Songs Archives - William Blake poet artist visionary radical

‘All Things Begin and End in Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore’

Finding Blake creator and filmmaker James Murray-White reviews two recent books on Blake’s poem ‘Jerusalem’, from Jason Whittaker and Edwin John Lerner, exploring Blake’s work and its adaptations as both story and as mental fight.

I’m [re]minded to start this review of two recent books on Blake’s Jerusalem after hearing further controversy on the radio this morning of the trustees of Blake’s cottage in Felpham — where William and Catherine lived between 1800-1803, and he wrote the words for the poem — appealing for further funds (£3 million, I believe) to save the structure from collapse. I have mixed feelings about this trend for writers’ houses to become shrines, unless they offer something really different and entirely in keeping with the visions and aspirations of the artist who lived and created there. The original ambitions of these trustees, at least on their website, were articulated very curiously and boldly, but as time has progressed, while their ownership of the cottage is secure this mirrors the bricks, mortar, beams and thatch becoming more precarious, and the whole project has become more mired in human shenanigans. And now this further appeal for cash.

But, I’ll return to that later.

Professor Jason Whittaker’s book, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the fight for Englishness, is a big, bold exploration that uses Blake’s work as a touchstone for a look at what constitutes Englishness today. I’m a big fan and friend of Jason’s — I admire his journey as a scholar through ‘popular’ culture and his brilliant articulation of how creativity holds the mirror up to us, for better and often for worse. His work in Blake studies, most notably the website Zoamorphosis has been truly inspiring. Particularly the groundbreaking, immediately post-lockdown online Blake symposium, Global Blake, which brought scholars from all over the world and so many disciplines together in virtual space to show how Blake’s work and the artist’s presence in the world has touched into and influenced so many corners, people, and places. And as I type I remember there are many presentations I want to return to and watch again on their archive. ‘Finding Blake’ was screened as part of the event, with a Q&A between Jason and me available somewhere there too.

The second book in this beautiful mix is Jerusalem: The story of a song by Edwin John Lerner. A tour guide and writer from Sussex, he wrote it during lockdown after having been invited into the cottage by the trustees. Lerner articulates his love of the myths of King Arthur and Glastonbury, and indeed the publisher, Chronos, is a historical non-fiction imprint.

So right from the off, I note we are dealing with both a ‘story’ (Lerner), and a ‘fight’ (Whittaker), and am intrigued where both may lead us. I love that two books on this deep subject arrive at roughly the same time — and hopefully, more to come.

Englishness — imagination and aspiration

Starting with Lerner’s Jerusalem, the author quickly flies through a useful potted history of Blake’s life and times, describing his journeying between London and Felpham and back — no more or less than other biographies but with a more specific look at the writing of the epic poem itself in Chapter 8, ‘Journeying to Jerusalem’. He then unleashes what is clearly his true passion; a deeper history of the place and mythological culture of Glastonbury, with all the legends and layered perspectives upon this wonderful Somerset town.

There is so much within this book, it’s clear he has much to share and bottomless energy to delve away into whatever takes his fancy. I learned so much about the composers Elgar and Parry — more than I feel I needed to. I found irksome the amount of space he devotes to the film Calendar Girls: it randomly crops up as an aside in the introduction, then gets almost a whole chapter later. Again, the connection between the original ownership of the song by the Women’s Institute and how they have used it, and as a metaphor for women’s suffrage, in Lerner’s hands all this history becomes too dense.

Given that the Finding Blake project on our website here has been developed because of the finding of the location of Blake’s mortal remains, I was dismayed to read his aside about this tremendous piece of detective work by Luis and Carol Garrido as “rather morbid” (p.14). Finding the location of the remains and the history of how they came to be lost, has in my opinion, sparked a wave of new interest in Blake since 2018, and has been entirely positive in bringing his legacy higher in the mind’s eye of the cultured public. It has also brought interest in Catherine, his wife and muse, which I feel has catalysed the Blake Society to also get behind honouring her remains with a new grave, and promoting her as well.

