[In the following essay, Helms considers Blake's use of the book of Ezekiel as a source for the narrative and themes in Jerusalem.]

The best way to begin a study of the relationship between Ezekiel and Jerusalem is with Harold Bloom's perception that the “continuity” of Blake's poem is “strikingly like the organization of the book of Ezekiel.”¹ I take up Professor Bloom's suggestion gratefully, but with a sense that there is more to that relationship than even he realizes.² Truculent visionary that he was, Blake most often used Ezekiel less as source than as sounding board. On the simplest level, Jerusalem depends for many of its poetic effects on the force of strikingly recast allusions to Ezekiel, while in a more complex way, it exercises the reader's memory of the overall form of Ezekiel, and by working startling changes upon it, creates a prophetic structure that is at once new and strangely traditional.³ A study of Blake's recastings of Ezekiel will quicken our grasp both of some central themes and of what there is of a narrative pattern in Jerusalem.

As is already well known, some of the key images in Jerusalem stem, in altered form, from Ezekiel. The wheel imagery is especially striking for what Blake does with his biblical model.⁴ For Ezekiel, the image of the “wheel within a wheel” (Ezek. 1:16) represents the order, symmetry and merciful mobility of the Merkabah, the divine chariot, or what Bloom calls the “form of God in motion.”⁵ But Blake reverses the image, finding in the “wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic / Moving by compulsion each other” (J. 15:18-19)⁶ the perfect symbol for all he despises in mechanized England. In a different way Blake alters the image of the “four living creatures” who form the chariot of the deity. They become the Four Zoas (by way of the Revelation, for John borrows Ezekiel's living creatures and calls them téssara zôa), but Blake makes a fascinating and crucial shift, for in Jerusalem it is not the four Zoas who are associated with wheels and act as a motive force, but the twelve sons of Albion. Blake divides the prophet's image of the living creatures and their wheels into two parts: the cherubim (living creatures), with their four faces each (Ezek. 1:6), become Blake's sons of Los, with their “four faces towards the Four Worlds of Humanity” (J. 12:57), who labor with their father to build Golgonooza, while the wheels of the divine chariot become the wheels of the deluded sons of Albion, who try to destroy Golgonooza, kidnap Jerusalem, and bear her into captivity.

Golgonooza is Blake's version of Ezekiel's envisioned new temple, which would, the prophet hoped, replace the old one destroyed by Babylon's army in 587 b.c. Both Blake's holy city and Ezekiel's temple are built four-square, with gates facing the primary directions (Ezek. 47:1; J. 12-13). But the differences are more important than the similarities. In the biblical temple the eastern gate is closed (Ezek. 44:1-2), whereas in Los's city “The Western Gate Fourfold is clos'd” (J. 13:6).⁷ Blake rewrites his model for two reasons, both necessitated by the geography of his myth. In Jerusalem, west is the direction toward Eden (another recasting, for in Genesis, God “planted a garden eastward in Eden”), and Blake's myth has it that the gate “toward Eden is walled up till time of renovation” (J. 12:52).⁸ As long as Albion remains fallen, Eden is forbidden to him and his Zoas and their Emanations. The other reason for Blake's reversal is that on the mythic map of Jerusalem, east is the direction toward Babylon from Golgonooza (as it is from the biblical Jerusalem), and it is toward Babylon that Jerusalem is irresistibly drawn, by the sons of Albion, away from the spiritual fourfold London, through its open eastern gate. The gate is decorated with symbols of all that is wrong with the men of England, the sons of Albion, whose wheels represent their inhuman, mechanized existence:

The Eastern Gate fourfold, terrible & deadly its ornaments,
Taking their forms from the Wheels of Albion's sons, as cogs
Are form'd in a wheel to fit the cogs of the adverse wheel.

(J. 13:12-14)

Through the eastern gate, by those wheels of compulsion, England's liberty is drawn toward the city of natural religion, “eastward to Babylon” (J. 82:36).

