[In the following essay, Bloom provides an overview of Blake's Jerusalem, including a discussion of the poem's themes and structure.]

The Strong Man represents the human sublime. The Beautiful Man represents the human pathetic, which was in the wars of Eden divided into male and female. The Ugly Man represents the human reason. They were originally one man, who was fourfold; he was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God. How he became divided is a subject of great sublimity and pathos. The Artist has written it under inspiration, and will, if God please, publish it; it is voluminous, and contains the ancient history of Britain, and the world of Satan and of Adam.

Blake, describing his painting “The Ancient Britons”

Jerusalem is that voluminous work, a poem in one hundred engraved plates and more than four thousand lines. Jerusalem is twice as long as its prelude, Milton, and very much more difficult, so much so that I will not give a full summary of it. A brief introduction to the poem, with some indication of its structure, and a few appreciations of its splendor, must serve here to round out my description of Blake's poetic achievement.

Jerusalem is subtitled The Emanation of the Giant Albion, and begins with an address “To The Public,” which divides Blake's potential audience into the categories of “Sheep” and “Goats,” a rather less complimentary division than that in the Marriage between “Angels” and “Devils.” The date on the title page, 1804, cannot be the date of the poem's completion, and is certainly not that of its engraving, which may be as late as 1818. Probably the writing of the basic text was over by 1809, though Blake may have revised for another decade.

The poem is divided into four chapters, three of which concern a strife of contraries progressing toward a humanizing solution. Chapter 1 presents the contraries of the self-divided giant, Albion, and his fourth component, Los, whose form is now like the Son of God. Chapter 2 opposes the Orc cycle and Los's attempt to achieve a form out of the cycle which shall liberate man. Chapter 3 shows the human vision as represented by Blake's Jesus, conflicting with the natural vision of reality as maintained by Deism. Chapter 4 gives us the final confrontation, in which contraries cease and imaginative truth is set against a culmination of Satanic error. Blake does not carry the poem into apocalypse but stops with the uncovering of all phenomena in their human forms.

The poem opens with both Albion and Blake asleep, but Albion is in the deathly sleep of Ulro, Blake in the creative repose of Beulah. The voice of the Savior awakens Blake, warning him that “a black water accumulates.” This is the dark Atlantic, the blood of the fallen Albion, or Atlas, which will vanish in the apocalypse, when there shall be no more sea. Albion, hearing the Savior's voice, “away turns down the valleys dark,” rejecting the vision as a “phantom of the over heated brain.” Possessed by jealous fears, Albion has hid his Emanation “upon the Thames and Medway, rivers of Beulah.” Spenser had pictured a marriage of the Thames and Medway as an image of concord in the natural world, an extension of the state of being described in the married land of the Gardens of Adonis. The hiding of Jerusalem signifies the fall of the Thames and Medway from human to natural status, a collapse of the phenomenal world into the system of nature.

Certain of Blake's major conceptions have evolved into a change in emphasis when we meet them again in Jerusalem. The most important concern Los, who in The Book of Urizen was as culpable as Urizen himself. In The Four Zoas, Los is still deeply immersed in error, but in Milton he merges into an identity with Blake and Milton, who are themselves in error but fighting toward truth. In Jerusalem, Los is closely involved with Jesus, and the furnaces of inspired art become identical with the machinery of salvation.

In Albion's continued (and willful) fallen condition, all human perfections “of mountain & river & city, are small & wither'd & darken'd.” Against this shrinking of human lineaments, Blake offers himself as prophet:

Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish'd at me.
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination
O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love:
Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!
Guide thou my hand which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages,
While I write of the building of Golgonooza, & of the terrors of Entuthon:
Of Hand & Hyle & Coban, of Kwantok, Peachey, Brereton, Slayd & Hutton:
Of the terrible sons & daughters of Albion, and their Generations.
Scofield! Kox, Kotope and Bowen, revolve most mightily upon
The Furnace of Los: before the eastern gate bending their fury.
They war, to destroy the Furnaces, to desolate Golgonooza:
And to devour the Sleeping Humanity of Albion in rage & hunger.