That aside, Lerner is a gifted storyteller, with a passion to weave his knowledge together and bring us a layered backdrop to how the poem became a song, and how it has filtered through elements of society, class, culture — and all our peculiar British institutionalisation of ourselves — with all the ramifications of imagination and aspiration, and how we all may interpret differently.

What I feel he doesn’t do well is filter out some of the padding, or hone all this research down into a strong and cohesive narrative. Where he writes to excess on the history and outcomes of the three Olympic Games London has hosted, he loses this reader. When he is sleuthing around Elgar’s house, Brinkwells, in deepest wooded Sussex, or Parry’s Grade 1 listed 800-year-old pile, Shulbrede Priory, Lerner brings colour to his mapping, but I wonder if he’s just filling more pages for the sake of it.

“… the words of Jerusalem are easy to remember and it was not too much of a stretch to shoehorn them into an anthem sung to promote the cause of female suffrage. That is the great beauty of Jerusalem: it could be adopted by radicals and conservatives alike, both camps finding something in it to support their preferences. Radicals love Blake’s mystical worldview and his outsider status. Conservatives love the patriotism. Both sides enjoy belting out a good song.” (p. 77)

England cricket’s ‘Barmy Army’ performing ‘Jerusalem’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpScDWXEkFY

A second Bleakean clip on the radio this morning touches into this deep dive: ‘The Barmy Army’ are musical supporters of the English cricket team, cheering the team on and buoying up the crowd of supporters. As the Test Match is underway, Billy was invited on to national morning radio to play Jerusalem on trumpet — to inspire the rest of us to continue with “mental fight”?

I will not cease from mental fight

Mental fight: Showing the cover of Jason Wjittaker's book, 'Jerusalem'

Whittaker’s book, however, is much more details-focused and, with his academic eye and gift for exposition, is framed upon his argument that Blake and Parry’s versions of Jerusalem are both strange and at the same time familiar to those who invoke its vision. Whittaker is not shy from getting into the Brexit debate and seeking to untangle the poem/hymn from its use in that thorny arena, and its hijacking by a right-wing agenda for a nationalist view of what might constitute Englishness. Here’s a scholar willing to use his skills in a fight to rescue a cultural hijack.

Before he unpicks that, I really like chapter 5: ‘Bring me my bow: Empire’s End 1945-1976’, as he gets into the diversity of representations of the song across many mediums. He has done extensive listening to probably every recording and rendition, from folk versions (I looked for ages for British folk busker Don Partridge’s version but alas could not find it), to how it has been used in various films, theatre productions — including the magnificent ‘Jerusalem’ (2009) by Jez Butterworth, also reviewed by me on this site — books and every medium that exists. The level of detail he pours into this is extraordinary, and he makes his research a seamless river of creativity, with every nuance explored — from David Bowie and Mark E. Smith, to Morrissey’s caustic interventions.

He clearly differentiates between highbrow and pop culture, and uses of the words and themes, and dives into what resonates. I share this quote from singer Chris Wood, whose 2013 version I deeply love:

“It’s not the voice of many but a solitary voice. It’s the voice of a human reaching into himself to find a reason to carry on. The voice of a man shaken by the depth of indifference the world has for him and all that he believes in.” Chris Wood, None The Wiser.

There’s a willingness throughout the work that is not afraid to highlight the darkness inherent in Blake’s vision, which Parry’s hymn largely glossed over in its big-picture pitch for identity rooted in place. Whittaker knows it in Blake’s bigger work, and crucially he highlights where artists (of all genres) find it too and respond to it, as with Wood, and Marc Almond’s 2014 The Tyburn Tree (Dark London) (with John Harle). I’d like to highlight his elucidation of the inspiring writer Ben Okri’s 1999 poetry collection Mental Fight, which universalises Blake’s desire into a clarion call “to everyone, especially those who have been oppressed in any way, to engage in mental fight, to rise from a fallen state into redemption”.

