SOURCE: Marks, Mollyanne. “Self-Sacrifice: Theme and Image in Jerusalem.” Blake Studies 7, no. 1 (1974): 27-50.

[In the following essay, Marks considers the ideology of self-sacrifice and how it reveals itself in Blake's Jerusalem.]

Jerusalem represents a movement away from the more richly embroidered universe of Blake's earlier poetry to a starker myth, in which a few of Blake's giant forms are assimilated to figures, events, and concepts of Judaeo-Christian tradition. The elaborate structure of Jerusalem serves essentially to redefine the language of that tradition, and in particular the concept of self-sacrifice that to Blake was the meaning of Jesus.

Jerusalem thus reaches its triumphant conclusion in a strangely familiar image:

Jesus replied Fear not Albion unless I die thou canst not live
But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me
This is Friendship & Brotherhood without it Man Is Not

(96:14-16, E253/K743)¹

This speech occurs just before Albion, the universal man, is inspired to sacrifice himself for Los, the poet-prophet and vehicle of imaginative power, thereby reversing the fall and restoring the Divine Vision. In the new context of Jerusalem, Blake's adaptation of the idea of self-sacrifice is at once familiar and strange, and invites attention.

Blake's allegorical method in Jerusalem explores various concepts and modes of consciousness by projecting them as mythic figures, according to his view that all things must be given definite form in order to be properly understood.² Blake's mythic figures often seem to possess human characteristics, but they are not fully formed characters. As fragments of a once integrated Human Form Divine, they represent aspects of the mind, as well as forces working through history. Blake may use several figures at once to dramatize a particular problem—a method which gives considerable subtlety and flexibility to his redefinitions of tradition. So it is that in Jerusalem the human struggle to realize imaginative potential through self-sacrifice is given both a shape and a name. The internal struggle with the self or selfhood—the fearful, base, and anxious element that blocks human expression—is projected in the poem into a full-scale war operating at once on a personal, a historical, and a cosmic level. This struggle is presented most completely in the conflict between Los and his Spectre of Urthona, but the process by which various figures in the poem overcome selfhood to become fully creative is a central ordering element of Jerusalem.³

The self or selfhood is, for Blake, the force irreconcilably opposed to creativity, generosity, and the human give-and-take of psychic warfare in Eternity. Projected in his poetry as the Spectre, it is ordinarily the mode of consciousness Blake describes as single or Ulro vision, the vision which permits only a single law of oppression.⁴ Every individual may pass through any fixed state of vision; each of Blake's characters potentially has a spectre. In Jerusalem the chief antagonist of Albion and of the human imagination is Albion's Spectre:

                                                                                                            he is the Great Selfhood
Satan: Worshipd as God by the Mighty Ones of the Earth
Having a white Dot calld a Center from which branches out
A Circle in continual gyrations. this became a Heart
From which sprang numerous branches varying their motions
Producing many Heads three or seven or ten, & hands & feet
Innumerable at will of the unfortunate contemplator
Who becomes his food [:] such is the way of the Devouring Power

(29[33]:17-24, E173/K659)

Blake has constructed this passage around his radical emblem of limitation: the circle which is the Mundane Shell, the globe of wrath, and the human heart which limits the limitless possibilities of eternity. In spite of the suggestion of a phrase like “branches out,” the movement defined in the passage is one of contraction and encircling. Blake's images usually contain their own contraries. The potential creative energy of this figure is evident from the rapid multiplication of its parts, but the emphasis of this particular passage is clearly on the negative force of the selfhood. The process described is the familiar Blakean one in which the subject, or “unfortunate contemplator,” creates a tyrannical god whose victim he himself becomes.⁵ The energy of the contemplator becomes the material for the creation of limitless limits which serve only to contain him. Blake's satire is abbreviated, but an allusion establishes his accustomed connection between an Old Testament-Miltonic God and the figure these same sources present elsewhere as Satan. From Blake's perspective they share a desire to confine man within time, space, and a knowledge which will forever torment him. What is interesting here, however, beyond the ironic conflation of traditional categories is Blake's identification of the figures of Jehovah and Satan as a specific mode of purely human consciousness. In the lines immediately preceding the passage quoted, this Great Selfhood reveals himself as the Rational Power in Albion who perceives man to be as we now know him—a mortal being of a certain size who lives and dies engaged in transitory and largely pointless activity (29[33]:5-16, E173/K659). The struggle of Albion to overcome and sacrifice his Selfhood is the epic action of Jerusalem; it is the inevitable way to reverse a fall which is described as a movement “From willing sacrifice of Self, to sacrifice of (miscall'd) Enemies.” Yet the form, nature, and significance of this struggle may best be understood by looking at another, related contest in Jerusalem which partly mirrors and partly determines it. Blake has stated that “General forms have their vitality in Particulars.” There is, in Jerusalem, an abiding emphasis on individual responsibility and on self-purgation, and it is from a “particular” and personal contest at its center that the rest of the poem opens out. This contest takes mythic form in the struggle of Los, the active hero of the poem, with his selfhood, his own Spectre of Urthona.⁶

On one level, Los's struggle with his spectre is a most personal account of Blake's own labors at composition. In his correspondence Blake gives rather straightforward accounts of his struggle to defeat the sense of doubt and despair—his own Spectre of Urthona—which frustrated his imagination:

I labour incessantly & accomplish not one half of what I intend, because my Abstract folly hurries me often away while I am at work, carrying me over Mountains & Valleys, which are not Real, in a Land of Abstraction where Spectres of the Dead wander.⁷

In this letter, written probably before Jerusalem was conceived, Blake is concerned primarily with the corrosive power of analysis—the Spectre in his least differentiated form, as abstract reasoning which clouds the “particular” matter of imaginative production. Later, in a letter to Hayley, Blake describes his internal conflict in greater detail. Its relevance to Jerusalem is obvious and crucial:

