Almost everything you know about the hymn “Jerusalem” is wrong

For more than a century, the hymn “Jerusalem” has been a staple of English national culture. Usually invoked as a sign of patriotic pride—at Last Night of the Proms or the 2012 Olympics—it also appears from time to time with a knowing wink to those more liberally minded, as in the recent rejuvenation of Alan Moore’s Hellblazer comics by Si Spurrier and Aaron Campbell. Returning to London from a long sojourn in the US, central character John Constantine encounters a naked Boris Johnson in an episode entitled “Green and Pleasant Land.”

The original poem—the source of various famous phrases such as “dark Satanic mills” and “arrows of desire”—was written by William Blake as part of his epic poem Milton, which includes the stanzas beginning “And did those feet in ancient time.” The reason why so many people have been willing to interpret the poem as a patriotic piece lies less with the religious and political dissenter Blake than with Charles Hubert Parry, the composer who set his words to music in the midst of the First World War.

Whether patriotic or ironic, a shared feature of all “Jerusalem” allusions tends to be a sense that everyone knows what it is about as an archetype of Englishness. The first readers of Blake’s poem, however, appeared to be completely confused as to its meaning. Alexander Gilchrist, the biographer who introduced Blake to a Victorian audience, printed the stanzas almost without comment. The enfant terrible of the aesthetes, Algernon Swinburne, observed that in reading Milton “we pass again under the shadow and into the land that shifts and slips under our feet.”

By contrast, we’re meant to understand “Jerusalem” today as part of our national heritage. Kate Maltby, writing for the Spectator in 2016, repeated a variant of the oft-repeated joke that “Blake asks four questions in succession, and the answer to each is a resounding no.” The first of these is whether Jesus Christ came to Britain with his relative, trading for copper and tin. The only problem is that the myth of Christ coming to Roman Britain, as the historian Paul Ashdown has shown, was only invented in 1895, long after Blake’s death. The poet wasn’t writing about Christ at all but rather Joseph of Arimathea, whose legendary visit to these isles was repeated by Milton in his History of Britain.

Maltby was on surer ground in asserting that “Jerusalem,” at least in Blake’s version, is not a patriotic hymn. Blake probably started composing the lines in 1802, when a friend of his new patron, William Hayley, praised his new hymn and hoped he would find a way to notate the music. Blake had moved from London—an increasingly dangerous place for radicals in the early 19th century—to the coastal village of Felpham in 1800, but his sojourn by the sea ended in disaster when, three years later, a soldier by the name of John Scolfield entered the garden of his cottage. The two men became involved in a heated argument over politics in which, according to the soldier, Blake “damned the King & said the Soldiers were all Slaves,” a remark which led to his arrest and trial for sedition at Chichester the following year.

While Blake was acquitted, it was not an accident that the one man who had cursed “One King, one God, one Law” in his writings should have been the very person to be tried by George III’s judges in 1804. Blake railed against “hirelings” in the court, camp and university who would “for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.” That his words would one day be sung at royal jubilees and weddings would have astonished him.

Blake’s “Jerusalem” was not intended to be one favourable to the establishment. Misunderstandings of the poem have been rife: “dark Satanic mills” is most commonly interpreted as a reference to the industrial revolution but is actually part of Blake’s personal mythology in which Satan is described as a miller who grinds down human souls.

Parry, the composer who made Blake’s words famous, was described by his friend Henry Colles as “a liberal-minded Conservative,” and was effectively commissioned to compose what would become known as “Jerusalem” by the poet laureate Robert Bridges and his former student, Henry Walford Davies (later Master of the King’s Music and musical adviser to the BBC). The occasion for the hymn’s first performance was a meeting of the organisation Fight for Right on 28th March, 1916 at Queen’s Hall in London. Established by the imperial adventurer, Francis Younghusband, the aim of Fight for Right was to reinvigorate the spiritual morale of the nation during the long night of the First World War. It was this context that led to “Jerusalem” being seen as a nationalistic—even potentially xenophobic—hymn.

The only problem for Parry was that a great deal of his musical influences were German, such as Mendelssohn and Schuman, and he quickly became disillusioned with the jingoism of Fight for Right: within three months of composing “Jerusalem,” he had withdrawn his support for the organisation and instead gave the copyright to Millicent Fawcett, a leading light in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Parry told Fawcett that he hoped it would become “the women voters’ hymn.”

According to his first biographer, Charles Graves, shortly before his death in 1918 the composer let rip at hosts at a party who were insulting the Germans—a common enough activity at the time. As with Blake, the “Jerusalem” that Parry sought to build in England’s green and pleasant land was a very different one to that which is so confidently invoked by many of those who have sung it in the century since.