31

Jerusalem

music by Hubert Parry

words by William Blake

‘HE CEASED TO SPEAK, and put his finger on the note D in the second stanza where the words “O clouds unfold” break his rhythm. I do not think any word passed about it, yet he made it perfectly clear that this was the one note and one moment of the song which he treasured.’

These are the words of the conductor Walford Davies. He was recalling sitting with his old teacher Hubert Parry in the composer’s room at London’s Royal College of Music, looking over the score of ‘And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time’, the song we all now call ‘Jerusalem’. Davies was preparing to conduct its first performance. The moment is recounted in Jeremy Dibble’s biography of Parry. Today the words that Parry put to music are not only familiar but famous, yet their fame is down to composer rather than writer; prior to 1916, when the song was first sung, hardly anyone knew William Blake’s words.

The poem was first published in 1808 as part of the preface to Blake’s Milton, a long work in two sections, part literary criticism, part state-of-the-nation, part autobiography. And there the words remained until they were anthologised by Robert Bridges during World War I. Bridges, who was Britain’s poet laureate, called his anthology The Spirit of Man and hoped it would lift national morale, which in 1916 was flagging as news continued to arrive of the carnage on the Western Front. It was Bridges, too, who saw the potential in Blake’s words for a musical setting – a unison song in which everyone could join – and he asked Parry to tackle the job in time for a Fight for Right rally in London’s Queen’s Hall.

The song, for soprano soloist, chorus and organ, was a success, as you might expect, but even at the time Parry seems to have had doubts about the long-term ambitions of Fight for Right. Winning the war: yes, of course, but what did such violent patriotism presage for peacetime? Parry was considering refusing Fight for Right further performances, when the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies approached him for permission to perform the song at a concert in 1918. The composer cheerfully agreed to the request. He orchestrated the organ part for the occasion, granted further permission for the song to become the Women Voters’ hymn, and assigned them the copyright. After the vote was granted and the organisation disbanded, copyright was transferred to the Women’s Institute, whose members still sing the song each year at their national conference.

‘Jerusalem’ has been sung at British Conservative Party conferences and alongside ‘The Red Flag’ at Labour Party conferences. It is the official song of the English Rugby League and, more recently, has been adopted by English cricket supporters. Each year on the final night of London’s Promenade Concerts, it contributes to the traditional mixture of creepy jingoism and studied silliness in the Royal Albert Hall. It is, in other words, a song for all seasons.

But is it a hymn? It is certainly in the hymnbook, but the song’s religious message is debatable.

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

According to legend, Jesus visited England in his youth with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea. Obviously, there is no evidence for this, so the only sensible answer to the questions posed in the first verse is a resounding no.

Its credentials as a Tory anthem are equally dubious. In Blake’s poem, England, for all its ‘mountains green’ and ‘pleasant pastures’, doesn’t seem to amount to much, what with those ‘clouded hills’ and ‘dark Satanic Mills’. True, Bridges altered Blake’s ‘these’ to ‘those’, putting the ‘Satanic Mills’ in the past, but still this is not a poem in praise of the status quo and conservative values, and evidently the words of the second verse are about improvement. Certainly that’s how Clement Attlee saw them at the 1945 British general election when his Labour Party promised to build a ‘new Jerusalem’, and won in a landslide over the war hero, Churchill.

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In England’s green & pleasant Land.

So it could be about the second coming of Christ – that much chimes with the concept of building ‘Jerusalem’ we read about in the Book of Revelation. But the rest of Blake’s imagery, though apocalyptic, is to do with self-help. A bow and arrows, a spear and a chariot, ‘Mental Fight’ and an unsleeping sword: this is the imagery not so much of revelation as revolution.

Parry wrote a superb tune for Blake’s words, one so grateful and inspiring to sing it almost encourages the singer to believe the words mean whatever they want them to mean. The unison melody flows beautifully, the end of line one (‘ancient time’) becoming the opening of line two (‘Walk upon Eng–’). Similarly, the third line resembles the first, except that now it leads us to minor chords and a sense of something like regret, perhaps that ‘the holy Lamb of God’ wasn’t seen on ‘England’s pleasant pastures’. The tune winds its way back to the major at the end of the phrase ‘shine forth upon’, and the high point of the melody is on the second syllable of ‘Jerusalem’, as it should be.

In the second verse, the tune magically suits the meaning of the words as well as in the first, especially with the broken rhythm at ‘O clouds unfold’, of which Parry was so proud. This time the return from minor to major coincides with ‘Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’, and the climax of the tune is no longer on the ‘ru’ of ‘Jerusalem’ but at the top of the phrase ‘Till we have built’. The emphasis seems clear enough. If we want ‘Jerusalem’ we must make it ourselves.