its past creations. Like Urizen, it wants a joy without change, a static law for ox and lion, a reversal of regenerative purpose.

The second association with the waterwheel and by extension with the fiery wheel appears with Vala in the clouds (29[33]:36ff., E174/K659-60). It is here that Vala dramatically reveals herself as Love or Venus Genetrix and Albion further adores her as Nature Goddess and the mother of Jerusalem (30[34]:9, E174/K660). Vala is now “La-va” and therefore a typical product of the insane and deformed rational power which begins in the void of a white dot, creates a false heart of selfishness from that void, and exists thenceforward on the infinite variety of every beholder's perception. And of course it is “Vision” in the deific sense that is being so perverted and devoured. Stevenson in his Annotated Blake supposes that Albion's emanation referred to in plate 29:25 (K33:25) is Vala, who is as well “the cause of the appearance in the frowning Chaos.”⁹ The reference is indeed ambiguous enough to require substantiation and relevance beyond assertion. But we can begin by noting (a) that the title of the poem calls Jerusalem the “emanation of the giant Albion,” (b) that he had in fact hidden her in jealousy at the very start of the poem, and (c) that the cause of the appearance has just been described to us as a function of the “unfortunate contemplator,” who is Albion. What we are getting is an effect of the white dot contemplated by Albion until he brings into being his emanation Jerusalem “involved” in the “colours of Autumn ripeness” that is Vala as Nature Goddess or, more to the historical point, Natural Religion.

Reasons for believing that the Divine Vision here, as seen by Albion, actually reflects Jerusalem are debatable but start on the solid foundation above—that the only emanation Albion had was Jerusalem. Albion here is not seeing straight—he is in the power of his rational faculty—and certainly Vala is not talking straight. But in plate 23 Jerusalem tells us—like a voice from a sepulchre—that she is embalmed in Vala's bosom for Albion's sake.¹⁰ We also know that for all the perverted opaqueness of its forms even the Old Testament law had essential vision in it which later could be elicited and spiritualized by Christ into the remission of sins it was meant to embody. We should also remember that for better as well as for worse Albion is subject under his rational power to memory—and his memory (like Theotormon's at the end of Visions of the Daughters of Albion) retains traces of vision in spite of its overlay of reason and sense impressions.

I emphasize the point to suggest a significant analogy. The waterwheel of Newton which moved to create the woof of Locke for the opaque encompassing of Europe required a spiritual causation according to the Blakean calculus. The white-dotted void creates circular gyrations very much like a waterwheel motion to weave eventually the Vala form which Albion projects and worships. Embalmed in that form is its life—Jerusalem. Both Albion and Vala refer to Jerusalem to disparage and subordinate her. But their references suggest her underlying presence—and Blake has given us reason to believe that she is there, even though embalmed in a death made up of the misuse of her powers as they move against the current of vision and generation by the reversals of reason and the reflection of the senses. The Lockean mirror and the Newtonian mill have combined to produce a feminine goddess who asserts her masculine prerogatives over the sense-and-reason-bound man that Albion has become now that he has turned from the vision which nonetheless continues, embalmed and reversed, to motivate the mechanical effects in the sky he humbles himself before.

The mill and mirror images reverse and reflect the current of creation from west to east. The east is the void, the white dot, the selfish center. But that is the direction in which our reason and our senses direct our imaginative activity. In another Blakean reversal, the inner world has become outer. That is, in Lockean fashion, it has become a void which only the senses can fill in. As previously suggested, the spectre's reversed and cyclical view of history is of some real help to us, if not to Los (who knows better), when he points out how this “sensible” remaking of the void is an eternal recurrence of Adam's sin. Adam reborn as Edom and later as Skofield combines in varying ways Blake's conception of the Accuser who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage by turning from vision to the senses, from Eve as emanation to Eve as wife. The chaotic reversals of and on the Biblical genealogies are in one view aptly distorted mirror images of the mill-like spectral mind that formulates them. It sees only the shadowy generations forever repeating themselves with no ostensible movement towards regeneration. It is not to the spectre's purpose to see them otherwise. In another view, however, they represent the main ingredient and structural base for the repetitive plates and chapters of Jerusalem itself—and unless we follow the lead of Blake's golden string through their circular byways and seeming dead ends we shall never arrive at the gate which is being built for us continually in Golgonooza and which will become apparent at the time of the end. We will remain with the recurrent old Adam in us a “mouldering skeleton in the garden of Eden”—or spiritually drown with Noah when he “shrunk beneath the waves.”