For now! O Glory! and O Delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love and is the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant, the ruiner of ancient Greece. I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him; I have had twenty; thank God I was not altogether a beast as he was; but I was a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils; these beasts and these devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and liberty, and my feet and my wife's feet are free from fetters … he is become my servant who domineered over me, he is even as a brother who was my enemy.⁸

Jerusalem was most likely not completed until years after the 1804 date etched on the title-page, but one might speculate upon the relation of the victory over Blake's own Spectre, described in the letter of 1804, and the conception of Jerusalem, which makes the poetic process of achieving such a victory the means by which Eden is reconstituted in the fallen world.⁹ In any event, Blake's antagonist in the letter—“that Spectrous Fiend”—is most certainly his Spectre of Urthona, and the importance that the struggle of Los and the Spectre comes to hold in Blake's definitive poem is foreshadowed here.

The Spectre is, among other things, the prophet's propensity to doubt himself and his abilities—hence his compelling Blake to twenty years, “incessantly labouring and incessantly spoiling what I had done well.” Blake's own struggle with the Spectre, as he describes it in the letter, is a continuing struggle with a debilitating self-consciousness which had long hindered his efforts. The imaginative illumination which arrests the Spectre's long domination is, however, only the beginning of the poet's task. Blake conquers his dread by turning Jerusalem against it, so that the reintegration of the Spectre and the prophetic consciousness is carried out only in the details of the poetry.

The concept of the artistic imagination as the agent of man's regeneration is central to the design of Jerusalem, as Blake outlined it in A Descriptive Catalogue. Jerusalem, he claimed, contains the ancient history of Britain as well as the world of Satan and Adam, as these things are written in Eden—it is, in other words, Blake's recreation of Christian vision for an English public in an English context.¹⁰ The intermediary between Eden and our fallen world is the artist who is “an inhabitant of that happy country [Eden]” (DC, E533/K578). It is directly through the continued efforts of the artist that “the world of vegetation and generation may expect to be opened again to Heaven, through Eden, as it was in the beginning” (DC, E533/K578).¹¹ But opposed to Los there is always his Spectre, and the opening plates of Jerusalem depict for us their struggle, emphasizing from the outset its central role in the poem.

Jerusalem opens with a distillation of Blake's earlier myths of the fall, as Albion, the Eternal Man, turns away from the promptings of the Savior—the awakened Human Imagination—and chooses instead the “Laws of Moral Virtue” which will gradually shrink Human perceptions until they are “small & wither'd & darken'd.” It is against this continuing and self-induced fallen condition of man that Blake sets his prophetic poem, in an unusual, but revealing, invocation:

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.

(5:16-26, E146/K623)

Blake is speaking here in his own person, but that “person” is the Blake who finally emerged in Milton as Blake-Milton-Los, the poet-prophet who is working through his art to return man to the Eternal state. He is not yet the fully assured prophet, the Los-Blake-Jesus of the poem's close. As in the 1804 letter to Hayley, he is the fallen artist who has realized his incarnation but who must struggle to maintain it; and his struggle must be, first of all, to “Annihilate the Selfhood,” in order to free himself for his greater task.

The passage quoted above suggests some of the intersecting levels of meaning operating in the poem. First, it sets forth the basic opposition of the poem: the opposition between the building up of Golgonooza, the Eternal City of Art, and the terrors of Entuthon, the wasteland which the fall of Albion is creating. Nothing in Blake's poetry is static, and this opposition of building up and tearing down, of creating and destroying, is going on all the time, with the creative force gaining as Blake goes on with his work. Yet, this same fundamental opposition is meaningful in still other ways. In Jerusalem, a single event usually refers simultaneously to several different levels of meaning, and a single word can gather to itself a whole separate complex of meaning by drawing on an earlier use of the same word in Blake's canon. Here, Blake's invocation of the full saving power of the Human Imagination in beginning his poem is a contribution to the building of Golgonooza, because it will enlarge man's perceptions in spite of his own efforts to limit them. Yet this can be done by Blake only by overcoming the limitations of Blake's own vision so that, in a sense, the major opposition of the poem is between Blake's imagination and his own Selfhood. In the same way, external manifestations of Blake's own doubts and fears, in the form of unfavorable reviewers and unsympathetic participants in his treason trial¹² become representative of the larger forces of evil, in England and in the world, because evil is nurtured wherever the imagination is stifled, and so the greatest struggle, for Blake, may be at the same time cosmic and personal.

As Jerusalem develops, the opposition of imagination and selfhood will quickly be generalized. But the opposition of Los and his spectre will continue to refer to Blake's situation as a laboring artist and also to the larger contest of forces in Blake's England and the world. Blake's insistence on the multiple meanings and forms of a single event is part of his struggle to overcome the limits of time and space in his poetry. The structure of the poetry urges the reader to draw together the separate forms into a united vision and so counteracts the fall, but at the same time the very existence of a division into separate forms reflects and reinforces the condition of the present world. For instance, Blake's account of how Albion's fall took place, given early in Chapter 1, shows us clearly several versions of the same event as it appears in different contexts, thereby making connections for the reader that Blake later demands the reader make for himself:

So Los in secret with himself communed & Enitharmon heard
In her darkness & was comforted: yet still she divided away
In gnawing pain from Los's bosom in the deadly Night;
First as a red Globe of blood trembling beneath his bosom[.]
Suspended over her he hung: he infolded her in his garments
Of wool: he hid her from the Spectre, in shame & confusion of
Face; in terrors & pains of Hell & Eternal Death, the
Trembling Globe shot forth Self-living & Los howld over it:
Feeding it with his groans & tears day & night without ceasing:
And the Spectrous Darkness from his back divided in temptations,
And in grinding agonies in threats! stiflings! & direful strugglings.
Go thou to Skofield: ask him if he is Bath or if he is Canterbury
Tell him to be no more dubious: demand explicit words
Tell him: I will dash him into shivers, where & at what time
I please: tell Hand & Skofield they are my ministers of evil
To those I hate: for I can hate also as well as they!
From every-one of the Four Regions of Human Majesty,
There is an Outside spread Without, & an Outside spread Within
Beyond the Outline of Identity both ways, which meet in One:
An orbed Void of doubt, despair, hunger, & thirst & sorrow.
Here the Twelve Sons of Albion, join'd in dark Assembly,
Jealous of Jerusalems children, asham'd of her little-ones
(For Vala produc'd the Bodies. Jerusalem gave the Souls)
Became as Three Immense Wheels, turning upon one-another
Into Non-Entity, and their thunders hoarse appall the Dead
To murder their own Souls, to build a Kingdom among the Dead [:]

(17:48-63; 18:1-10, E161/K639-40)

The brilliance of Blake's technique here is deliberate juxtaposition of the poem's three major areas of reference: psychological, historical, and mythic. The same event—the fall of man—reveals itself in each of three accounts here in a unique form, though in reality all three are the same event—an identity which is reinforced by similarities of movement and of imagery in the passages. This method shows the reader how to see events in history, in the realm of myth, and in the mind of man as types translating a single pattern.

The first description concerns Los and the fall as it manifests itself, for the artistic consciousness, in the separation of Los's emanation and spectre. This twofold division leads to imagination as it exists in the fallen world. The conflict between the creative principle and the ruinous doubts which threaten it is, of course, familiar, but a further, more subtle complication is represented by the separation of Enitharmon, Los's emanation. Man ought to be continually creating and loving his own outer world. But when the artistic consciousness is seduced by its own detached invention, neglecting further labor, it creates a fixed natural order and abnegates its prophetic role. It turns to spectral modes of creativity which draw merely on sensation and experience, rather than on inspiration. The work of a poet so deceived serves only to reinforce and sustain fallen existence. This is the permanent condition of the fallen artist who has not reconciled the divisions within himself. Through the imagery, however, Blake links this event to the beginnings of man's fall in The Book of Urizen. There Urizen, first separating himself from Eternity, presided over his own separate world and took human shape under the hammer of Los with a “red / Round globe hot burning” as his heart. Here Los fosters a separating natural world in a “red Globe of blood” which is to become the heart of Enitharmon. The two falls are the same process, but they appear different in different contexts.

Blake's poetry constantly demands that we hear in it echoes drawn from all parts of Blake's canon; but in this passage he also shows us immediately some of the varying shapes of the fall, and the relation between them. What Los's division into spectre and emanation is for the imagination, then, the next passage translates for us in terms of Blake's own life. The first words—“Go thou to Skofield”—compel us to consider the pressure of Blake's life on the poem, much as the Bard's Song drew Blake's quarrel with Hayley into Milton. Scofield was the drunken soldier whom Blake turned out of his garden, and who later had Blake prosecuted for “an assault & Seditious words.”¹³ Blake was acquitted, but a number of participants in the trial appear in Jerusalem as villainous representatives of oppressive law. A change to the first person follows in the allusion to Scofield, suggesting further that the poem is now concerned with Blake personally. The dilemma of the generic fallen artist gives way abruptly to the plight of the particular artist, William Blake, besieged by doubtors and detractors, until an uncharacteristic outburst of hatred marks a triumph of his own spectre and an occasion of the fall in him. Blake's hatred is directed against Hand as well as Scofield—Hand probably representing the Hunt brothers whose magazine had attacked Blake—and the passage gains significance from the identification made a little later in the poem, of Hand as a spectre:

Hand stood between Reuben & Merlin, as the Reasoning Spectre
Stands between the Vegetative Man & his Immortal Imagination

(32[36]:23-24, E176/K663)

Blake seeks to clarify the conflict between himself and the Spectral forces of the fallen world. But hate is the weapon of a spectre, and Blake's first battle properly lies with the dissenting forces in himself, rather than with misguided detractors abroad. His outburst is therefore only a false start, and an account of further fall succeeds it. Characteristically, even in so brief a description, metaphors of division signal an instance of the fall—“I will dash him into shivers, where & at what time / I please.”

The third parallel description of the fall is the myth of Albion, Vala, and Jerusalem, which occupies the remainder of the first chapter of the poem. This passage traces the large movement of the fall in the poem, though the essential pattern repeats what has just gone before. Albion the universal man is falling, and his sons have become spectres, jealously persecuting the children of his emanation, now also separate, so that doubt and destruction triumph. Thus man's creativity is being sacrificed to a natural appearance (Vala) that conceals from him his own infinite potential, and the result threatens to be imaginative death. The Sons of Albion who are plotting against Jerusalem's children, man's imaginative creations, are linked by allusion to Milton's fallen angels in “dark Assembly.” But fall is expressed in the movement of the whole passage, which is relentlessly backwards, the reverse of the imaginative movement toward unity. The Globe which is the heart of the fall returns here as “An orbed Void” which is “doubt, despair, hunger, & thirst & sorrow” and which therefore contains only the emotions of a spectre. Again there is a circle in the “three Immense Wheels,” which turn outward upon each other, in counter motion to the Edenic movement, which is typified in Ezekiel's vision of wheels within wheels which are the chariot of God.¹⁴ These revolving circles signal the vegetable cycles of fallen existence, which move forever towards nothing but Non-Entity, a “Kingdom among the Dead.” Indeed, the movement of the entire passage, and of the fall itself, has been from the original and glorious “Four Regions of Human Majesty” to this final debased inversion of a kingdom of the dead brought about by willful self-destruction.