Whittaker works hard to rebut the darkness of Blake-Parry’s hymn being adopted by the far right as well as the lumpen middle (in my view exemplified as much by the paradox of ‘New Labour’ as by the current Conservative government and the dying kicks of capitalism itself) and then dissects its tragic entwining around the paradigm of Brexit, and where the reality of this leaves us culturally with all our human friends in any other country around this world.

To zoom in upon the specifics, back to Felpham and the area around Blake’s cottage and the origin of the work, I find it tragic to read that:

“The Arun District, of which Felpham is a part, voted by nearly two-thirds to leave the EU in 2016, one of many towns and regions dissatisfied with modern life, part of which dissatisfaction was the desire to ‘take back control’ of a modern world which seemed to have changed beyond all recognition.” (p. 194)

Awake! Awake! Awake!

I lived in the city of Jerusalem for five years, and while my time there felt very vibrant and energising, the divisions within the city — nationalities, contested spaces, polarities between right and left, religious and secular, notions of ‘holy’ and ‘unholy’ — and (for me) the impact of all this upon the land and all the natural resources, made me examine this intense focus upon this place, and the value of that.

Whittaker refers to the “multiple battle lines” of the fight for the meaning of Englishness. Blake wasn’t wanting to replicate a place but something inherent in its spiritual underpinning, and this now to me feels an issue that Parry’s version ignores, or that much of the recent appropriations fail to see. The aim and ethos were never about a physicality, but about our shared humanness and the values we have as a species. And whether we have enough integrity and connection to the divine to ascend those steps or staircase into Blake’s vision of the eternal. It’s crucial to stress the brilliance in Blake’s work at pointing us to an interiority that needs to be found — the mental fight, and wielding the sword within, and without. Awake! Awake! Awake!

Concluding, I think again of the cottage in Felpham where Blake birthed this epic.

While Jerusalem is entwined with our cultural psyche, as explored through these two works, what of the bricks and mortar, with its mixed history and its place in the present, and all the future dreaming that creatives, directors, architects and historians can do? Is it simply about the money, or the will? Does three million quid to save, restore and revamp feel justified right now? I don’t need to write of the straitened times of this age, as we’re all in it and swamped or touched in some way. Britain right now feels divided, and the national psyche ruptured. Awake! Awake! Awake!

Beneath the 1804 poem, Blake inscribed a Biblical quotation:

“Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets” (Numbers XI. Ch 29.)

Mental Fight: Showing William Blake's preface to Milton, with the poem 'Jerualsam' — By page of Blake’s book Milton, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15925662

Notes

Jason Whittaker’s Blake, Parry, and the fight for Englishness is published by Oxford University Press (UK, 2022).

Edwin John Lerner’s Jerusalem: the story of a song is published by Chronos Books (UK, 2022).

Zoamorphosis – The William Blake Blog is devoted to the afterlife and reception of Blake’s art and poetry, looking at how generations of writers, artists, musicians and other cultural figures have adapted his ideas. And the associated Global Blake is an international network of scholars working on William Blake and all aspects of his poetry and art.

You can find Jason Whittaker’s Global Blake interview with James Murray-White here on YouTube, and James’s review On Jez Butterworth’s ‘Jerusalem’ & Our Fallacy of Albion here on Finding Blake.

Chris Wood’s adaptation of Jerualsam is on his album None The Wiser (RUF Records, UK 2013) and you can see a live performance here on YouTube.

Reflections on A Poison Tree

Poet Clare Crossman was one of our first contributing authors at Finding Blake, and we welcome Clare back with her reflections on A Poison Tree, a key poem in William Blake’s work, published in Songs of Experience in 1794.

I re-read A Poison Tree again recently because I run the south Cambridgeshire Poetry society, Stanza, and was looking for poems about Truth, which is the theme of this year’s national poetry day.

Adrian Mitchell, a great lover of Blake, was a necessary poet in the mix. The lyrics of his song The Truth were just what I needed and then there was Emily Dickinson, Don Patterson, WH Auden, and all the other poets on the National Poetry Day site.