The Starry Wheels revolv'd heavily over the Furnaces,
Drawing Jerusalem in anguish of maternal love
Eastward.

(J. 5:46-48)

Again, we must look to Blake's recasting of Ezekiel for a grasp of his condemnation of the sons of Albion, who are his versions of Ezekiel's “children of Israel.” In Jerusalem, the sons and daughters of Albion are the same entities as the sons and daughters of Jerusalem, just as in Ezekiel the children of Israel and the sons and daughters of Jerusalem are equivalent (J. 5:65; Ezek. 21:1). Blake differentiates between them only by function and perspective. When Albion's children are doing Satan's work, as it were, they are called the sons and daughters of Albion; when they are the objects of pity and woe, they become Jerusalem's. The one set is physical, the other spiritual.

As the Soul is to the Body, so Jerusalem's Sons
Are to the Sons of Albion, and Jerusalem is Albion's Emanation.

(J. 71:4-5)

Albion's sons, like the children of Israel in Ezekiel's time, are under the dominion of Babylon; but whereas in Ezekiel the sons and daughters of Jerusalem were sent into exile because they joined with their “mother” in the sins that made them worthy of destruction, in Jerusalem the sons of Albion themselves are active in drawing their mother toward Babylon's dungeons. Indeed they have disowned their real mother, Jerusalem, and claim Babylon instead, in Blake's deeply ironic parody of Paul's words at Galatians 4:26: “Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.”

Babylon the City of Vala,, the Goddess Virgin Mother.
She is our Mother! Nature! Jerusalem is our Harlot-Sister.

(J. 18:29-30)

Ezekiel's condemnations of Jerusalem are just; the city had indeed committed many “whoredoms” against her God, with her idol-worship and her military alliances with heathen nations.

Is this of thy whoredoms a small matter, that thou hast slain my children, and delivered them to pass through the fire? … Thou hast also committed fornication with the Egyptians thy neighbours.

(Ezek. 16:20-21, 26)

In Jerusalem, however, it is the deluded sons of Albion who accuse their mother of harlotry. Because Jerusalem is “called Liberty among the Children of Albion” (J. 54:5), they blindly assume that must mean whoredom; liberty must mean libertinism. “Cast! cast ye Jerusalem forth!” they cry. “The Shadow of delusions! The Harlot daughter!” (J. 18:11-12). To them, Jerusalem's liberty means

                                                                                                                 the sinful delights
Of age and youth, and boy and girl, and animal and herb. …
Beneath the Oak & Palm, beneath the Vine and Fig-tree.

(J. 18:16-17,19)

Again, Blake's recasting of his biblical models is remarkable, and a grasp of his changes is essential to a clear reading of Jerusalem. Ezekiel's righteous condemnation of Jerusalem becomes in Blake an ironic condemnation of the accusers themselves. In Ezekiel, Jerusalem committed her whoredoms in hillside groves of oaks, called “high places,” where the Hebrews, in imitation of their Canaanite neighbors, raised phallic symbols and carried on sexual rituals. But in Blake, the sacred groves of sin become places of innocent pastoral pleasure, transformed into Micah the prophet's picture of the future time when his God will rule all the earth: “They shall sit every man under his vine and fig tree: and none shall make them afraid” (Mic. 4:4). The very words of accusation in the mouths of the sons of Albion become an ironic statement of Jerusalem's blessed freedom.

Like his sons, Albion himself is a remodelled version of Hebrew originals. In The Four Zoas, Blake's rejected attempt at what he succeeded with in Jerusalem, Albion's original, the Ancient Man, is modelled after the central figure in Isaiah, the personified Israel. Albion, eponym of spiritually moribund England, began in Isaiah's complaint against Israel that “the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it” (Isa. 1:6). The Ancient Man is in the same plight: “Sick'ning lies the Fallen Man, his head sick, his heart faint” (F.Z. 1:288). Blake chose, however, not to include this line from The Four Zoas in Jerusalem, and did not depend so heavily in the later poem on Isaiah for his major allusions, moving instead to Ezekiel. In this prophet Blake found the “house of Israel” personified as one giant entity, metaphorically possessing children (2:3), an adulterous city-wife (16:15), a heart (11:19), and composed of four parts, or corners (7:2), which were divisible by a sword (14:17).