Golgonooza we have met before as the New Jerusalem or City of Eden, a city of redemption like Spenser's Cleopolis or Yeats's Byzantium, or a “Fourfold Spiritual London,” in Blake's vocabulary. Entuthon is the wasteland outside the city, at once a garden become a forest and a road to Eternity become a maze, like Spenser's Faery Land in Book I of his romance. Hand and his eleven brothers (down to Bowen) are the sons of Albion, and several fairly congested paragraphs are necessary to introduce their identity and function.

Zechariah the prophet mentions seven “eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth” (4:10). In Blake these Eyes of God become seven Orc cycles, seven attempts by which the God in Man tries to reverse his fall. The first two Eyes, Lucifer and Moloch, are pre-Hebraic, Druidic cycles, leaving behind giant monuments like Stonehenge. The third Blake calls Elohim, and sees as fixing the limit of contraction, or the creation of Adam and Eve. The fourth, Shaddai, is the age of Abraham, in which human sacrifice ends and so the limit of opacity is established: that is, Satan is identified and cast out. The fifth Eye, Pachad, or the “fear” of Isaac, finishes the first twenty “churches,” or epicycles, into which the third, fourth, and fifth cycles are divided. The sixth Eye, that of Jehovah, is the cycle coming to an end in Blake's own time, where the last phase, or twenty-seventh church, is called Luther, the final orthodoxy into which the Protestant Orc aged. The twenty-eighth phase is the seventh Eye, or church of Jesus, the inauguration of which will be the act of apocalypse.

Blake lives toward the end of the sixth Eye whose god, Jehovah-Urizen, made a covenant with Jacob under the name of Israel. We have seen Milton struggling with Urizen on the banks of the Arnon, seeking to abrogate that covenant by molding Urizen into human form. Jacob, or Israel, is Albion, the fallen Man of the sixth Eye of God, and so Albion, like Israel, must have twelve sons. Orc first came in Israel's cycle as Moses, who, Palamabron-like, was caught between a Rintrah (Elijah, the pillar of fire, Los) and a Satan (Aaron, the pillar of cloud, Urizen). Moses yielded to Satan, and so the Jehovah cycle was bound over to natural morality, not the imagination of the prophets. When the Israelite host crossed into Canaan across the Jordan from the East, they accomplished another fall, identical in Blake's myth with the collapse of Atlantis and the isolating of Britain from America. In Milton, the Female Will tries to tempt Milton to a similar error in entry, but the renovated poet refuses. The imaginative entrance into Palestine, for Blake, is through Edom from the South, the upper gate of Beulah through which The Marriage of Heaven and Hell expects the Savior to come.

As Albion-Israel sleeps, the struggle around him is transferred to his sons against Los. Albion's twelve sons are both a human Zodiac (as they worship the Starry Wheels, which they credit Urizen with having created) and an accusing jury, like the one Blake sat before in his treason trial.

Kwantok, Peachey, and Brereton were judges at Blake's ordeal. Kox was a confederate of Scofield, the accusing dragoon. The origin of the other names is shadowy, but this does not matter. Only four of Albion's sons are of importance in the structure of Jerusalem. They are first, Hand, a death principle, probably based on the three Hunt brothers who published the literary review The Examiner, which made two hideous attacks upon Blake's work as an artist. Hand is the Satanic Selfhood of Israel's oldest son, Reuben, who is the particular symbol in Jerusalem of the natural or vegetative man, separated by Hand from Merlin, his immortal part or imagination. The next two brothers are Hyle (Hayley, or the Greek word for “matter”) and Coban (possibly an anagram for Sir Francis Bacon, who with Newton and Locke is Blake's symbol of fallen reason and its empirical exaltation of nature). Simeon and Levi, the murderous twins, soldier and priest, correspond to Hyle and Coban. Scofield, the cause of Blake's bondage, is a Joseph figure, for he is responsible for Albion's fall as Joseph caused the descent of Israel into Egypt. The first three sons of Albion—Hand, Hyle, and Coban—are a Triple Accuser and represent Reason, Nature, and Mystery respectively.

The poem next introduces the other antagonists of Los and Jerusalem, the sinister Daughters of Albion, whose names are drawn from accounts of early British history, who together form Tirzah, Mother Nature, and Rahab, the Whore of Babylon, who, as the Covering Cherub, blocks our way back into Eden.

