And did those feet in ancient time 

This poem by William Blake (1757-1827) is the conclusion of the preface to his long poem Milton, one of his “prophetic” books.  It was printed in 1808, though begun before 1804 while Blake and his wife were living, briefly, in Sussex.  Blake did not think of the lines as a hymn for churches, but as the introduction to a prophetic book which would pose “mental fight,” as in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, as the means of bringing about a new and spiritual Jerusalem.  The rhetorical questions of the first two quatrains are linked to stories of the “Glastonbury thorn”  and relate to the legend, first written down at the beginning of the 13th century and translated into English in the 15th, that Joseph of Arimathea took a sacred chalice to England.  Some later versions say that Jesus as a teenager accompanied Joseph to England on a business trip.  Blake twice made illustrations of Joseph in “Albion.”  In these quatrains, however, Blake ponders the questions without offering answers, but the questions themselves contrast a pristine mythic era with his own time of “dark Satanic mills,” and not only physical, coal-burning mills, but also intellectual mills which suppress human imagination.  The poem’s focus on England was not meant to be understood in terms of nationalist parochialism.

 

Blake’s poem remained mostly unremarked until the end of the 19th century.  In 1893 Henry Charles Beeching, rector of Yattendon in Berkshire, published it in an anthology entitled A Paradise of English Poetry, in a section called “Patriotism.”  Beeching also included in that section the famous “this sceptered isle” speech by John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s Richard II (slightly altered).  A few years later Henry Walford Davies, then organist of the Temple Church in London, who had already set Blake’s “The Lamb” to music, set “And did those feet”, along with the John of Gaunt speech and a text by  Arthur Hugh Clough in his 1907 England’s Pleasant Land.  Robert Bridges, who had retired from medical practice in London because of ill health, became director of music in Beeching’s church in Yattendon in 1895.  Appointed Poet Laureate of England in 1913, he became much involved in the Fight for Right movement and published a collection of patriotic verse called The Spirit of Man, including Blake’s poem.  Bridges sent the poem to Hubert Parry (1848-1918), asking the composer to set the words to “suitable, simple music . . . that an audience could take up and join in.”  Parry, himself a Vice President of Fight for Right, wrote  the music, naming the tune “Jerusalem.” It was inaugurated in a meeting of the movement in the Queen’s Hall in March, 1916, conducted by Walford Davies.  Later Parry distanced himself somewhat from Fight for Right and signed the copyright for the hymn, with an orchestration, over to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society.  The name of Parry’s hymn has become frequently (mis)understood to be the title of Blake’s poem.   Edward Elgar’s 1922 orchestration of Parry’s score for the Leeds Music Festival of 1922 is the most widely known form of the music.  There is no documentary evidence for the bit of musical folklore that George V said he preferred “Jerusalem” [sic] to “God save the king.”