The only covenant that can be established by a Skofield-Adam fallen from vision or by a Kox-Noah caught up in the flood of Udan-Adan (“nada-nada” would be an appropriate Blakean reversal of the sea of Time and Space) is a barren covenant in materialism and rationalism. The spectre, by the force of his choplogic and comparably chopped visions, is most specifically trying to beg the question of that covenant by attempting to make time subject to space. He insists on cyclical patterns of generation that reduce man to the shrunken root he became (recurrently after Noah) when Reuben and those who beheld him continued to exchange imaginative vision for sense impressions as a means of knowing. He comes out of the west to suggest that he is Time moving backwards. The constellations of Albion's sons, revolving in and out of Los's furnace in the east, only seem to conflict with his retrograde and mill-like motion. Vision itself goes east, imbued in the senses, and so the east as center becomes not expansive towards the west but selfishly retrograde as well. Implicitly, even Sol has become Los, though Los will keep his vision in time of trouble, and so establish the underlying thread—or golden string—which will set us straight again. Meanwhile, our self-righteous spectres will continue to demand back Enitharmon not only as pity but also as the space in which they can work out their covenant of death in cyclical, shadowy generations.

Space is the reality of the senses, as Time is of the fallen imagination. The ultimate knowledge for the imagination is to know the purpose of Time (and, by necessary but subordinate “extension,” of space as well), which is for Los to know himself and his power as the “mercy of Eternity.” When this knowledge surfaces as the collective and conscious imagination of men, the world is on its way to its redemption through generation. Specifically, Los's function in continually rebuilding the ever-decaying Golgonooza is to preserve the emanations, who are collectively Jerusalem. Their powers are reversed as they become, like the sons they emanate from, children (or projections) of the cloudy reversal of love and vision which Vala represents. In Los's furnaces, they are continually melted down to their essential purity from the opaque forms continually molded around them when they appear in an Ulro world as the apparent product of the rational mill. Reason recycles them in mirrored facsimile of their previous likenesses in spite of Los's continuing efforts at maintaining in time their essential translucence in Eternity. When Erin appears from the furnace in Chapter One she represents a surrogate west of vision gone east—and for a moment we can see with Los and his daughter-emanations the ideal space in which time might fulfill its destiny. For that bare moment between two pulsebeats she stands free of all satanic opaqueness as a sign of the New Jerusalem or the Mount of Heavenly Contemplation which elides the mazes of Ulro along with the golden string that leads through them. Erin—like the heavenly Canaan later—is a vision of the gate or window we continue to lose sight of as we turn from the rivers of life and down the dark Atlantic vale. In the generations since Albion and Adam fell, that is the only west we can perceive into being when all we perceive is a reflection of our own senses spinning mill-like in the void—against the current of creation.

The perspective on Jerusalem I am really offering here is an old one. It is called “explication of text.” Even the “reversals” I have chosen to explicate begin in the commonplace of Blakean anagram and occasionally retouch on fairly obvious images of reversal which have been read to different but congruent ends by other explicators. But there should be enough new among the old to suggest that the method and its specific application to Blake's text are neither of them exhausted.

My introductory pleasantries aside, I do not mean to scant historical scholarship so much as I mean to put it in perspective as an adjunct to what Harold Bloom has noted as perhaps the one thing most needful in Blake studies—close reading.¹¹ It may well be, as Morton Paley suggested a few years ago, that we have ascertained Blake's general meaning well enough—¹² though the suggestion is an invitation to the Nemesis of cogent paradox in the person of the “close reader” who will find several types of ambiguity reversing the meaning of Jerusalem beyond my relatively direct approach to doing that here. In fact, I would suspect any thorough check of the yearly bibliography of critical work on Blake will continue to elicit such attempted restatements—even of general meaning—from here to the time of the end.

To get to present cases, a glance at any extended plate-by-plate analysis of Jerusalem should convince us that the knots in Blake's golden string are in many places cut Gordian-wise when they apparently resisted interpretive efforts at untying them—or simply seeing through their involutions. We, the readers, are thereby left “struggling with incoherent roots”—tag-ends left dangling or reknotted with alien snippets from history, biography, “sources,” which perhaps in the wrong sense “gloss” what they try to interpret. We should suspect the sloth of good-will that lets us accept these easy exits into silence or sources. We should begin thinking about indefinite or opaque forms and that bad light of common day which both Blake and Wordsworth talked about. We should at any rate try to keep our eye on the essence inside the poem which all the pother is about. That would be a way of protecting the emanation in a time of contingent trouble.