Each of these descriptions represents differently a fall which is essentially the same event. And by establishing this identity, Blake launches a counter-movement to the process of fall and division described in the passage. The poetic form of Jerusalem draws things together, even as they are falling apart, by revealing the nature of evil and the fundamental sameness of its manifestations. Error disappears, according to Blake, when it can be clearly recognized, so that the choice between error and salvation becomes obvious. The imaginative view establishes identities, while the fallen view always divides, for when error can be fully consolidated and identified, it can also be destroyed. Here, then, Blake is urging his reader to oppose the process of fall that he describes by the imaginative act of recognizing the identity of these separate instances of fall. But the very necessity of doing so shows us we are fallen indeed. Blake can reject traditional forms of verse and chronological ordering, but his labors are nonetheless finally enclosed in the time and space of a fallen world that is being transformed only gradually. The shape of his poetry is particularly suited both to mirror the separations of the fall and to dramatize a movement towards unification.

The emphasis, at the beginning of Jerusalem, on Los's efforts to overcome the division within himself has a crucial purpose. It establishes the attempt of the artist to consolidate and clarify his vision as the constructive force in the poem and opposes to it the dream of fallen history which is Albion's deathlike sleep. When Los's labors are far enough advanced, then Albion will wake into the Divine Vision Los has built up, casting off his Selfhood; and the fallen world will vanish like a dream (see plates 95-96). Los's struggle with his Spectre recurs throughout Jerusalem and is resolved only in the final plates. Unlike the Los of Blake's earlier poems, though, the hero of Jerusalem is continually aware of his identity and his goal. In a passage near the beginning of the poem, Los undergoes a rapid and compressed evolution which recalls the previous stages of his development in Blake's work:

For as his Emanation divided, his Spectre also divided
Los rag'd and stamp'd the earth in his might & terrible wrath!
He stood and stampd the earth! then he threw down his hammer in rage &
In fury: then he sat down and wept, terrified! Then arose
And chaunted his song, labouring with the tongs and hammer:
But still the Spectre divided, and still his pain increas'd!

(6:3-12, E147/K624-25)

In response to this initial division of his powers, Los first appears as the Los of The Four Zoas, engaged in the terrible dance of transformation which marked the accommodation of man's imagination to the cycles of history. Then, as he sits weeping and terrified, we glimpse the Los of Milton as he mistakenly opposes Milton's descent to the fallen world, until he realizes at last the “old Prophecy in Eden recorded” which leads him to join with Blake and Milton and accept the new poetic incarnation. But these two essentially mistaken responses of fury and terror give way to the new posture which is characteristic of Los in Jerusalem. In spite of the trouble and pain of division which continues to beset him, marking his still fallen state, the Los of Jerusalem possesses an increased awareness of his mission and his power. His labors are still sometimes misguided, but his response to the terrors which confront him is essentially unerring: he assumes his true role as creator, chanting his poetry and seeking to build man a new world to live in.

Los's evolution to a greater consciousness is also Blake's own, and his enhanced self-knowledge is reflected in the detailed allegory of the poet's inner life which becomes in Jerusalem a universal myth of artistic process. Los's struggle with his Selfhood provides many of the dramatic and moving moments of the poem. Blake's characterization of the Spectre—of just that element of the mind which generates anxiety, fear of the future, and frustration—is subtle and a triumph of his allegorical method. The Spectre, because he is only one aspect of the mind, gives voice to the pure grief of a vision of man trapped by powers outside his control:

                                                                                                                        Despair! I am Despair
Created to be the great example of horror & agony: also my
Prayer is vain I called for compassion: compassion mockd[,]
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. …

(10:50-58, E152/K630)

Blake had seen other artists whom he admired perish, both physically and imaginatively, through the domination of this voice. In Jerusalem Los turns away from the cry and compels his Spectre to labor for others.

Elsewhere the Spectre represents still more temptations to which the artist is prey. In a strange passage on plate 17, for example, Los sends the Spectre against the Daughters of Albion lest he, Los, be seduced from his labors by the deceptive beauties of nature. The Daughters flee from the Spectre's “undisguised desire” and hide in the temples of “cold chastity.” The Spectre, then, encounters the inevitable fate, in Blake's view, of the man of imagination who is seduced by natural beauty into admitting the existence of a fixed order of nature. The passage as a whole suggests Blake's own inclination to the Spectre's weakness and is in a sense a self-chastisement for his failure to come to terms directly with the allurements of nature. Elsewhere, too, the Spectre shows himself capable of the creativity of a Urizenic poet, wholly given over to mystery and abstraction (91:32-41, E249/K738).

The Blakean artist works necessarily within time, the physical body, and the fallen world, seeking to alter them and make new forms of experience possible. The Spectre is, therefore, a personification of the limits with which and within which the artist must labor to create. Blake's symbolic constructs contain their own contraries, so that the Spectre has potential for either creative activity or for destruction. This potential is portrayed dramatically by the juxtaposition, in Chapter 1, of two forms of the Spectre's labors. The first passage depicts the form of the Spectre under the auspices of the Sons of Albion:

And this is the manner of the Sons of Albion in their strength
They take the Two Contraries which are calld Qualities, with which
Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good & Evil
From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation
Not only of the Substance from which it is derived
A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer
Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power
An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing
This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning Power
And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation

(10:7-16, E151/K629)

In the next lines, the Spectre is under the influence of Los and the situation is quite different:

Therefore Los stands in London building Golgonooza
Compelling his Spectre to labours mighty. …

These two passages, following immediately one on the other, reveal the antithetical forms of the Spectre under his several masters, but they illustrate also an important ordering principle of the poem. Here, the activity of the Sons of Albion in employing the Spectre of Man for abstract reasoning, exclusive holiness, and murder is the inverted image of Los's use of the Spectre to build up Golgonooza, the city of human culture and civilization. In the same way, throughout the poem, the efforts of Los to rejoin his Spectre and emanation go on as mirror images of the fall and sleep of Albion, with its concomitant destructiveness in the activities of Vala-Rahab and Satan-Urizen. The point of the argument of Jerusalem is to clarify the separation of these two emerging versions of reality, and also their relation, so that the world of experience appears as a parody or inverted form of the world the human imagination is seeking to create. The antithetical structure of the four parts of Jerusalem grows out of this emerging struggle of contraries, which will finally resolve itself into the reunion of a reprobate Los and a redeemed Albion, and the casting out of the negation, Satan.