Blake clearly was a close and perceptive reader of Ezekiel, and there really is no cause for wonder that the spirit of the most visionary of the Hebrew prophets should hover over Jerusalem, or that Blake should feel kinship with such a man or desire intellectual warfare with him. We ought to recall that he applied to himself the words of Ezekiel's inaugural vision, writing to Butts soon after his own visionary experiences described in Milton, that even if the world should ignore the poetry produced with “Divine Assistance” at Felpham, still “I have orders to set my face like a flint (Ezekiel iiiC, 9v) against their faces, & my forehead against their foreheads” (to Butts, 6 July 1803). In keeping with this conviction of inspiration parallel to Ezekiel's, Blake models the description in Milton of the aftermath of his visionary union with Los directly after the Hebrew prophet's account of what followed his own inaugural vision. Just as the Lord appears to Ezekiel “as the appearance of fire” and carries him “in the visions of God” to Jerusalem, so Los appears to Blake in a “fierce glowing fire” and carries him to Golgonooza (Ezek. 8:2, 3; M. 22:8, 26-27). And in both accounts, the visionary journey to the holy city culminates in predictions of approaching apocalypse. “Go ye after him through the city, and smite. … Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women” (Ezek. 8:5-6); “Six Thousand years are pass'd away, the end approaches fast” (M. 23:55). Just as the visions of Ezekiel preside, in altered form, over the visions of Blake in Milton, so the book of Ezekiel presides, in altered form, over the structure of the poem to which Milton is “preludium.”⁹

Ezekiel's Israel falls, passes through the death of Jerusalem's exile, and returns with the aid of the spirit of the Lord (at least in the prophet's vision) to rebuild the holy city's temple. Blake's Albion falls into the sleep of Ulro, passes through the Eternal Death of imaginative dissolution and separation from his Jerusalem, and finally, under the hammer-blows of the laboring Spirit of Prophecy, rejoins his Emanation so that England may, in Blake's vision, “Labour in Knowledge … to Build up Jerusalem.” This much of the parallel outlines of the two works is clear; from here, however, we must proceed to an account not of modelling but of Blake's intellectual warfare with Ezekiel.

As a prophetic structure, Ezekiel is typical, and in the words of J. Lindblom, “clearly arranged.”

First we have a series of prophecies concerning the judgement on Jerusalem and the people of Israel. Then follows a section containing oracles on pagan nations. A third section contains predictions of the expected restoration.¹⁰

One could hardly say that Jerusalem is clearly arranged (though Blake did attempt a somewhat artificial and arbitrary structure of four chapters with twenty-five plates each¹¹); yet despite the lack of an apparently defining pattern or a clearly progressing narrative, Blake's poem does possess its own prophetic structure (one already intuited in part by Bloom)—a structure that becomes clear when it is placed up against Ezekiel, the prophet whom Blake is both following and battling.