With its new personages introduced, the poem turns to intense conflicts. Los hears Jerusalem lamenting for her children, the murderous sons and daughters of Albion. He knows that to save her he must revive Albion, and he can do that only by laboring to turn nature into art. But his Spectre, the selfish ego of Urthona we have met before in The Four Zoas, tries to lure Los away from the furnaces, reminding him that Albion's friendship for him has been deceitful. Blake's Spectre is reminding him that he is an unwanted and unheard prophet, rather like Shelley's selfhood turning on him in the fourth stanza of the Ode to the West Wind, when the other English prophet of the age is faced by the ordeal of despair. As Shelley rises into life in the great last stanza of the West Wind, so Blake-Los denies and subdues his Spectre:

Thou art my Pride & Self-righteousness: I have found thee out:
Thou art reveal'd before me in all thy magnitude & power
Thy Uncircumcised pretences to Chastity must be cut in sunder!
Thy holy wrath & deep deceit cannot avail against me
Nor shalt thou ever assume the triple-form of Albion's Spectre
For I am one of the living: dare not to mock my inspired fury
If thou wast cast forth from my life! if I was dead upon the mountains
Thou mightest be pitied & lov'd: but now I am living; unless
Thou abstain ravening I will create an eternal Hell for thee.
Take thou this Hammer & in patience heave the thundering Bellows
Take thou these Tongs: strike thou alternate with me: labour obedient.

As Los labors at his furnaces he creates “the Spaces of Erin,” the bulwark that the poetic vision sets against the raging Atlantic of Time and Space (Erin because Ireland is a geographic buffer for England against the Atlantic). The Spectre weeps, but the unmoved Los states the guiding law of Blake's work:

I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.

The Spectre despairs, refusing to believe that the God in Man deserves Los's labors. But even in despair, the divided Blake works on, driven by the visionary will of Los, who compels the Spectre in Blake to work with him:

So spoke the Spectre shudd'ring, & dark tears ran down his shadowy face
Which Los wiped off, but comfort none could give! or beam of hope
Yet ceas'd he not from labouring at the roarings of his Forge
With iron & brass Building Golgonooza in great contendings
Till his Sons & Daughters came forth from the Furnaces
At the sublime Labours for Los, compell'd the invisible Spectre
To labours mighty, with vast strength, with his mighty chains,
In pulsations of time, & extensions of space, like Urns of Beulah
With great labour upon his anvils; & in his ladles the Ore
He lifted, pouring it into the clay ground prepar'd with art;
Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems;
That whenever any Spectre began to devour the Dead,
He might feel the pain as if a man gnaw'd his own tender nerves.

The striving with systems liberates the Daughters of Beulah, Blake's Muses, and in the power of that liberation Golgonooza is built. Outside the city is the desolate world of Ulro:

There is the Cave; the Rock; the Tree; the Lake of Udan Adan;
The Forest, and the Marsh, and the Pits of bitumen deadly:
The Rocks of solid fire: The Ice valleys: the Plains
Of burning sand: the rivers, cataract & Lakes of Fire:
The Islands of the fiery Lakes: the Tree of Malice: Revenge:
And black Anxiety; and the Cities of the Salamandrine men:
(But whatever is visible to the Generated Man,
Is a Creation of mercy & love, from the Satanic Void.)
The land of darkness flamed but no light, & no repose:
The land of snows of trembling, & iron hail incessant:
The land of earthquakes: and the land of woven labyrinths:
The land of snares & traps & wheels & pit-falls & fire mills:
The Voids, the Solids, & the land of clouds & regions of waters:

Night and day Los walks round the walls of his city, viewing the fallen state of the Zoas, and the rooting of the twelve sons of Albion into every nation as the Polypus, the undifferentiated mass of vegetative life. As Los looks out at the world through Blake's eyes, he sees Albion cased over by the “iron scourges” of the natural philosophy of Bacon and Newton:

                                                  Reasonings like vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations

All things that he sees acted on Earth have already been created by Los as bright sculptures in the Halls of his city. But these inspired prophecies do not save Jerusalem from being accused of sin by the twelve sons of Albion, and by Vala, Albion's mistress. The fallen giant speaks out of his sleep, accusing himself, and so suffers the fate of Job: “Every boil upon my body is a separate & deadly sin.” The first chapter closes with the Daughters of Beulah lamenting Albion's departure from self-forgiveness and the forgiveness of others.

