[In the following essay, Bloom discusses the similarities between Jerusalem and the book of Ezekiel and the perspectives of Blake and Ezekiel as writers.]

… also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man.

—Ezekiel 1: 5

“The midst thereof” refers to “a fire infolding itself,” in the Hebrew literally “a fire taking hold of itself,” a trope for a series of firebursts, one wave of flame after another. Blake's Jerusalem has the form of such a series, appropriate to a poem whose structure takes Ezekiel's book as its model. The Four Zoas, like Young's Night Thoughts, is in the formal shadow of Paradise Lost, and Milton less darkly in the shadow of Job and Paradise Regained. In Jerusalem, his definitive poem, Blake goes at last for prophetic form to a prophet, to the priestly orator, Ezekiel, whose situation and sorrow most closely resemble his own.

Ezekiel is uniquely the prophet-in-exile, whose call and labor are altogether outside the Holy Land. Held captive in Babylon, he dies still in Babylon, under the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar, and so never sees his prophecy fulfilled:

Thus saith the Lord God; In the day that I shall have cleansed you from all your iniquities I will also cause you to dwell in the cities, and the wastes shall be builded.

And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by.

And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, and are inhabited.

(36: 33-5)

Everything in Ezekiel except this ultimate vision is difficult, more difficult than it at first appears. Blake's Jerusalem is less difficult than it first seems, even to the informed reader, but it still is difficult. Both books also share a harsh plain style, suitable for works addressed to peoples in captivity. Ezekiel, like Jerusalem, is replete with the prophet's symbolic actions, actions at the edge of social sanity, violence poised to startle the auditor into fresh awareness of his own precarious safety, and the spiritual cost of it. As early as The Marriage of Heaven And Hell, Blake invokes Ezekiel as one who heightens the contradictions of merely given existence: “I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung, and lay so long on his right and left side? he answered the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite.” The central image of Blake, from whenever he first formulated his mythology, is Ezekiel's: the Merkabah, Divine Chariot or form of God in motion. The Living Creatures or Four Zoas are Ezekiel's and not initially Blake's, a priority of invention that Blake's critics, in their search for more esoteric sources, sometimes evade. Ezekiel, in regard to Blake's Jerusalem, is like Homer in regard to the Aeneid: the inventor, the precursor, the shaper of the later work's continuities. From Ezekiel, in particular, Blake learned the true meaning of prophet, visionary orator, honest man who speaks into the heart of a situation to warn: if you go on so, the result is so; or as Blake said, “a seer and not an arbitrary dictator.”

I have indicated elsewhere the similarities in arrangement of the two books, and the parallel emphases upon individual responsibility and self-purgation.¹ Here I want to bring the poets closer, into the painful area of the anxiety of influence, the terrible melancholy for the later prophet of sustained comparison with the precursor, who died still in the realm of loss, but in absolute assurance of his prophetic call, an assurance Blake suffered to approximate, in an isolation that even Ezekiel might not have borne. For Ezekiel is sent to the house of Israel, stiffened in heart and rebellious against their God, yet still a house accustomed to prophecy. God made Ezekiel as hard as adamant, the shamir or diamond-point of the engraver, and that was scarcely hard enough; Blake knew he had to be even harder, as he wielded his engraver's tool.

Jerusalem begins with the Divine Voice waking Blake at sunrise, and “dictating” to him a “mild song,” which Blake addresses in turn to Albion, the English Israel, at once Everyman and an exile, a sleeper in Beulah, illusive land of shades. When the Divine Voice orders Ezekiel to begin his ministry, the prophet has already had a vision of the four cherubim and their wheels, a manifestation of glory that sustains him in the trials ensuing. But Blake has never seen the Living Creatures of the Merkabah, his Four Zoas as one in the unity of a restored Albion. The fourth, final book of Jerusalem begins with a demonic parody of the Merkabah, with the Wheel of Natural Religion flaming “west to east against the current of / Creation.” A “Watcher & a Holy-One,” perhaps Ezekiel himself, “a watchman unto the house of Israel,” identifies this antagonist image for Blake, who is afflicted throughout by demonic epiphanies, as Ezekiel was not. The form of Ezekiel's prophecy depends upon the initial vision, for the glory is thus revealed to him before his task is assigned, though the emphasis is on the departure of the Merkabah, interpreted by the great commentator David Kimchi as a presage of the Lord's withdrawal from the Jerusalem Temple, thus abandoned to its destruction.