The first striking difference-in-similarity between the two works is in their respective first halves. Lindblom is right in finding in the first twenty-four chapters (one half) of Ezekiel a judgment both against Jerusalem, on the one hand, and the people of Israel, on the other. The first of Ezekiel's three sections has two separate perspectives, one on Israel personified as a sinful and doomed entity, the other on Jerusalem personified as an adulterous wife, a harlot-city whose sons and daughters will be exiled in Babylon. That is to say chapters three through fifteen concern Israel, father of the “children of Israel” (Ezek. 6:5), an entire land full of sin, for whose “trespass” God will make him “desolate” (Ezek. 15:8). Chapters sixteen to twenty-four are in turn directed to Jerusalem, who, like her “elder sister … Samaria,” has “committed adultery,” “played the whore with the Assyrians”; for which crime, God promises, “I will scatter thee among the heathen” so that the Babylonians “shall take thy sons and thy daughters” (Ezek. 16:46, 28; 22:15; 23:25). Blake follows, but with a difference. Just as the first twenty-four chapters (one half) of Ezekiel tell essentially the same “story” from two different perspectives, so does the first half (two chapters) of Jerusalem: the fall of Albion the personified England (he is more of course, but we stick to the eponymic aspect), and the separation of the “harlot” Jerusalem from his bosom and her exile in Babylon, or Vala. Then, having told essentially the same “story,” both Chapters One and Two end at the same point, with the same plea by the Daughters of Beulah.

And there was heard a great lamenting in Beulah; all the Regions
Of Beulah were moved as the tender Bowels are moved, & they said:
“Descend, O Lamb of God, & take away the imputation of Sin
By the Creation of States & the deliverance of Individuals Evermore. Amen.”

(J. 25:1-2, 12-13)

Expanding on wing, the Daughters of Beulah replied in sweet response:
“Come, O thou Lamb of God, and take away the remembrance of Sin.”

(J. 50:23-24)

In both cases the Daughters utter prayer just after Albion has spoken his last words, thus bringing the two accounts of the sickness and death of Albion to rest at the same point in time.

“Look not so merciful upon me, O thou Slain Lamb of God!
I die! I die in thy arms, tho' Hope is banish'd from me.”

(J. 24:59-60)

Therefore I write Albion's last words: “Hope is banish'd from me.”
These were his last words; and the merciful Saviour in his arms
Receiv'd him.

(J. 47:18; 48:1-2)

Yet once more, as so frequently in this poem, Blake evokes the reader's memory of Ezekiel only to startle him into shockingly new perceptions by working deft and instructive changes in the model. For whereas in Ezekiel the two halves of the first section both end by calling down deserved destruction upon sinful Israel and adulterous Jerusalem, the first two chapters of Blake's poem end with radically different perspectives upon the dooms of Albion and his Emanation. Ezekiel's accusations of whoredom are accurate, but Albion's Sons' outcries are not; indeed her “harlotry” of liberty is exactly what Blake desires of her.

Even though it appears in Chapter One that the Sons of Albion's drawing Jerusalem away to Babylon is a total defeat for Liberty, and that she will be enslaved forever in the “Dungeons of Babylon,” Chapter Two presents the matter from a totally different and much more hopeful perspective. In Two it is not only Albion's Sons that are responsible for Jerusalem's leaving Beulah and Albion's Bosom; rather it is “Maternal Love [that] awoke Jerusalem” from her repose on Albion's couch (J. 48:18). Blake's woman-city is a great change from Ezekiel's. Lying between them is Paul, who changed the image of the woman-city from adulterous wife to faithful and loving mother (Galatians 4:26). Erin explains Blake's reasons for the change. Jerusalem, she says, must leave Albion's bosom for her own sake. Her journey to Babylon will not be a total defeat but a saving purgation.

                                                                                                    The Place of Holy Sacrifice
Where Friends Die for each other, will become the Place
Of Murder & Unforgiving, Never-awakening Sacrifice of Enemies
The Children must be sacrific'd! (a horror never known
Till now in Beulah) unless a Refuge can be found
To hide them from the wrath of Albion's Law that freezes sore
Upon his Sons & Daughters, self-exiled from his bosom.
Draw ye Jerusalem away from Albion's Mountains
To give a Place for Redemption. …

(J. 48:55-63)

Ye know that if the Emanation remains in them
She will become an Eternal Death, an Avenger of Sin,
A Self-righteousness, the proud Virgin-Harlot! Mother of War!