Chapter 1 defines the roles of Los and his Spectre and the implications of their struggle in the development of the poem. The logic of Jerusalem demands that as Los gains in strength and selfawareness through victories over his Spectre, there should be a progressive clarification of man's perceptions and of the divisions of error and imagination in the fallen world. This is, indeed, the emerging pattern of the poem, but Blake is wary of any semblance of automatic improvement and insists instead on individual responsibility. A large portion of the poem is given over to a vision of the fall of Albion and the destruction, at the expense of human wholeness, done by the reasoning mind and the despotism of the Selfhood.

The pattern of Jerusalem is not at all one of continuous narrative. It consists instead in the juxtaposition of opposing views as they develop in the poem. Chapter 2 is addressed to the Jews and their mistaken vision which holds that redemption is evolving through a single, fixed historical progression. By asserting the identity of England and the ancient Biblical lands, Blake denies the uniqueness of any fallen experience, at the same time that he attempts to restore the unfallen perspective from which there is an essential unity of human language and existence. Chapter 3 deals directly with Blake's own time and the approaching culmination of history. This chapter represents an advance over previous states of vision, though it is concerned chiefly with the triumph of error, because Blake's work exists to identify and denounce that error for what it is and for what it fails to be. Therefore Los's hammer is heard in an undersong throughout the chapter, and in its last plates Blake appears for the first time in the poem:

I walk up and down in Six Thousand Years: their Events are present before me
To tell how Los in grief & anger, whirling round his Hammer on high
Drave the Sons & Daughters of Albion from their ancient mountains

(74:19-21, E227/K714)

Blake is an Incarnation of Los and Jerusalem is the work of the prophetic spirit in England moving mankind towards the ultimate confrontation of the forces of destruction and imagination, in the individual and among all men.

Chapter 4 is addressed “To the Christians,” for the chapter defines Blake's Christianity as he approaches his revelation. He comes to this Christianity through a process of radical redefinition which invests the dictates of the institutionalized religion of his day with new significance:

I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination Imagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.

(77, E229/K716-17)

Blake's humanism finds the Holy Spirit to be none other than the freely-flowing intellect of Man and the antithesis of Hell and Heaven to be that between the life of the natural body and the workings of imagination.

The action of Chapter 4 also begins with the conflict of Los and the Sons of Albion, but Los displays a greater confidence which adds new intensity to the struggle:

          The Spectres of Albions Twelve Sons revolve mightily
Over the Tomb & over the Body: ravning to devour
The Sleeping Humanity. Los with his mace of iron
Walks round: loud his threats, loud his blows fall
On the rocky Spectres, as the Potter breaks the potsherds;
Dashing in pieces Self-righteousnesses: driving them from Albions Cliffs. …

(78:1-7, E231/K718-19)

The murderous intent of Albion's Sons is here evident, as is Los's greater effectiveness against them. Los's hammer blows dash to pieces their self-righteousness. Blake's thundering denunciations destroy (in his view, of course) the fabrications of the “reasoning Spectres” of his own day, such as Voltaire and Rousseau. Los's labors are repeatedly set against new manifestations of error until the climactic action of the last plates of Jerusalem at last resolves his struggle. On plate 86 the crisis in Los's relations with his emanation, which has been long impending, now comes upon him, as they enact a miniature drama of desire, flight, and pursuit. Enitharmon asserts her doctrine of the dominance of the Female Will, but Los, for the first time, has the strength to advocate his own supremacy. Los's new maturity is a hopeful sign, but for the time they are divided. The division weakens his powers, because he is “Lured by her beauty outside himself in shadowy grief.” This division brings on the Spectre's single moment of triumph in Jerusalem, for he hopes through it to undermine Los's strength:

A sullen smile broke from the Spectre in mockery & scorn
Knowing himself the author of their divisions & shrinkings,
          gratified
At their contentions, he wiped his tears he washd his visage.

(88:34-36, E245/K733)

The Spectre is responsible for the situation in the sense that he is the fallen pride and doubt which keeps them apart. He is pleased, too, because the artist's alienation from delight in his own creations is most likely to interfere with the artist's future efforts. As long as Enitharmon remains separate from Los, the Spectre can hope that he will maintain his separate existence.

The statement of the Spectre's temporary independence leads to a full revelation of the enemy of Los's imaginative strength, the Antichrist in the Covering Cherub, just as the statement of Los's integration with his Spectre followed a long declaration of his imaginative autonomy. The Covering Cherub is the Spectre of the universal humanity—a “reveald majestic image / Of Selfhood, Body put off”—when, through the failure of individual faculties to perform their proper functions, it is allowed to develop fully and to tyrannize over the ruins of man's imaginative nature. The vision which it would establish as reality is a demonic parody of the world man once knew—“in its Brain incloses a reflexion / Of Eden all perverted.” Because it represents the triumph of everything Los opposes, the Covering Cherub is encouraged to reveal itself through the temporary triumph of the Spectre, Los's enemy within. But the Cherub is also a challenge to Los to become truly the prophet armed, conscious of his powers alone and not of his debilitating fears. The great speech of Los that follows and a final confrontation with his spectre are Los's responses to the Cherub's challenge and reveal on the level of the artist's consciousness the necessary operation of his power against the selfhood which opposes him.

