Mental fight, corporeal war and righteous dub: the struggle for 'Jerusalem', 1979-2009
Blake himself rejected the text, omitting it from later versions of Milton (Essick and Viscomi, Milton 39–40), yet although the original architect cast out the stanzas beginning ‘And did those feet’ from the Preface to Milton, they have since become the cornerstone of his subsequent reputation and, indeed, a cornerstone for the study of Blake’s reception. Whatever Blake may have intended by those cryptic quatrains, it was Hubert Parry, encouraged by Robert Bridges, who discovered a fiery desire within the words which their original author for some reason turned against. As adapted by Elgar for the Last Night of the Proms in 1916, so powerful was the imperial fire of ‘Jerusalem’ that George V reputedly wished immediately to institute it as the national anthem (Glancey 9). In the first decades of its incarnation, the Blake–Parry hymn became a powerful exposition of national desires and political aspirations of the left and right. Following the Second World War, however, and for a wide range of reasons, those very political aspirations appear to have become more frequently a subject of ridicule. In Monty Python’s 1969 Buying a Bed sketch, ‘Jerusalem’ is used to mock an old, class-bound order, while the overblown cover version by Emerson, Lake & Palmer on Brain Salad Surgery (1973) exemplifies prog rock kitsch. As Cold War consensus gave way to neo-conservative struggles for dominance over the failing Soviet Empire, however, so ‘Jerusalem’ was treated once again as an ideological tract that sometimes invoked the assumed intentional stance of its author(s), but which more often was simply manipulated to position different instances of the hymn within a mutable and highly contested series of interpretations.