(J. 50:14-16)

Blake's shifting of our perspective on Jerusalem's separation from Albion on the wheels of Albion's Sons, after this preparation in Erin's speech, is then miraculously accomplished by his presenting those wheels from a totally different point of view; their meaning suddenly appears in a much larger context, and we at last understand that Jerusalem must be purged from Albion that both may be redeemed.

So Erin spoke to the Daughters of Beulah. Shuddering
With their wings, they sat in the Furnace, in a night
Of stars, for all the Sons of Albion appear'd distant stars
Ascending and descending into Albion's sea of Death
And Erin's lovely Bow enclos'd the Wheels of Albion's Sons.

(J. 50:18-22)

God's rainbow of promise to Noah (Gen. 9:13) reappears as symbol of the ultimate divine plan behind Jerusalem's exile. The final two plates, therefore, of the second chapter, present a summation of the meaning of the first two, and a foreshadowing of the central theme of the third. We learn that Jerusalem was allowed to be taken captive, and that Albion's entering into Eternal Death was for a reason: sick Albion must be given a malleable state so that the evil possessing him may be destroyed.

                                                                            Iniquity must be imputed only
To the State they are enter'd into, that they may be deliver'd …
Because the Evil is Created into a State, that Men
May be deliver'd time after time, evermore. Amen. …
Therefore remove from Albion these terrible Surfaces
And let wild seas & Rocks close up Jerusalem. …
Albion is now possess'd by the War of Blood!

(J. 49:65-66, 70-71, 76-77; 50:8)

Here, at the end of Jerusalem's first section (Chapters One and Two) is Blake's announcement of the central theme of its second section (Chapter Three): war on earth, Albion's possession by the “War of Blood,” a theme that is wholly in keeping with its model, chapters twenty-five through thirty-two of Ezekiel. This second of Ezekiel's three main sections deals with the “day of the Lord” against the surrounding hereditary enemies of Israel. As S. R. Driver has said,

The fall of Jerusalem wore the appearance of a triumph for heathenism; Jehovah, so it seemed, had been unable in the end to defend His city: the nations around viewed Him with scorn, and His name was profaned amongst them. To reassert the majesty and honour of Jehovah by declaring emphatically that He held in reserve a like fate over Israel's neighbours is the main scope of the following chapters.

[25-32]¹²

In other words, the central theme of the second section is war on earth; just as Babylon has destroyed Jerusalem, so will she destroy Ammon (25:1-7), Moab (25:8-11), Edom (25:12-14), Philistia (25:15-17), Tyre (26:1-28), Sidon (28:20-26), and Egypt (chapters 29-32).

The second of Jerusalem's three main sections (Chapter Three) deals with Albion's “Eternal Death” as he lies enmeshed in the State “Rahab … an Eternal State” of war (J. 52), and with Jerusalem's imprisonment in the clutches of Vala (her exile in the Babylon of false religion that is, to Blake, the very cause of the “War of Blood”). Chapter Three tells, that is, what it means to be in the State Rahab, enslaved by Babylon. Rahab, the harlot of the Old Testament, is Blake's personal name for the state of mind he calls “Natural Religion” or “Deism,” the equivalent for him of what Revelation calls “Mystery” and the “Whore of Babylon” (see The Four Zoas, 8:597-620 for his capsule history of Rahab). Deism is the Babylon enslaving England's Liberty, the Rahab who imprisons Albion in a War of Blood; for to Blake the degrading moral effects of the self-imputed moral virtue of England's rationalists is the chief cause of war. He complains in the prose introduction to Chapter Three that Deists

charge the poor Monks & Religious with being the causes of War, while you acquit & flatter the Alexanders & Caesars, the Lewis's & Fredericks, who alone are its causes & its actors. … Those who Martyr others or who cause War are Deists.

Jerusalem is in the dungeons of Babylon and Albion is possessed by the War of Blood because the inevitable result of the control of a nation by Rahab is warfare. As the sons of Albion cry,

                                                            I am drunk with unsatiated love,
I must rush again to War, for the Virgin has frown'd & refus'd.