Chapter 2 is addressed “To the Jews,” and begins with a lyric that identifies ancient Jerusalem and modern London. Plate 26, just before this lyric, shows Jerusalem, the woman, appalled by Hand the Accuser, who stalks by her, left foot forward, a serpent intertwined in his arms, a dark vision of reason identified with death. Hand is the vision Blake calls upon the Jews to repudiate, that their humility may be liberated from self-righteousness. As the second chapter will concern the attempt to form history into vision, Blake directs it to the Jews whose writings record the struggles between contraries in a nation's spiritual history.

Chapter 2 begins with Albion's acceptance of Urizen as God, under the cold shadows of the Tree of Mystery. After this, he creates a Female Will in Vala, and worships it as well. Reuben now takes Albion's place as the man of ordinary perceptive powers, the Adam who has reached the limit of contraction. As such, Reuben is in the dreadful position of a creature who invents his own unnecessary death and then grows forward toward it, but this perverseness is the pattern of ordinary generative life.

Los makes a series of resolutions to save Albion, and so deliver Reuben over to the Merlin within himself, but Albion is now interested only in justice and righteousness, like a Job's comforter, and will not allow himself to be saved by works of forgiveness. Instead, he orders Hand and Hyle to seize Los to be brought to justice. Los prays for the “Divine Saviour” to arise “upon the Mountains of Albion as in ancient time,” and takes action by entering into Albion to search the tempters out of the giant's Minute Particulars. But he finds every Particular of Albion, every individual component of vision, hardened into grains of sand. Unable to save the degenerated Albion, Los as Savior builds a couch of repose for him to rest upon, the materials of the couch being composed of the books of the Bible. Jerusalem goes into the kind arms of the Daughters of Beulah, to await her lord's awakening. Erin, the spirit of myth-making or individual vision, ends the chapter with a speech of great complexity, addressed to the Daughters in their role as sources of a poet's inspiration. Beginning with a sense of horror at the collapse of Atlantis and the withering away of the human form, she passes to the paradox of fallen vision:

The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions,
Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix'd into furrows of death;
Till deep dissimulation is the only defence an honest man has left.

Certainly this is Blake chastising his own life, and lamenting the limits of his existence:

The Eye of Man, a little narrow orb, clos'd up & dark,
Scarcely beholding the Great Light; conversing with the Void:
The Ear, a little shell, in small volutions shutting out
True Harmonies, & comprehending great, as very small:
The Nostrils, bent down to the earth & clos'd with senseless flesh,
That odours cannot them expand, nor joy on them exult:
The Tongue, a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys,
A little sound it utters, & its cries are faintly heard.

This is the contrary to Thel's lament over the senses. Yet Erin's speech centers as much on hope as on despair, for

                                                                                                                                            The Lord
Jehovah is before, behind, above, beneath, around.

The work of this Jehovah makes it clear that he is the Jehovah of Blake's Jesus, not of Satan-Urizen, for he shows his forgiveness by building the Body of Moses in the valley of Peor: the Body of Divine Analogy.” We have met this valley where Moses is buried before, in Milton, for Urizen and Milton struggle there until Urizen puts on the human form and abandons the law of morality with its stone tablets. The fallen body of man is therefore also “the Body of Divine Analogy,” made in the image of the unfallen Man-God. Frye sums up the central meaning of Jerusalem when he calls this use of analogy a “conception of the world of experience as a parody or inverted form of the imaginative world.”¹ Blake's dialectical position in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell depended upon just such a conception of nature and experience. The naturalist or vitalist does not realize that nature can be turned inside out, as it were, without being repudiated, just as the ascetic cannot understand that inverted as nature is, it remains a form, however distorted, of the truth. For Blake, to hold a mirror up to man is to see nature.

Erin closes her speech by vowing to remain as a shield against the Starry Wheels of Albion's sons, while the Daughters of Beulah end the chapter by calling upon the Lamb of God to descend.

That Blake addressed chapter 3 “To the Deists” marks it as the part of the poem which seeks to consolidate error. Deism Blake now defines explicitly as “the Worship of the God of this World,” and its morality as “Self-Righteousness, the Selfish Virtues of the Natural Heart.”