I was reminded of A Poison Tree by one of the members during our discussion. The more we looked at poems the more it seemed that there was a very thin line between truth and lies, as we felt the truth can sometimes be unbearable. A Poison Tree was discussed because it was the one poem we all knew in which the effects of not saying how you feel or addressing anger can cause self-destructive anger and, as in the poem, death — or murder as some have suggested.

Directness and honesty is a tone that can be relied on in Blake. It is interesting to note that the original title of the poem was Christian Forbearance, an irony of course from Blake: a criticism of the buttoned-up and the easy Good. He disliked hypocrisy.

The poison of soft, deceitful wiles

Blake stares into the face of what anger does to us by setting his thoughts in a simple balance.

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not my wrath did grow.

There is difficulty in speaking to the enemy and so, full of resentment, he nurtures the Poison Tree inside him (I imagine capillaries through which a cancer is spreading):

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

Blake notes that how he responds to the enemy is to pretend to be pleasant: ‘soft deceitful wiles’. He smiles through his anger. As Shakespeare wrote, “A man may smile and smile and be a villain”.

Hand-painted copy B of William Blake’s “A Poison Tree”, 1794 currently held at the British Museum.

In the third verse there is an elegant reversal, the apple in the Garden of Eden becomes a glittering object as if it has been touched by King Midas, not a beautiful piece of fruit:

And it grew both day and night
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine
And he knew that it was mine.

This apple does not belong in the Garden of Love, it has been created by things left unspoken and has become a symbol of deception and anger (‘My precious, my precious’). This apple does not cause the fall of man by being picked and eaten; it causes death destruction and an eerie acknowledgement of the way evil can fascinate and entangle.

Then there is the last verse.

And into my garden stole,
When the night had veiled the pole:
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

I don’t agree with literal interpretations of the last verse. I think it is too deliberately ambiguous, and my feeling is that it means more that the evil has somehow spread and been recognised by both the foe and the speaker in the poem. In the dark ‘night had veiled the pole’ both people in the poem have become part of the destructive anger.

A destructive anger

I wonder what started this poem off? We have all had relationships that end in anger and silence, with both people involved feeling damaged. The singer-songwriter Beth Orton has written a wonderful melancholic setting for this poem which can be found on one of her finest albums, Sugaring Season.

But the poem I think is about real hatred and real dislike, where those involve dissemble and pretend to be opposite to who they are while harbouring a deep, destructive anger… The scenes in the last series of Peaky Blinders, showing Oswald Mosley at full throttle come to mind. In that instance, hatred of the other is masquerading as good sense and decency — which is in his case fascism.

Blake seems to be saying that however difficult we find it we must stand up to our real foes, and express our angers because if we don’t the consequences are terrible. Courage and forgiveness are also required, which can be found for a friend — but someone you really don’t like? That’s another matter. It is easier with a friend but maybe not impossible with a foe.

Good advice from 225 years ago. Oh, William Blake you were wise. You looked directly at hatred and what it does.

As Adrian Mitchell (a great admirer of Blake) wrote 150 years later:

The truth is the truth it’s a strange kind of animal, so I stay awake listening for the truth.

Notes

Adrian Mitchell’s The Truth is published in Come on Everybody – Poems 1953-2008, published by Bloodaxe Books. And you can read The Guardian’s obituary for Mitchell, “in whom the legacies of Blake and Brecht coalesce with the zip of Little Richard and the swing of Chuck Berry…” who wrote Tyger for the National Theatre in 1971, “a time-travelling musical about a visionary 18th-century poet in today’s fallen times, with music by long-term collaborator Mike Westbrook.”

You can hear Beth Orton’s song, Poison Tree, on YouTube – and of course Finding Blake guest contributors Astralingua and Mick and Kate Stannard have also shared their own adaptations of Blake’s poem with us.