(J. 68:62-63)

Treating the same matter epigrammatically in “The Laocoön,” Blake declares that “Art Degraded, Imagination Denied, War Governed the Nations,” for “Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed.” The century of worldwide war between England and France that culminated at Waterloo was, for Blake, a perversion of the sexual energy that should have been expended in the delights of boy and girl beneath the vine and fig tree, the same delights the sons of Albion fear Jerusalem has enjoyed. The price of the repression they practice is the long war between Albion and his Spectre Luvah in Chapter Three; and “Luvah is France” (J. 66: 15).¹³

Chapter Three presents, however, not just the central theme of the “War of Blood,” but a counter-theme as well; for just as Two foreshadows the central theme of Three, Three does the same for Four. In the narrative it works in this manner: late in the second chapter, three of Albion's Zoas, “feeling the damps of death” just before Albion is to be “plowed in among the dead,”

                                                            with one accord delegated Los,
Conjuring him by the Highest that he should Watch over them
Till Jesus shall appear; & they gave their power to Los
Naming him the Spirit of Prophecy, calling him Elijah.

(J. 44:28-31)

It is only here, after becoming the Spirit of Prophecy and executor, as it were, of the creative imagination of the moribund Albion, that Los can begin building his city, the new Jerusalem called Golgonooza. This work begins in earnest after Plate 55, when Los has an experience directly based on Isaiah's inaugural vision. Paraphrasing the divine words to Isaiah, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us” (Isa. 6:8), the “Great Voice of Eternity” cries “who will go forth for us, & Who shall we send before our face?” (J. 55:69). The implied answer is, of course, that Los will do so; and the next lines declare that “Then Los heaved his thund'ring Bellows on the Valley of Middlesex, / And thus he chaunted his Song” (J. 56:1-2). Things happen quickly after this. Albion is “Plowed in among the Dead” (J. 57:14), the Spectre of Albion takes control of Albion's inner life (in excessively simplified translation, England becomes Deistic, rationalistic), and war rules Albion's land. But now Los is at work too, laboring furiously in Golgonooza, “the Spiritual Fourfold London,” against the depredations of the deluded Sons of Albion, defiantly and hopefully forming with the labors of art the

                                                                                Mundane Shell,
The Habitation of the Spectres of the Dead, & the Place
Of Redemption & of awaking again into Eternity.

(J. 59:7-9)

Los's labor in Chapter Three provides a place of opportunity (our world) for redemption, for the resuscitation of Liberty, foreshadowing thus the central theme and activity of Chapter Four, which is announced quite clearly in its prose introduction: “to Labour in Knowledge is to Build up Jerusalem.”

If this is the theme of Jerusalem's third section, how does it relate to the corresponding part of Ezekiel? Professor Bloom cautions that the “general parallel between Jerusalem and Ezekiel cannot be carried too far”; especially, he warns, is this true in the poem's fourth chapter. For even though the description of the new temple in Ezekiel's concluding section supplies images and descriptions for Golgonooza, they appear not in Chapter Four of Jerusalem, as we might expect, but in Chapter One.¹⁴ The answer to this apparent difficulty is that here, at this point in the fortunes of Albion/Israel, is the key point in Blake's intellectual warfare with his prophetic forbear, the point at which he must alter his model. For though as visionaries, Blake and Ezekiel were one, as moralists, they were worlds apart. Unlike most of Judah's prophets, Ezekiel was also a priest, and for him the foundation of the restored Jerusalem was to be scrupulous observance of ritual, taboo and sacrifice. The priests in Ezekiel's restored temple were to teach the people not the moral demands of the Law, as of old; rather, “they shall teach my people the difference between the holy and the profane” (Ezek. 44:23). The major ritual function of the priests was to be the sprinkling “of the blood of the sin offering … upon the posts of the house, and upon … the altar” (Ezek. 45:19). For Blake, however, nothing is profane; “every thing that lives is Holy”; and “Laws of Sacrifice for Sin,” he insisted, are “Withering the Human Form” (J. 49:24). So even though the final sections of both prophecies deal with the restoration of the Woman-City, Blake is unable to follow Ezekiel in the means of restoration, and its functions once restored. The third section of Ezekiel is a combination of physical blueprint for the rebuilding of the temple—its location, measurements, materials—and script for the nature of the restored worship—rituals and sacrifices. The third part of Jerusalem is a description of and call for the spiritual labors that will restore the Woman-City. Or, in other terms, while Ezekiel is concerned in its final section with clarifying the nature of the Judaism of the exiles who will return from Babylon (how they will worship in their rebuilt temple in a rebuilt Jerusalem), Blake is concerned in Chapter Four of Jerusalem with establishing and clarifying the nature of true Christianity, and with ‘building up’ the Jerusalem that “Babylon the great, hath destroyed” (J. 75:1).