In the England of Jerusalem, everything that could be seen as an image of salvation has been abandoned to destruction. No poem could open and proceed in a profounder or more sustained despair, for the next level down is silence. The temptation of silence, as in the self-hatred of Browning's ruined quester, Childe Roland, type of the poet who has given up, is to turn, “quiet as despair,” into the path of destruction. Blake's antagonist, in Jerusalem, is what destroys Browning's quester: selfhood. What menaces continued life for the imaginative man is the quality of his own despair:

But my griefs advance also, for ever & ever without end
O that I could cease to be! Despair! I am Despair
Created to be the great example of horror & agony: also my
Prayer is vain I called for compassion: compassion mocked,
Mercy & pity threw the grave stone over me & with lead
And iron, bound it over me for ever: Life lives on my
Consuming: & the Almighty hath made me his Contrary
To be all evil, all reversed & for ever dead: knowing
And seeing life, yet living not; how can I then behold
And not tremble; how can I be beheld & not abhorred

(10: 50-59)

The imaginative man's despair is the Spectre of Urthona, who speaks these lines, and who may be thought of as holding the same relation to Blake the poet as the Solitary of The Excursion has to Wordsworth the poet. For the Spectre of Urthona is every prophet's own Jonah, in full flight from vision for reasons more than adequate to our unhappy yet still not unpleasant condition as natural men. Though the Spectre of Urthona had his genesis, in Blake's work, as an initially menacing figure, he is very appealing in Jerusalem, and Blake's critics (myself included) have erred in slighting this appeal, and thus diminishing the force of Blake's extraordinary artistry. The Spectre of Urthona is always right, if the reductive truth of our condition as natural men be taken as truth. Nor is the poor Spectre unimaginative in his reductions; they are exuberant in their unqualified insistence upon knowing by knowing the worst, particularly concerning the self and the sexual wars of the self and the other. What is most moving about the Spectre's reductive power is its near alliance with his continual grief. We are repelled by his “mockery & scorn” and his “sullen smile,” but each time we hear him we see him also as one who “wiped his tears he washd his visage” and then told the terror of his truths:

The Man who respects Woman shall be despised by Woman
And deadly cunning & mean abjectness only, shall enjoy them
For I will make their places of joy and love, excrementitious.
Continually building, continually destroying in Family feuds
While you are under the dominion of a jealous Female
Unpermanent for ever because of love & jealousy.
You shall want all the Minute Particulars of Life

(88: 31-43)

The form of prophecy cannot sustain such reductive, natural truths, for in the context of prophecy they are not true. When we listen to the Spectre of Urthona we hear a bard, but not a prophet, and the bard belongs to Blake's own literary age, the time of Sensibility or the Sublime. Blake's lifelong critique of the poets to whom he felt the closest affinity—Thomson, Cowper, Collins, Gray, Chatterton—culminates in Jerusalem. The Spectre of Urthona descends from the Los of the Lambeth books, and the Bard of Experience of the Songs, but is closer even than they were to the archetype Blake satirizes, the poet of Sensibility, the man of imagination who cannot or will not travel the whole road of excess to the palace of wisdom.

Martin Price, studying “the histrionic note” of mid-eighteenth century poetry, emphasized the poet as both actor and audience in “the theatre of mind.” Precisely this insight is our best starting point in understanding the Spectre of Urthona, who is so unnerving because he appears always to be “watching with detachment the passions he has worked up in himself.” The grand precursor of this histrionic kind of bard is the Satan of the early books of Paradise Lost, whose farewell to splendor, upon Mt. Niphates, sums up the agony that makes so strange a detachment possible.

                              … to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
O Sun to tell thee how I hate thy beams …
Me miserable! which way shall I flie
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I flie is Hell, my self am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n.