When the poem begins again we see the grief of the imaginative heart as Los “wept vehemently over Albion.” The Eternals elect the Seven Eyes of God, but the Daughters of Albion continue their wild cruelties, while the Sons maintain their battle against the hammer of Los. Urizen creates Druid temples for human sacrifice, while Los goes on with the perpetual work of making his city.

The cycles move on until we reach the story of Joseph and Mary. Blake had little use for any myth of a virgin birth; to him such an event could only occur as a demonic act in Ulro. His mother of Jesus is a Magdalen, like Oothoon. But Joseph is no Theotormon, and Mary becomes a form of Jerusalem:

O Forgiveness & Pity & Compassion! If I were Pure I should never
Have known Thee; If I were Unpolluted I should never have
Glorified thy Holiness, or rejoiced in thy great Salvation.

The larger part of chapter 3 sharpens the opposition between Vala and Jerusalem, Satan and Jesus, until:

The Human form began to be alter'd by the Daughters of Albion
And the perceptions to be dissipated into the Indefinite. Becoming
A mighty Polypus nam'd Albion's Tree: they tie the Veins
And Nerves into two knots: & the Seed into a double knot:
They look forth: the Sun is shrunk: the Heavens are shrunk
Away into the far remote: and the Trees & Mountains wither'd
Into indefinite cloudy shadows in darkness & separation.

This decay of nature is simultaneous with the union of the Daughters of Albion into “Rahab & Tirzah, A Double Female,” who torture the human form and inspire their admirers to the sexual aberration of war. The twenty-seven churches now pass into the group of “the Male Females: the Dragon forms,” stretching from Abraham to Luther, and where Luther ends Adam begins again in Eternal Circle.” But before the Circle can go round again, prophecy finally succeeds and breaks into history:

But Jesus breaking thro' the Central Zones of Death & Hell
Opens Eternity in Time & Space; triumphant in Mercy

With this event, the third chapter closes. The fourth begins with an address “To the Christians,” for Blake is approaching his revelation and

A man's worst enemies are those
Of his own house & family;
And he who makes his law a curse,
By his own law shall surely die.

“Is the Holy Ghost any other than an Intellectual Fountain?” Blake asks and by that question separates himself from the institutional Christianity of his own day or of any other. A blank-verse introductory poem goes further in separating Jesus from the Wheel of fire that moves religion in his name:

I stood among my valleys of the south
And saw a flame of fire, even as a Wheel
Of fire surrounding all the heavens: it went
From west to east against the current of
Creation and devour'd all things in its loud
Fury & thundering course round heaven & earth
By it the Sun was roll'd into an orb:
By it the Moon faded into a globe,
Travelling thro' the night: for from its dire
And restless fury, Man himself shrunk up
Into a little root a fathom long.
And I asked a Watcher & a Holy-One
Its Name? he answered: It is the Wheel of Religion

Jesus died, according to Blake, because he strove against the current of this Wheel. But as the institutions of religion have subsumed the first visionary, so they begin in our time to subsume Blake also, whose doctrinal orthodoxy has been proclaimed by assorted divines.

The action of chapter 4 begins again with the incessant labors of Los against the Spectres of Albion's Twelve Sons. These have crowned Vala as queen of earth and heaven. Hand and Hyle have been seduced by their Emanations, and only their Satanic Spectres, ghosts of reason and nature, remain to battle Los. Los himself wearies, for he is “the labourer of ages in the Valleys of Despair.” Yet he has resolution enough to take Reuben from his wanderings and set him into the Divine Analogy of the six thousand years of Biblical and post-Biblical history. A vision of Jerusalem within Albion revives Los and he returns with fresh courage to his furnaces, but is betrayed into wearying strife again by Enitharmon, who begins to recede into the Female Will.

The remainder of the poem is dominated by a full epiphany of Antichrist and a gradually mounting consciousness of redemption. On the eighty-ninth plate the Antichrist is revealed as “a Human Dragon terrible and bright,” who is also Ezekiel's “anointed cherub that covereth” a Leviathan who devours in three nights “the rejected corse of death” that the last Luvah had shed. In the final line of the eighty-ninth plate a Double Female who has mustered multitudes of the fallen becomes absorbed through those multitudes in Antichrist, and so becomes a Satanic One with him.