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.

(J. 77)

And this “‘liberty,’” is, of course, the “Jerusalem of the poem.”¹⁵

The nature of Christianity is liberty, and this liberty, called in the poem “Jerusalem,” is now in ruins, both in England and all over the earth. It can be rebuilt, Blake claims, only by our beginning again to practice true Christianity, which requires that we “expel” from among us

those who pretend to despise the labours of Art & Science, which alone are the labours of the Gospel. Is not this plain & manifest to the thought? Can you think at all & not pronounce heartily That to Labour in Knowledge is to Build up Jerusalem, and to Despise Knowledge is to Despise Jerusalem & her Builders.

(J. 77)

Therefore, Blake requires, “Let every Christian, as much as in him lies, engage himself openly and publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem” (J. 77). For Blake, of course, Christian mental pursuits are the labors of the arts of the imagination; as he wrote in the inscriptions to “The Laocoön,” “A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect: the Man or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.” We practice Christianity by the sanctified labors of art:

Prayer is the Study of Art.
Praise is the Practice of Art.

Here then is the central theme of Chapter Four of Jerusalem—the incessant imaginative labors of Los by the side of the fallen Albion, labors continued ceaselessly until Albion arises again and Jerusalem is restored to him:

                                                            O Albion! my brother!
Corruptability appears on thy limbs, and never more
Can I arise and leave thy side, but labour here incessant
Till thy awaking.

(J. 82:84; 83:1-3)

And of course in the end, after long labor and appropriate divine intervention, Albion does awake, and Jerusalem is restored. The poem ends thus, appropriately, with an echo in its last line of the last verse of Ezekiel, who tells the name of his rebuilt city: “and the name of the city from that day shall be The Lord is there”:

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

Notes

1. Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), p. 404.

2. In order to distinguish my conclusions from Professor Bloom's, I must quote him at some length. Each of Jerusalem's chapters, he writes, “depends for its progression on a dialectical struggle of contraries. In Chapter I these are Albion and Los, with Albion incarnating the acceptance of chaos and destruction. The conflict of forces here is akin to that of the opening quarter of Ezekiel with Los-Blake in the role of Ezekiel and the English people or Albion in the role of the Jews or Israel. In Blake's second chapter Los works to create an image of salvation from the mere repetition of Albion's natural history. This is Blake's equivalent of Ezekiel's evolving prophecy of the state's destruction for lack of good works. In his third chapter Blake opposes ‘Deism,’ the end product of Albion's history, and the vision of a savior, the Blakean Jesus. The parallel is the next movement in Ezekiel, the prophetic denunciation of Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia, Tyre, Sidon and Egypt, which is the prototype for Blake's attack on Mystery and Nature. … Blake's fourth chapter opposes error and truth directly, out of which confrontation comes a prophecy of the Last Judgement; Ezekiel's closing chapters are visions of redemption, and of a City and a Temple worthy of that redemption” (Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968], pp. 843-44). In a more recent essay, Bloom has enlarged on his earlier view of the relationship between Ezekiel and Jerusalem, finding that Blake felt not only influence, but the “anxiety of influence.” “This baneful aspect of Poetic Influence produces the form of Jerusalem, which is the form of Ezekiel's prophecy twisted askew” (“Blake's Jerusalem: The Bard of Sensibility and the Form of Prophecy,” The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition [Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1971], p. 76; this essay first appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies). Unfortunately, he does not explain what he means by this statement.