(IV, 35-37, 73-78)

A detachment that can allow so absolute a consciousness of self-damnation has something Jacobean about it. What a Bosola or a Vendice sees at the end, by a flash of vision, Satan must see continuously and forever in the vast theatre of his mind. There exists perpetually for Satan the terrible double vision of what was and what is, Eternity and the categories of mental bondage, the fallen forms of space and time. This twofold vision is the burden also of the Bard of Sensibility, but not of the prophet who has seen the Merkabah, or even studies in hope to see it, as does the Blake-Los of Jerusalem. Freedom for the prophet means freedom from the detachment of the histrionic mode; the prophet retains a sense of himself as actor, but he ceases to be his own audience. A passage from solipsism to otherness is made, the theatre of mind dissolves, and the actor stands forth as orator, as a warner of persons (Ezekiel 3: 17-21). Should he fail to make this passage, he is reduced to the extreme of the histrionic mode, and becomes the singer-actor of his own Mad Songs, one of the “horrid wanderers of the deep” or a destined wretch “washed headlong from on board.” I take the first of these phrases from Cowper's powerful, too-little known poem, On The Ice Islands (dated March 19, 1799) and the second from the justly famous The Castaway (written evidently the following day). A year later and Cowper died, his death like his life a warning to Blake during his years at Hayley's Felpham (1800-1803) and a crucial hidden element in both Milton and Jerusalem, where Blake fights desperately and successfully to avoid so tragically wasted a death-in-life as Cowper's.

In On The Ice Islands Cowper translates his own Latin poem, Montes Glaciales, In Oceano Germanica Natantes (written March 11, 1799). The ice islands are “portents,” with the beauty of treasure, but apocalyptic warnings nevertheless as they float in “the astonished tide.” They appear almost to be volcano-births, yet are Winter's creations:

                                                                                                                        He bade arise
Their uncouth forms, portentous in our eyes.
Oft as, dissolved by transient suns, the snow
Left the tall cliff to join the flood below,
He caught and curdled with a freezing blast
The current, ere it reached the boundless waste.

This is, to Blake, his Urizen at work, a methodical demiurge who always blunders. In Cowper's phantasmagoria, this is the way things are, a Snow Man's vision, a violence from without that crumbles the mind's feeble defences. To it, Cowper juxtaposes the creation of Apollo's summer vision:

                                                                                                              So bards of old
How Delos swam the Ægean deep have told.
But not of ice was Delos. Delos bore
Herb, fruit, and flower. She, crowned with laurel, wore
Even under wintry skies, a summer smile;
And Delos was Apollo's favourite isle.
But, horrid wanderers of the deep, to you,
He deems Cimmerian darkness only due.
Your hated birth he deigned not to survey,
But, scornful, turned his glorious eyes away.

One remembers Blake's youthful Mad Song, written at least twenty years earlier:

Like a fiend in a cloud
          With howling woe,
After night I do croud,
          And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increas'd;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.

Late in his life, long after the Felpham crisis, Blake looked back upon Cowper's madness. We do not know when Blake annotated Spurzheim's Observations on … Insanity (London, 1817), and we perhaps cannot rely on the precise wording of the annotations as being wholly Blake's own rather than Yeats's, since the copy from which Yeats transcribed has been lost. But, to a student of Blake, the wording seems right:

SPURZHEIM:
“… the primitive feelings of religion may be misled and produce insanity …”
BLAKE:
“Cowper came to me & said. O that I were insane always I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane. I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health & yet are as mad as any of us all—over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from Bacon Newton & Locke”

Spurzheim cites Methodism “for its supply of numerous cases” of insanity, and Blake begins his note by scrawling “Methodism &.” The Spectre of Urthona has the same relation to Blake's Cowper that Los has to Blake's Ezekiel, and we will see more of the Spectre than we have seen if we keep in mind that he is both a poet of Sensibility and a kind of sin-crazed Methodist. Cowper ends On The Ice Islands by desperately warning the “uncouth forms” away:

Hence! Seek your home, nor longer rashly dare
The darts of Phoebus, and a softer air;
Lest you regret, too late, your native coast,
In no congenial gulf for ever lost!

The power of this, and of the entire poem, is in our implicit but overwhelming recognition of Cowper's self-recognition; he himself is such an ice island, and the uncongenial gulf in which he is lost is one with the “deeper gulfs” that end The Castaway:

No voice divine the storm allayed,
          No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
          We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

Though Cowper's terror is his own, the mode of his self-destruction is akin to that of the Bard of Sensibility proper, Gray's Giant Form:

‘Fond impious Man, think'st thou yon sanguine cloud,
Rais'd by thy breath, has quench'd the orb of day?
To-morrow he repairs the golden flood,
And warms the nations with redoubled ray,
Enough for me: with joy I see
The different doom our fates assign.
Be thine despair, and scept'red care,
To triumph, and to die, are mine.’
He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height
Deep in the roaring tide he plung'd to endless night.