In reaction to this intensified horror, Los reaches the heights of his prophetic power on the wonderful ninety-first plate, which gathers together the hard-won wisdom of Blake's heroic life:

Go, tell them that the Worship of God, is honouring his gifts
In other men: & loving the greatest men best, each according
To his Genius: which is the Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other
God, than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity;
He who envies or calumniates: which is murder & cruelty,
Murders the Holy-one: Go tell them this & overthrow their cup,
Their bread, their altar-table, their incense & their oath:
Their marriage & their baptism, their burial & consecration:
I have tried to make friends by corporeal gifts but have only
Made enemies: I never made friends but by spiritual gifts;
By severe contentions of friendship & the burning fire of thought.
He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children,
One first, in friendship & love; then a Divine Family, & in the midst
Jesus will appear; so he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole
Must see it in its Minute Particulars

Milton had invoked the Holy Spirit as one that preferred “Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure.” Now Blake overthrows all that is outward in worship as a distraction from the human. Los, with a tremendous effort, at last subdues his Spectre:

I care not whether a Man is Good or Evil; all that I care
Is whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool. Go! put off Holiness
And put on Intellect: or my thund'rous Hammer shall drive thee
To wrath which thou condemnest: till thou obey my voice

In the furnaces of Los the nations begin to fuse together. Albion revives:

The Breath Divine went forth upon the morning hills, Albion mov'd
Upon the Rock, he open'd his eyelids in pain; in pain he mov'd
His stony members, he saw England. Ah! shall the Dead live again

The Four Zoas go to their apocalyptic tasks: “Urizen to his furrow, & Tharmas to his Sheepfold, and Luvah to his Loom.” The integrated Urthona labors at his Anvil, with Los within him “labouring & weeping,” for though unwearied, the prophet has labored long, “because he kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble.”

Jesus, in “the likeness & similitude of Los,” appears before Albion, as the Good Shepherd before “the lost Sheep that he hath found.” They converse, “as Man with Man,” the dialogical image of mutual confrontation excluding any notion of subject-object experience between them. Jesus has died and must die for Albion, but only the death of the Selfhood. In a clairvoyant moment of humanist affirmation, Blake's Jesus, who is “the likeness & similitude” of Blake as both are of Los, states Jerusalem's version of the Atonement: “This is Friendship & Brotherhood: without it Man is Not.” Nothing in Blake is finer than those last five words, inevitable in their simplicity.

The Covering Cherub comes on in darkness and overshadows them, and appears to “divide them asunder.” Terrified for Jesus, Albion throws himself into Los's furnaces of affliction, seeking to lose himself in saving Jesus, but

All was a Vision, all a Dream: the Furnaces became
Fountains of Living Waters flowing from the Humanity Divine
And all the Cities of Albion rose from their Slumbers, and All
The Sons & Daughters of Albion on soft clouds Waking from Sleep
Soon all around remote the Heavens burnt with flaming fires
And Urizen & Luvah & Tharmas & Urthona arose into
Albion's Bosom: Then Albion stood before Jesus in the Clouds
Of Heaven Fourfold among the Visions of God in Eternity

In this crucial moment, in and out of time, the workshop of the artist has become the Living Waters of Humanity's Intellectual Fountain, and “a pure river of water of life” as well, in reference to the last chapter of Revelation. The lineaments of Man are revealed, and the Four Zoas take their places in a wonderfully active Eden, very unlike Milton's static Heaven:

And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright
Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions
In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect
Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination, throughout all the Three Regions immense
Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age; & the all tremendous unfathomable Non Ens
Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent varying
According to the subject of discourse & every Word & every Character
Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or
Opakeness of Nervous fibres such was the variation of Time & Space
Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary & they walked
To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen
And seeing: according to fitness & order.

The ninety-ninth plate shows Albion and Jerusalem in a sexual embrace surrounded by fire on every side. The text is very quiet, and very sure:

All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone, all
Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing
And then Awakening into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.
And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem

In this most definitive of Blake's visions, nothing is excluded. Among the innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appearing in heaven are not only “Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer,” but “Bacon & Newton & Locke,” for contraries are necessary in Eden. Blake was free even of his own apparent obsessions, for the imagination cannot be obsessed, even as it cannot be contained. “The clearer the organ the more distinct the object,” Blake wrote, and the organ of his imagination was the whole man.

Notes

1. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 383.