While Los's speech resembles Milton's declaration before the descent to redeem his selfhood, it is addressed, significantly, not to an assembly of observers, but to a psychic element of Los himself, namely his spectre. This is a further refinement in Blake's internalizing of the redemptive process, and it points again to the importance of this struggle within the confines of the artist's mind. Los's speech draws together all that he has learned of the proper use of poetic powers and of the identity of truth and error in the world:

                                … go Spectre! obey my most secret desire:
Which thou knowest without my speaking: Go to these Fiends of Righteousness
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. …

(91:3-12, E248/K737-38)

Los's words are demonstrations of imaginative truth—blows of his “mighty hammer” which are compelling the enemies of that truth to appear in their definitive form.

As if sensing what Los's speech will mean for him, the Spectre turns, for the first time, to “creative” activity:

The Spectre builded stupendous Works, taking the Starry Heavens
Like to a curtain & folding them according to his will
Repeating the Smaragdine Table of Hermes to draw Los down
Into the Indefinite, refusing to believe without demonstration[.]
Los reads the Stars of Albion! the Spectre reads the Voids
Between the Stars; among the arches of Albions Tomb sublime
Rolling the Sea in rocky paths: forming Leviathan
And Behemoth: the War by Sea enormous & the War
By Land astounding: erecting pillars in the deepest Hell,
To reach the heavenly arches. …

(91:32-41, E249/K738)

The Spectre is not passive; when pressed, he is capable of labors as tremendous as those of Los. At first the Spectre's labors appear to be simple parodies of Los's creative acts: “Los reads the Stars of Albion! the Spectre reads the Voids / Between the Stars.” But the Spectre's activities ultimately become more menacing. In lines 37-39 he becomes as the God of the Book of Job, dividing the seas and forming the agents of sanctified tyranny over men, Leviathan, and Behemoth. It is interesting to compare this with the behavior of another Spectre earlier in the poem:

But the Spectre rose like a hoar frost & a Mildew rose over Albion
Saying, I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power!
Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man!
Who teach Doubt & Experiment & my two Wings Voltaire: Rousseau.
Where is that Friend of Sinners! that Rebel against my Laws!
Who teaches Belief to the Nations, & an unknown Eternal Life
Come hither into the Desart & turn these stones to bread.
Vain foolish Man! wilt thou believe without Experiment?
And build a World of Phantasy upon my Great Abyss!
A World of Shapes in craving lust & devouring appetite

(54:15-24, E201-202/K685)

The selfishness and holiness which have characterized Los's spectre throughout the poem can, with the impetus of added terror, develop into something very like the Urizenic behavior of Albion's own Spectre—hence, in Blake's view, the debased and dangerous creativity of artists who have fallen under the influence of the establishment. In seeking to subdue his own spectre, then, Los is attacking something very close to the root of the fall and is endeavoring to prevent the very same errors which gave the fallen world its shape.

Los does not permit the new creations of his spectre to exist:

                                                                                          Los beheld undaunted furious
His heavd Hammer; he swung it round & at one blow,
In unpitying ruin driving down the pyramids of pride. …

(91:42-43, E249/K738)

But Los does not stop with the creations of the Spectre. He also operates on the Spectre himself. The entire process is a horribly painful and terrifying ordeal for Los, who must smite a part of himself on his anvil:

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.

(91:44-46, E249/K738)

Los here is accomplishing two things. First, he is destroying in his spectre those limits of perception which he once created in Reuben, or natural man, in order to set a limit to the fall:

Los rolled, his [Reuben's] Eyes into two narrow circles, then sent him
Over Jordan. …

(30[34]:53-54, E175/K661)

                                                                                                                                            and Los bended
His Ear in a spiral circle outward; then sent him over Jordan.

(32[36]:12-13, E176/K662)

Secondly, Los is overcoming in himself the fear which originally caused him to limit the senses of man, thus mistakenly reinforcing the effects of the fall.

As a result of Los's liberating blows, the Spectre must view his own works as they appear to the unfallen senses:

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

(91:47-49, E249/K739)

As in the case of the Eternals in Chapter 3, Ulro visions of chastity become harmless when viewed from a large enough perspective.

Having gone this far, Los returns to his anvil and subdues his spectre altogether. He attacks the spectral reasonings, altering them “Til he had completely divided him [the Spectre] into a separate space.” The hammering voice of the prophet systematically attacks and clarifies the obfuscations of his own stubborn pride and dread until nothing remains but the minute particulars of self which can be reduced no further. This definite form of the selfhood is then kept apart, and the imaginative faculty is effectively free of the doubting, despairing force within itself. Los has suffered much in the process, but he can now speak with complete confidence and authority:

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 thundrous Hammer shall drive thee
To wrath which thou condemnest. …

(91:54-57, E249/K739)

Los is now free of the Spectre's attempts to introduce the sterile values of the fallen world into his creative furnaces of imagination.

The significance of Los's contest with his Spectre in Jerusalem touches on some basic questions that have been raised recently about the poem's structure. The majority of critics still approach Jerusalem by seeking literary analogues to its form and by referring it to traditional methods of organization.¹⁵ These studies have been useful but not definitive, and there is now a need, I think, to see Blake's poetic structures more clearly in light of his own principles of narrative form. Blake's ideas about narrative form are intimately connected with his vision of the poet as trapped within a fallen consciousness and the confines of temporality. Earlier poems, particularly The Book of Urizen, have been addressed to this problem, wherein the artist is inevitably compromised by the chaos he beholds. The mode of Urizen is ironic recognition, but in Jerusalem, the inner struggle to transcend fallen limits dictates both form and content. The result is a poem in which there is no single narrative progression, though many can be traced, and yet a poem in which the process of composition is itself the subject and ordering principle throughout. Poetically this can happen because Los is both the figure of imagination and the embodiment of time. As he overcomes his selfhood, then, the limits of the fallen world are overcome and so the poem is created.