That is not the way the Spectre of Urthona ends:

                                                                                          Los beheld undaunted furious
His heavd Hammer; he swung it round & at one blow,
In unpitying ruin driving down the pyramids of pride
Smiting the Spectre on his Anvil & the integuments of his Eye
And Ear unbinding in dire pain, with many blows,
Of strict severity self-subduing, & with many tears labouring.
Then he sent forth the Spectre all his pyramids were grains
Of sand & his pillars; dust on the flys wing; & his starry
Heavens; a moth of gold & silver mocking his anxious grasp.

(91: 41-49)

Cowper and the Bard drown to end an isolation, whether terrible or heroic; the theatre of mind dissolves in the endless night of an original chaos, the abyss always sensed in the histrionic mode. The Spectre of Urthona is both shattered and unbound, his anxious grasp of self mocked by his selfhood's reduction to a fine grain, to the Minute Particulars of vision. Because he cannot face the hammering voice of the prophetic orator, the Spectre is at last divided “into a separate space,” beyond which he cannot be reduced. The theatre of mind is necessarily a Sublime theatre of the Indefinite, but the prophet compels definite form to appear.

Jerusalem's quite definite form is the form of prophecy, Blake's mythologized version of the story of Ezekiel, even as the form of Revelation is demonstrated by Austin Farrer to be St. John's mythologized rebirth of Ezekiel's images.² When the visionary orator steps forward, he shares the courage of Gray's Bard, but goes further because his words are also acts. Emerson, in one of his eloquent journal broodings upon eloquence, fixes precisely this stance of Blake's Los:

Certainly there is no true orator who is not a hero. His attitude in the rostrum, on the platform, requires that he counterbalance his auditory. He is challenger, and must answer all comers. The orator must ever stand with forward foot, in the attitude of advancing. His speech must be just ahead of the assembly, ahead of the whole human race, or it is superfluous. His speech is not to be distinguished from action.

(Journal, June, 1846)

Speech that is act cannot be reconciled with excessive self-consciousness; the prophetic mind is necessarily a mind no longer turned in upon itself. The man of Young's Night Thoughts (“I tremble at myself / And in myself am lost!”) is succeeded by prophetic Man, the “identified” Human Form, as Blake exaltedly wishes him phrased. This transition, from representative man as poet of Sensibility, inhabiting the theatre of mind, to prophetic Man, a transition made again in Wordsworth and in Shelley, is in Blake at least founded upon Biblical precedent. What drew Blake to Ezekiel is the denunciation, first made by that prophet, of the entire spiritual tradition of collective responsibility. As Buber remarks, “Ezekiel individualizes the prophetic alternative.”³ The larger covenant has broken down, because the collectivity of Israel or Albion is no longer a suitable covenant partner.

For the theatre of mind, though an Ulro-den of self-consciousness, is founded upon a collective Sublime. The man of Burke, Young, Gray, Cowper, is still the universal man of humanist tradition, still the man Pope and Johnson longed to address. Wordsworth is enough of a Burkean to retain the outline of such a figure, but Blake knows that continuity to be broken down, and forever. Blake's God, like Ezekiel's, sends a “watchman” to admonish individuals, and Los, as that watchman, delivers a message that no collectivity is capable of hearing. The Sublime terror, founded as it is upon a universal anxiety, is dismissed by Blake as the Spectre's rhetoric, his deception of others, while the Sublime transport is similarly dismissed as the Spectre's sentimentality, or self-deception. “Los reads the Stars of Albion! the Spectre reads the Voids / Between the Stars.” To see the Burkean Sublime is to see: “a Disorganized / And snowy cloud: brooder of tempests & destructive War.”