3. Previous studies of the structure of Jerusalem are Karl Kiralis, “The Theme and Structure of William Blake's Jerusalem,” The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, ed. V. de Sola Pinto (London: V. Gollancz 1957), and E. J. Rose, “The Structure of Blake's Jerusalem,” Bucknell Review, 11 (1963), No. 3, 35-54. I agree with Professor Rose that Kiralis' view of the poem's structure, based on the themes of “Childhood, Manhood & Old Age,” is, as he says, “essentially incorrect.” Rose's own interpretation, that each chapter of the poem is devoted in turn to one of the Zoas (Tharmas, Luvah, Urizen and Los in that order), seems an adequate explanation of the role of three of the four, but it slights Los's overall functions, the very functions that determine the element of narrative in Jerusalem. Rose sees Los entering Eternal Death in Plate 1, and coming out to observe cosmic imaginative unity in Plate 100, and notes that Los's quest is the major theme of the poem, but says too little about everything in between—he sees that the poem has a beginning and an end, but slights the middle. The present paper supplements Rose's insights about the narrative element in Jerusalem.

4. This paper was complete before I saw Professor Rose's excellent and thorough study, “Wheels Within Wheels in Blake's Jerusalem,” SiR [Studies in Romanticism], ii (1972), 36-47, which gives far more information on the wheel imagery than I can here.

5. Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 66.

6. All references to Blake are from Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1966), and will be identified in the text.

7. The closing of the eastern gate of Jerusalem's temple was a matter of ritual. It was opened once a year at the New Year Festival when the king, as personification of the risen deity, entered the gate in joyous procession, coming from the direction of the rising sun. See the New Year Psalm 24: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.” See also A. R. Johnson, “Hebrew Conceptions of Kingship,” Myth, Ritual and Kingship, ed. S. H. Hooke (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1958), pp. 228-29. For a valuable and clearly illustrated discussion of Blake's Golgonooza, see S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (Providence, R. I.: Brown U. Press, 1965), pp. 162-65.

8. See the excellent discussion of directional symbolism in Jerusalem in Henry Lesnick, “The Function of Perspective in Blake's Jerusalem,” BNYPL [Bulletin of the New York Public Library], 73 (1969), 49-55.

9. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), p. 323. Blake was, of course, fascinated by Ezekiel's visionary and prophetic aspects long before he began Jerusalem. In Plates 12 and 13 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he pictures himself dining with Isaiah and Ezekiel, and learning from the latter that his symbolic actions (eating dung, and lying for long periods on his right and left side) were prompted by the “desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite.” Blake echoes this language in an early plate of Jerusalem: “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” (J. 5:17-19). Blake as painter also was fascinated by the figure of Ezekiel; he did paintings of the four Living Creatures appearing to Ezekiel, of the valley of dry bones vision, and of the death of Ezekiel's wife. On these works, see J. E. Grant, “Blake's Vision of Ezekiel,” Blake Studies (Spring, 1973, in press as of this writing). For more on Blake's relationship to Ezekiel, see my essay, “Blake at Felpham: A Study in the Psychology of Vision,” Literature and Psychology, 22 (1972), 57-66.

10. Johannes Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962), p. 263.

11. Here I agree with John Beer, Blake's Visionary Universe (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), p. 173.

12. An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (New York: World Publishing Co., 1956), p. 287.

13. The best study of this strand of historical allegory in Jerusalem is, of course, David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (New York: Doubleday, 1969). See especially pp. 462-487.

14. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 844.

15. Blake's Apocalypse, p. 462.