In dealing with time and eternity, Blake endorses the Christian view of the Incarnation as the unique point in history which unites the human and the divine, but through his persistent redefinition of traditional concepts, he greatly alters its meaning. For Blake, it is Jesus who, “breaking thro' the Central Zones of Death & Hell / Opens Eternity in Time & Space …” (75:21-22, E229/K716). But Jesus, according to Blake, is the full embodiment of the Human Imagination: “All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the Divine body of the Saviour the True Vine of Eternity The Human Imagination” (VLJ [Vision of the Last Judgment], E545/K605-06). Time and eternity are therefore joined whenever the divine and the human are one; in the fallen world human creativity remains subject to time until it has sufficiently transformed the universal consciousness to bring about the apocalypse.

To Blake's way of thinking, the shape a man (or a nation) gives to his conception of time indicates the extent of his vision and reveals his spiritual state. By this standard Blake can pass judgment on himself:

(VLJ, E553/K614)

Blake no longer sees Time clearly as the youth of eternal morning and reproaches himself for his own failure to perceive Time (and the times) as clearly and vitally as he could. Blake's struggle to overcome the failure of vision is portrayed in Jerusalem as one aspect of Los's battle with the selfhood. Los labors continually to transform the character of fallen time from a meaningless rehearsal of the past to permanent instances of progress back towards man's unfallen state. The alternative to Los's saving view of time is embodied in his Spectre, whom Frye pertinently describes as “clock time.” Because the Spectre accepts the limits of man's fallen condition, he represents the view of time as painfully short. Indeed, he lives in unremitting fear of the future, against which his only defense is a pointlessly frenzied activity in the present. Los's struggle to subdue his Spectre is, then, an allegorical representation of the poet's attempts to achieve a more imaginative view of time.

Time is thus defined subjectively—it appears different from different perspectives and it is illusory from the perspective of eternity. Clearly this idea of time influences the structuring of Blake's poetry. It has been observed, though by no means accepted, that Jerusalem is essentially a nonconsecutive series of poetic “happenings,” rather than a linear ordering of events.¹⁶ I would go further; Jerusalem defines the process of overcoming a fixed, nonhuman view of time. It both presents the struggle to do so dramatically and reflects that struggle in its form.

Jerusalem neither assumes the reality of an objective historical continuum nor itself depends on a narrative progression through time. Every aspect of the poem's composition, from its metrical ordering and verbal structures through its direct identification of England and the ancient Biblical lands, attempts to transcend spatial and temporal restraints.

As Los overcomes his selfhood, and thus the limits of his fallen condition, he is ready to assume the role of Jesus, representing the individual's transcendence of all finite limits. Yet Los's separation from his emanation still remains to be healed, and Enitharmon is terrified as she senses the impending change. She anticipates the annihilation of the separate female in the coming Apocalypse, but her pleadings fail to move the new Los, who is no longer subject to spectral fears and uncertainties. He announces the signal of Morning in the forces of Death risen against him. Between the newly independent Los and the forces of Mystery which he has revealed, the antithesis is so great that the Judgment must come, and so Albion stirs on his rock.

As the awakened Albion compels the Zoas to assume their proper places, he perceives that Urthona is already at work. Los then receives the reward of his labors. In this passage Los is not simply Blake; he is any poet who labors to maintain a vision:

                                                    Urthona he beheld mighty labouring at
His Anvil, in the Great Spectre Los unwearied labouring & weeping
Therefore the Sons of Eden praise Urthonas Spectre in songs
Because he kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble.

(95:17-20, E252/K742)

Albion awakes because all creation has been converted in the furnaces of Los to its imaginative form, and since Los has gradually likened the world to the Divine Vision, he himself, beholding what he creates, assumes the form of Jesus. Then Los-Jesus, by his example, teaches Albion what he in turn must do. The apocalyptic reawakening of Albion to his eternal life for which Blake has been striving throughout this poem, his work, and his life is achieved, apparently, by a return to the fundamental Christian imperative, the necessity for self-sacrifice, epitomized in Jesus' surrender of his own life that all men might live eternally.

Los becomes Jesus precisely when he embodies the state of vision which for Blake is the essence of the Savior: Jesus is the joining of human and divine which occurs through the complete sacrifice of self. So Los-Jesus makes his definitive statement:

                                                   Wouldest thou love one who never died
For thee or ever die for one who had not died for thee
And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself
Eternally for Man Man could not exist!

(96:23-26, E253/K743)

There is no way beyond this perfect reciprocity to establish the identity of God and Man necessary for Blake's vision of Eden. Jesus's doctrine of self-sacrifice at this point in the poem appears to represent the Crucifixion; Albion views it as a casting of the self into the horrors of Eternal Death. But here again, perspective is crucial. What the fallen Albion regards as a kind of descent into Hell is, from an unfallen perspective, a rising into Eden. The Crucifixion is in fact identified with the Resurrection, for the moment of Albion's throwing himself into the Furnaces of Affliction is the moment at which “All was a Vision, all a Dream: the Furnaces became / Fountains of Living Waters flowing from the Humanity Divine” (96:36-37, E253/K744). The sacrifice of self on the cross becomes literally the act which redeems the fall and precipitates the victim into Eternity. Thus Blake disposes of the anomaly of a God who would demand the sacrifice of his only son and transforms the meaning of Christ's gesture by enclosing it in a mental drama. This moment is also identified with the moment of the full imaginative realization of Los-Jesus's own sacrifice of self for his brother Albion. Albion reflects, “& Self was lost in the contemplation of faith / And wonder at the Divine Mercy & at Los's sublime honour.” Thus we return to the crucial role in Jerusalem of the artist's struggle with his selfhood in the production of his art, as well as the transcendent significance of the work of art when it reveals adequately the Divine Vision, and when the spectator is actively engaged.¹⁷

The final plates of the poem, in which the Druid Spectre Satan is finally annihilated by the arrows of intellect from the bows of the risen Zoas, show Man returning to a strife of intellectual contraries in Eden. In this state, word and vision are one:

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. …

(98:28-32, E255/K746)

It is towards just this state that Jerusalem has been moving, for this is what Blake sought to accomplish in the poem itself: to join vision to word, so that in understanding what was meant by the language which shapes his life, man would return to a more human existence, one which recognizes fully the power of his words and his intellect. The complexities of Jerusalem finally reduce to the allegorical rendering of a vision of self-sacrifice, intended to reveal the nature of the selfhood in man and so to make the prophetic word actuality, for “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd” (MHH 10:69, E37/K152).