The bounding outline, or organized vision, Blake rightly found in Ezekiel and the other prophets, who gave him the harsh but definite form in which Jerusalem is organized, perhaps even over-organized. The form of prophecy, particularly fixed in Ezekiel, is the unique invention of the writing prophets who sustained the destruction of the northern kingdom and the subsequent Babylonian exile. Since the nabi's teaching emphasizes return, or salvation by renovation, the form the teaching takes emphasizes a process of return, the Merkabah's firebursts from within itself, a declaration that is also a performance. For the Merkabah, to surmise largely, is a giant image for the prophetic state-of-being, for the activity of prophecy, though it presents itself as something larger, as the only permitted (if daring) image of the divine imagelessness. If we think back to the first of the writing prophets, the sheep-breeder Amos, we find the situation of the Merkabah without its image. Prophecy comes among us as a sudden on-slaught from a stranger, a divine judgment in a storm of human speech, circling in until it addresses itself against the house of Israel. The image favored by Amos is not the storm of the rushing chariot's own splendor, the wind that is the spirit, but the waters of judgment, a more Wordsworthian emblem than Blake could care to accept.

In the writing prophets between Amos and Ezekiel, the image of judgment or form of prophecy departs more and more from the natural. Hosea's emphasis is upon the land, but the land's faithlessness, the wife's whoredoms, are presented as unnatural, rather than all-too-natural, as they would be by Blake. Isaiah's vision of God's radiance, his kabod (wealth and glory) moves toward the vision of the Merkabah, subtly juxtaposing as it does the Divine Throne and the dethroned leper king Uzziah. Micah, a more vehement nabi, emphasizes the image of the glory's departure from the sanctuary, and is thus the true precursor of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and through them of Blake. Jeremiah's great image, the potter's wheel upon which clay is molded into vessels, and marred vessels broken into clay again, is associated unforgettably with the prophet's own afflictions, an association which introduces into the prophetic form a new emphasis upon the nabi as person, but only insofar as the person is a vessel of God's message. In Ezekiel, the potter's wheel is taken up into the heavens in the wheels within wheels of the Merkabah, whose departure is at one with the advent of the prophet's inner afflictions, his intense personal sufferings.

Blake, a close and superb reader of the prophets, knew all this, better than we can know it because he knew also his election, following Milton, to the line of prophecy. But his immediate poetic tradition was the Theatre of Mind, and he struggled throughout his writing life first partly to reconcile Sensibility and prophecy, and at last largely to disengage the lesser mode from the greater. In Jerusalem, the Bard is identified with the Spectre of Urthona, and the nabi not with Los or Blake, but with the Los-Blake-Jesus composite who achieves unified form at the poem's close. Cowper's suffering is not redressed, but rather is cast away, for Blake is concerned to distinguish it sharply from the suffering of the prophet, the more fruitful afflictions of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And, since Jerusalem is even more purgatorial than Milton, the poem's main concern is to outline firmly the distinction between the two kinds of suffering in Blake himself. It is his own Spectre of Urthona who must be overcome, though the self-realization necessary for such harsh triumph depends upon his recognition that precisely this psychic component won out in the spirit of Cowper, and in other Bards of Sensibility.

Hayley, who patronized Cowper as he did Blake, extended his interest in what he took to be the “madness” of Bards to the Jubilate Agno of Smart, as we know from his correspondence with the Reverend Thomas Carwardine. We do not find in Jerusalem, with its powerful control of Blake's emotions, a pathos as immense and memorable as Smart's. The pathos of the Spectre compels a shudder more of revulsion than of sympathy; we are not humiliated by Smart's fate, or Cowper's, but we are by the Spectre's anguish. For the Spectre is rightly associated by Blake with Ezekiel's denunciation of “the dross of silver,” the impure to be cast into the terrible refining furnace of Jerusalem-under-siege. Blake is singularly harsh towards the Spectre in Jerusalem, not only because it is at last wholly his own Spectre and so most menacing to him, but also because he is turning at last against some of his own deepest literary identifications, and so attempting to free himself from a poetic attitude powerfully attractive to him, whether in Cowper, Gray, Chatterton—whom he had admired overtly—or in lesser figures of the Sublime school.