Agreed, the text alone is not enough, but it is the final cause and the final check. And by sticking to it through thick and thin, we can at any rate create the charitable (not self-righteous) opposition which is true friendship without driving our would-be friends to redo our outside reading in order to judge its relevance and our inferences—what we have used and what we have skipped. Better we drove our carts over those dead bones when they covered the world of vision and imagination which Blake said was the world he lived in.

Jerusalem is built up of purposely irrational spiralings off into the eternity of any man's imagination, insofar as he can expand his center up the vortex without getting caught within a plane circle of his own making. If there is admirable clarity and order in the poem, those qualities will, in the last synthesis, come out only for those who have the vision and perseverance to see through its minute particulars without dissecting them or caking them over. Correspondingly, Blake's poem resists a single meaning, as it does a single law, a single joy—and eternal death. Is there another poem in the language that comes so infinitely alive in the mind of the reader who imagines what he reads? I shall leave the question appropriately rhetorical, noting only in conclusion that, if Blake's intimations are right, the generations of readers after us, as after him, will become less shadowy as Time goes on.

Notes

1. Peter F. Fisher, The Valley of Vision (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1961), p. ix.

2. Fisher, p. 23.

3. A clear exception to this generalization is Edward J. Rose, who likewise rolls up the golden string to illustrate the pattern of reversal that characterizes much of Jerusalem. See particularly his “The Structure of Blake's Jerusalem,” Bucknell Review, 11 (1963), 35-53; “Visionary Forms Dramatic: Grammatical and Iconographical Movement in Blake's Verse and Designs,” Criticism, 8 (1966), 111-25; “Wheels Within Wheels in Blake's Jerusalem,” Studies in Romanticism, 11 (1972), 36-47.

4. For “lo” see Edward J. Rose, “Los, Pilgrim of Eternity,” in Blake's Sublime Allegory, ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), p. 98. For “loss” see (most recently) Karl Kroeber, “Delivering Jerusalem,” in Blake's Sublime Allegory, p. 357n.

5. All references are to E: The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, 4th printing, rev. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970) and to K: The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 3rd printing, rev. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971).

6. “Vala (to be pronounced not Vahla or Valla but Veila) is the Veil of the phenomenal world …,” H. M. Margoliouth, William Blake (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 144. S. F. Damon (A Blake Dictionary [New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1965], p. 428.) suggests the pronunciation Margoliouth disallows when he notes that Wagner so pronounced it “Valla” when he applied the name to the earth-goddess Erda in Siegfried. If Blake did indeed want her name to be construed as a reversal of Luvah, “Valla” would be the pronunciation best suggesting that reversal.

7. See Rose's “Visionary Forms,” pp. 112-13 for an expanded account of this reversed movement against the current of creation.

8. George Mills Harper, The Neoplatonism of William Blake (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 168-69.

9. W. H. Stevenson, ed., The Poems of William Blake (London: Longman, 1971), p. 683n. What Albion here calls the “Divine Vision” is of course not really the Divine Vision. He has at the beginning of the plate turned his back on Christ, who is that Vision, and so repeats the denial of Christ and Vision in plate 4. He is instead seeing his emanation, Jerusalem, reversed in Vala's mirror, where she can only be seen darkly. Jerusalem has gone east, into the selfish center and against the current of creation, so that she is in essence “involved” in Vala, who has “elevated” herself inward to so pervert the organized vision that otherwise would expand infinitely westward to Eden and Eternity. When Vala later states that she and Albion “hid” the Divine Vision, she seems to refer to that double action of plate 4 which was very likely one act: Albion's turning from Christ and his hiding of his emanation Jerusalem. Vala herself says that she is Luvah's emanation, which seems true enough, though her preceding assertion (line 39) that she was Albion's “bride and wife in great Eternity” seems false even to Albion when later he recalls that there is no marriage in Eternity.

10. This is a reading closer to the sense than to the syntax, but I feel it is valid. The fact that Jerusalem speaks as from a sepulchre to lament the congruent fact that Albion had “hidden” her from the divine vision suggests that she is the one who is “embalmed” in Vala's bosom. She has become as he is—a victim to Vala—so that he might return to the condition of vision she continues to represent, though opaquely.

11. “Commentary,” E843.

12. “Although a few problems remain, may always remain, on the whole we understand Blake's meaning well enough.” Review of Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970) in Blake Studies, 4 (1971), 99.