Clare has previously shared her reflections on Blake’s poem London with us here Finding Blake. And you can find her own poems at Clare Crossman – Poet & Writer as well as on ClimateCultures and the website for her project with James Murray-White: Waterlight — A Journey Along the River Mel.

You can explore more of Blake’s poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, with summaries, analysis and images of the original illustrations, at The Tate’s pages.

New Songs for Mr Blake

Musician and songwriter Mick Stannard is 69 years old and has, in his words, “been doing music most of that time, in bands and solo”. Ever since an operation meant singing was no longer possible, he’s been recording instrumental albums, but when he recently came across his forgotten copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience Mick wanted to set some of these poems to music — and asked Kate, his daughter, if she’d like to sing them. Their album, Visions of William Blake, was released earlier this year, and Mick and Kate Stannard now share their experience of working with Mr Blake.

Mick:

I think William Blake has been in my DNA for quite a long time. It feels as if Jerusalem has always been there. And of course it’s the same with The Tyger. Mind you, I’m only a beginner and don’t really know much about his ideas. My first musical influences were Vaughan Williams and traditional English folk; people like Shirley Collins and Sandy Denny. Finding out that artists like The Doors and Nick Drake were quoting him in their songs is probably what drew me to him. To be honest I never knew he was that big in ‘popular culture’.

I go mainly by instinct and to be honest I’ve taken a few liberties with the text of his poems (adding some words of my own and taking some of his out) so I’m not sure if a purist would necessarily approve!

Encounters with Blake

As far as Blake himself is concerned, I’m no expert or indeed scholar. Some years ago I went to an exhibition of his watercolours and it was like a kind of worship. The place was dark and each work shone out from its case like a little jewel. The detail in his paintings fascinated me. It was fantastic. That’s where I picked up Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This in turn (about thirty years later!) led me to the idea of setting these poems to music.

I guess it was pure chance. Kate and I had just finished an album, Welcome to Our World, and I was thinking about what to do next. I was looking in our bookcase for something (I can’t remember what it was) and just happened to come across the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Bingo! The more I delved into it, certain poems leapt out at me from the pages and I could hear the music straight away. With Visions of William Blake, it all seemed to make perfect sense.

Visions of William Blake, by Mick and Kate Stannard

To take one example, I was amazed at how prescient the words to Holy Thursday are, speaking of poor folk living “in a rich and fruitful land”. I almost re-named our track Holy Food Bank Thursday. It seems that nothing much had changed since Blake’s day! Also I found the words to Earth’s Answer particularly powerful and The Lamb appealed to my sense of pastoral England. That’s where I tried to write music in the style of my hero, Vaughan Williams. Lots of strings, a harp and an oboe. Always an oboe for bucolic stuff!

A creative process

I don’t normally talk much about the creative process but I’ll have a bash. I’m basically a songwriter (of sorts) and love the challenge of writing lyrics and fitting them to music. Obviously with the ‘lyrics’ already taken care of by Mr Blake the process was a bit easier but no less of a challenge. I wasn’t aware which of his poems are well known and which others less so, and I think I chose the ones to have a go at by some kind of instinct — and of course those which appealed to me emotionally. They also had to scan pretty well and have a rhythm I could work with.

I’ve been listening to music for a long time and my influences are very diverse, stretching from traditional English folk to 60’s psychedelia, punk, new wave, classical, thrash metal and avant garde. So I guess my selection was in part dictated by my broad musical taste, which allowed me to devise a particular setting for each poem. Earth’s Answer for instance is very much influenced by Pink Floyd, whilst The Echoing Green is (hopefully) pure Vaughan Williams and strange to say, some of the music in The Door of Death now reminds me (in retrospect) of the last scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey … Where the hell did THAT come from?

Messing around with the texts may seem a bit sacrilegious but it was the only way I could make the finished songs work to my satisfaction. It was simply a case of composing the music and making the words fit even if I had to add or subtract some. I hope William wouldn’t have minded! The Garden of Love wasn’t long enough so I added quite a lot of extra lines, and in The Lamb I took Blake’s lead when he says in Auguries of Innocence “the lamb misused breeds public strife and yet forgives the butcher’s knife”, and wrote an additional verse with that in mind.