But to cross over from Bard to nabi, from the theatre of mind to the orator's theatre of action, was not wholly a liberation for Blake's psyche. A different, a subtler anxiety than is incarnated by the Spectre, begins to manifest itself in Jerusalem. This is Blake's version of the anxiety of influence, which he had labored heroically to overcome in Milton. Jerusalem is not less in the Shadow of Milton (which Blake identified with Ezekiel's Covering Cherub) than Milton was, and is also in what we could call, following Blake, the Shadow of Ezekiel. To see and state clearly the hidden problem concerning Blake's degree of originality in his definitive poem, we need first to achieve a firmer sense of the poem's psychic cartography than is now available to us.

Freud, in The Problem of Anxiety, distinguishes anxiety from grief and sorrow, first by its underlying “increase of excitation” (itself a reproduction of the birth trauma) and then by its function, as a response to a situation of danger. Anxiety, he adds, can be experienced only by the ego, not by the id as “it is not an organization, and cannot estimate situations of danger.” As for the superego, Freud declines to ascribe anxiety to it, without explaining why. In Blake, the id (fallen Tharmas, or the Covering Cherub) does experience anxiety, and so does the superego (fallen Urizen or the Spectre of Albion, the Spectre proper). But Blake and Freud agree on the crucial location of anxiety, for the Blakean ego is Los, fallen form of Urthona, and the Spectre of Urthona is Los's own anxiety, the anxiety of what Yeats calls the faculty of Creative Mind. Yet Blake does distinguish the ego's anxiety from that of other psychic components. The Spectre of Urthona is neither the anxiety of influence, a peculiarly poetic anxiety that belongs to the Covering Cherub, with its sinister historical beauty of cultural and spiritual tradition, nor the anxiety of futurity, that belongs to fallen Urizen. Nor is it the sexual anxiety Blake assigns to Orc, the tormented libido burningly rising to a perpetual defeat. Los's anxiety is larger and more constant, resembling Kierkegaard's Concept of Dread, which must be why Northrop Frye ironically calls the Spectre of Urthona the first existentialist. A desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy, or walking oxymoron; so Kierkegaard speaks of Dread, and so we learn to see the Spectre of Urthona. To Kierkegaard, this was a manifestation of Original Sin; to Blake this manifests the final consequence of being one of Tirzah's children, a natural man caught on the spindle of Necessity.

If we combine the insights of Freud and Kierkegaard, then we approach the Spectre of Urthona's condition, though without wholly encompassing it. The missing element is the anxiety endemic in the theatre of mind, or the ego's dread that it can never break through into action. To be fearful that one's words can never become deeds, and yet to desire only to continue in that fear, while remembering dimly the trauma of coming to one's separate existence, and sensing the danger (and excitation) of every threat to such separation: that horrible composite is the Spectre of Urthona's consciousness. Blake, who had known this internal adversary with a clarity only the prophets achieve, turns Jerusalem against him even as Milton was directed against the Covering Cherub, and as The Four Zoas identified its antagonist in fallen Urizen. But even the prophets must be all-too-human. Blake triumphs against his ego's Dread, and wards off again the Urizenic horror of futurity, yet becomes vulnerable instead throughout Jerusalem to the diffuse anxiety of influence, the mimshach or “wide-extending” Cherub. This baneful aspect of Poetic Influence produces the form of Jerusalem, which is the form of Ezekiel's prophecy twisted askew by too abrupt a swerve or clinamen away from Blake's model.

Ezekiel is both more methodical in arrangement and more prosaic in style than the writing prophets before him. Rabbi Fisch, in his Soncino edition of Ezekiel, notes the even balance of the prophet's divisions, between the siege and fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the kingdom, and the vision of a people's regeneration, twenty-four chapters being assigned to each. Blake could have adopted this balance, but chose instead a darker emphasis. Ezekiel ends Chapter XXIV with God's definitive establishment of His prophet as a sign, to those who have escaped destruction. “Thou shalt be a sign unto them; and they shall know that I am the Lord.” At the close of XXV this formula is repeated, but as a prophecy against the Ammonites, with a grimly significant addition: “and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.” For the prophet has moved from the fiction of disaster to the hope of renovation, a hope dependent upon the downfall of his people's enemies. He moves steadily towards comfort, and the vision of a rebuilt City of God. Blake's directly parallel movement is from Plate 50, end of Chapter 2, to Plate 53, start of Chapter 3 of Jerusalem. Plate 50 concludes with an antiphonal lament, of Erin and the Daughters of Beulah, imploring the Lamb of God to come and take away the remembrance of Sin. But Chapter 3 begins with Los weeping vehemently over Albion, and with our being reminded again that this lamenting, still ineffectual prophet is himself “the Vehicular Form of strong Urthona,” that is, the Merkabah or Divine Chariot still in departure, still mourning in exile.