Notes

1. 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).

2. See W. J. T. Mitchell's discussion of Blake's allegorical techniques in “Poetic and Pictorial Imagination in Blake's The Book of Urizen,” ECS [Eighteenth-Century Studies], 3 (Fall 1969), 90-91.

3. David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954; rpt. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 253 n. 25, suggests that among other associations, Los's name is a pun on “loss” and that the name itself suggests man's need for a continuous loss of self. E. J. Rose, “Blake's Hand: Symbol and Design in Jerusalem,” TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language], 6 (1964), 47-58, describes the role of Hand as an opponent of Los in Jerusalem and implies without making them explicit connections between Hand and both Los's Spectre and the more general idea of selfhood in the poem. His discussion of hand imagery in the poem emphasizes the importance of Los's fight against various forms of selfhood.

4. See E. J. Rose, “Blake's Fourfold Art,” PQ [Philological Quarterly], 49 (1970), 400-23, for a discussion of Blake's four kinds of vision and the patterns of symbols appropriate to them.

5. See, for example, The Four Zoas iii, 40:2-8, E320/K293:

   Then Man ascended mourning into the splendours of his palace
   Above him rose a Shadow from his wearied intellect
   Of living gold, pure, perfect, holy; in white linen pure he hover'd
   A sweet entrancing self delusion, a watry vision of Man
   Soft exulting in existence all the Man absorbing
   Man fell upon his face prostrate before the watry shadow
   Saying O Lord. …

6. Urthona is the name of the imaginative faculty in its unfallen state. After the fall, Urthona is divided into Los, the poet-prophet contaminated by the fallen world in which he labors; his emanation Enitharmon, once the realized form of imaginative desires but now a separate, tantalizing female form; and the Spectre of Urthona, a creativity so debased by an anxious fear of the future that it often resembles despair, the black humanoid bat of plate 6.

7. Letter to Thomas Butts, 11 Sept. 1801, in The Letters of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), p. 51.

8. 23 October 1804, Letters, pp. 106-107.

9. For a discussion of probable dates of Jerusalem, see the Erdman edition, pp. 730-31 and Erdman, “Suppressed and Altered Passages in Blake's Jerusalem,” Studies in Bibliography, 17 (1964), 8 and 28.

10. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1965), pp. 356-57.

11. E. J. Rose, “Blake's Human Insect: Symbol, Theory, and Design,” TSLL, 10 (1968), 215-32, discusses the ways in which specific images develop and reinforce the idea of a transformation in the poem.

12. All but three of the Sons of Albion are named for men associated with Blake's trial for alleged sedition at Felpham.

13. See Erdman, Prophet, pp. 403-11.

14. See the discussion of wheel imagery in Frye, Fearful Symmetry, pp. 380-82, and Rose, “Wheels within Wheels in Blake's Jerusalem,” Studies in Romanticism, 11 (1972), 37-46.

15. Recently Joanne Witke, “Jerusalem: A Synoptic Poem,” Comparative Literature, 32 (1970), 265-78, has argued that the four-part structure of Blake's poem is analogous to that of the gospels, as they were viewed in his time. Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (1963; rpt. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 403-405, sees the poem as founded on a series of gradually sharpening antitheses that recall the pattern of the major prophetic books of the Bible. The importance of antithetical elements in Jerusalem's structure is stressed by Henry Lesnick, “Narrative Structure and the Antithetical Vision of Jerusalem,” in Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic, eds. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 391. Linear structural patterns are proposed by Karl Kiralis, “The Theme and Structure of Blake's Jerusalem,” ELH, 23 (1956), 127-43, who sees the poem organized according to a structure of growth, with divisions corresponding to the three ages of man, “Childhood, Manhood & Old Age”; and by Edward J. Rose, “The Structure of Blake's Jerusalem,” Bucknell Review, 11 (1963), 35-54, who argues conversely that the movement of the four parts is backwards through time and that each part is governed by a different Zoa. In a later essay, “Blake's Milton: The Poet as Poem,” Blake Studies, 1 (1968), 16-38, however, Rose asserts that linear analysis of Blake's poems is “doomed to failure.” All of these discussions, with the exception of Witke's and Rose's retraction, detect consistent patterns of development through time in Jerusalem and document their patterns, though interestingly enough, the patterns sometimes contradict. Several essays in Blake's Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), which became available only after this essay was substantially complete, exercise significantly new approaches to the structure of the poem. Through an analysis of many structural patterns in Jerusalem rather than a concentration on one, Stuart Curran arrives at a view of the poem which, like mine, finds the allegorized experience of Christ at the poem's center, while Roger Easson, “Blake and His Reader in Jerusalem,” explores the experience of the audience working through the poem and so sustains a sense of the poem's dynamic form.

16. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Blake's Composite Art,” in Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic, p. 70.

17. Blake remarks in A Vision of the Last Judgment:

    If the Spectator could Enter into these Images in his Imagination approaching them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought … then would he arise from his Grave then would he meet the Lord in the Air. …

    (E550/K611)