In Holy Thursday I saw a direct parallel between the times Blake talks about and today’s austerity Britain so I wrote a final verse about homelessness. I couldn’t possibly have done a different melody for Jerusalem as it already has the best ever tune so I just put in a bit of Brexit chaos at the end to reflect what’s currently happening in our green and pleasant land!

So, many reasons for changing the texts, I guess, and I think it occurred to me as I was going through the poems, kind of spontaneously. The process of making words and music fit is indeed pretty mysterious. That’s why when you hit on something special, it’s really exciting. I’ve no idea where it comes from. A higher place?

Kate:

Dad has always been interested in poetry, so I’ve been aware of William Blake among others for some time. Dad even used to write silly poems for me when I was young to make me laugh, and has always been creative. However I wasn’t very familiar with William Blake’s poetry before we started the album, and I didn’t know about his artwork either! But it’s been a really interesting project to work on together, and fun exploring both the light-hearted and the more sinister.

The poems and songs are all so different. I feel like I take on a different persona for each song on Visions of William Blake, and in a way sing as a different person. I think of them in a very separate way.

Usually we sit down and Dad gives me the poem to read through. I try to visualise and interpret the words quietly on my own, and then Dad plays me the music he’s recorded so far in headphones. Whilst the music is playing, I carry on visualising scenes or images and think about the words and then we go from there. We talk about what kind of tone of voice will work. For example, on Earth’s Answer the inspiration for my reading of the words was Gandalf from Lord of the Rings!

For me, with A Poison Tree it’s the storytelling of the poem. The scene I picture by the end of the poem is both chilling and beautiful, and it’s interesting (to me anyway) how peaceful it is, despite the hatred.

Visions of William Blake for the 21st century

I’ve been surprised at how many people my age and younger know of Blake, and have relatives who have studied his work or have a real interest.

I found it very interesting on first looking at Finding Blake to discover that the website and its users want to ‘re-imagine William Blake for the 21st century’. This very much articulated to me what I felt like we had also been doing with the album, whilst unaware at first of the Finding Blake site. By putting Blake’s words to music in 2019, and particularly for myself as someone who didn’t know very much about him before, I felt like I was in a sense ‘finding’ Blake.

To me, some of his poems are still very relevant now in 2019. For instance, like Dad has mentioned, the ideas behind Holy Thursday are still an issue now and it very much feels like nothing has changed in all these years. That poem could have been written in the 21st century.

Mick:

Blake seems to have had a larger influence on people’s general way of thinking than I had ever imagined. I think this new Extinction Rebellion movement which is currently growing is something that Blake would have enthusiastically espoused. Also, areas of mysticism and spirituality, something I had never considered.

Notes

Mick Stannard and his daughter Kate have been recording music together for about a year. Mick has been playing for longer than he cares to remember and has many influences ranging from The Velvet Underground to Vaughan Williams. He has recorded ten solo albums and three with Kate, Visions of William Blake being one. Kate has a degree in photography and is currently working for a cancer charity in London. She also designed the cover art for all the albums.

Visions of William Blake by Mick and Kate Stannard features twelve of William Blake’s poems: The Garden of Love; A Poison Tree; Auguries of Innocence; The Tiger; The Echoing Green; The Sick Rose; The Lamb; Earth’s Answer; Holy Thursday; The Door of Death; The Angel; Jerusalem. It’s available on Spotify, where you can also find their previous albums, and also available at Amazon as a download. You can buy the CD of Visions of William Blake direct from Mick: email him at mstannm[at]ntlworld[dot]com for details.

You can also discover another version of A Poison Tree in A Pocketful of Riches: Adapting Blake to Song, Joseph Andrew Thompson’s post about Astralingua’s own adaptation of Blake’s poems. And Strange Mystery Flower from Roger Arias describes his own Blakean musical adaptation.