Throughout Jerusalem, no prophetic hint from Ezekiel is adopted if it might lead to what Blake could regard as a premature mitigation of fallen travail. I do not mean to question Blake's harshness, the necessity for his augmented sense of the prophet's burden. But the bitterness of presentation, the burden placed upon even the attentive and disciplined reader, may surpass what was necessary. At the close of Plate 3, addressing the public, Blake declares his freedom from the “Monotonous Cadence” of English blank verse, even in Milton and Shakespeare:

But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts—the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other.

Parodying Milton's defence of his refusal to use rhyme, Blake indicates his passage beyond Milton to the cadence of Isaiah and Ezekiel, the form of a true Orator. The defence of Blake's cadence has been conducted definitively by a formidable prosodist, John Hollander, in his essay on “Blake and the Metrical Contract,” to which I can add nothing.⁴ In the passage above, Blake emphasizes, as against Milton, the prosody of the King James Version, which he does not distinguish from the Hebrew original. There is evidence that Blake, remarkably adept at teaching himself languages, had some Hebrew when he worked at Jerusalem, but his notions as to the variety of biblical poetic numbers seem to go back to Lowth, as Smart's notions did also. This gave him a distorted sense of the metrical freedom of his great originals, a distortion that was an imaginative aid to him. Whether his distortion of larger prophetic forms was hindrance or action is my concern in the remainder of this essay.

Blake shies away from certain symbolic acts in Ezekiel that earlier had influenced him quite directly. It has never, I think, been noted that Blake's London has a precise source in Ezekiel:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

And the glory of the God of Israel was gone up from the cherub, whereupon he was, to the threshold of the house. And he called to the man clothed with linen, which had the writer's inkhorn by his side;

And the Lord said unto him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof.

(Ezekiel 9: 3-4)

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

Those that sigh and cry are to be marked and spared, but those in Church and Palace are to be slain, as God pours out his fury upon Jerusalem, and upon London. Between Ezekiel and himself Blake is more than content to see an absolute identity. But, a decade or more later, the identity troubles him. If we contrast even the serene endings of Ezekiel and Jerusalem, where Blake directly derives from his precursor the naming of the City, we confront an identity straining to be dissolved:

And the name of the city from that day shall be ‘The Lord is there.’

(Ezekiel 48: 35)

And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem.

(Jerusalem 99: 5)

“The Lord is there” because the promise of Ezekiel's prophecy is that the Merkabah will not depart again from His sanctuary. Jerusalem receives therefore a new name. Blake's promise is more restricted, and warier; the Judgment will restore London to Jerusalem, but Jerusalem will still be a smelting furnace of mind, subject to the alternation of Beulah and Eden, creative repose and the artist's activity. So the departed Chariot's Cherubim or restored Zoas are not invoked again at Jerusalem's close, as they are by Ezekiel in his final epiphany. For an apocalyptic poem, Jerusalem is remarkably restrained. Blake follows Ezekiel throughout, but always at a distance, for he needs to protect himself not only from the natural history of mind (which crippled the poets of Sensibility) but also from the too rigorous Hebraic theism that would make his apocalyptic humanism impossible. Jerusalem does not accept the dualism of God and man, which is the only dualism sanctioned by the prophets, but which to them was less a dualism than a challenge to confrontation. Blake, who had held back from identifying himself wholly with Milton and Cowper, though he saw the Divine Countenance in them, kept himself distinct at last even from his prophetic precursor, Ezekiel, that he might have his own scope, but also that he might not be affrighted out of Eden the garden of God, though it be by “the anointed cherub that covereth.”

Notes

1. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, with commentary by Harold Bloom (Garden City, 1965), pp. 843 ff.

2. A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John's Apocalypse (London, 1949; Boston, 1963).

3. The Prophetic Faith, trans. Carlyle Witton-Davis (New York, 1949; reprinted 1960), p. 186.

4. From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York, 1965), pp. 293-310.