Blake's (and Parry's) Jerusalem

Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry

The performance of Blake's 'Jerusalem' at the memorial service for Gough Whitlam gave me a momentary pause, it being so strongly identified with England, and Whitlam being such a staunch 'Australianist.' After all, the Barmy Army of visiting cricket supporters sing it before the day's play during Ashes series. But then of course it was the campaign song for Clement Attlee's Labour Party in the famous 1945 landslide ousting Winston Churchill from No.10.  And, having had a not dissimilar educational upbringing from Gough - posh Protestant school - I too find the music invariably stirring; in fact, at the 30 year reunion a short service was held where this was the hymn sung heartily by a bunch of 'old boys' nearing 50.

But then I pondered the lyrics again ... lines such as

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem ...

Parry, who composed the marvellous music, was asked to set the poem to provide a song for the ultra-patriotic Fight for Right movement. Parry had misgivings but did not want to disappoint those who had asked him, and he was pleased - musically - with his resulting work. Yet his misgivings about the political agenda of the Fight for Right grew, and he publicly withdrew all support for the movement.

In this time when seemingly incomprehensible brutality and violence is once again erupting in parts of the world and in our news feeds, it is perhaps worthwhile to ask ourselves what it is that is so moving or inspiring in this hymn, this Call to Arms. Is not the line "Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand" terrifyingly brutal in the way it gives agency to the inanimate weapon. And how would we hear the lines quoted above if instead of the word 'Jerusalem' we substitute 'the Caliphate'?

An immediate sense of the general

Ever since I watched The Ascent of Man as a child, and read several of his books while I was (briefly) at university, Jacob Bronowski has been a significant —and, as is often the way, a sometimes unconscious — influence.

In a recent interview I did for Tincture Journal, I responded to a question about the relation between my work with designing computer systems and my poetry-writing by trying to talk about the similarities: "Seeing that two distinct things are in some respect the same is the vital insight of abstraction, which allows you to make metaphors, write reusable software components, devise mathematical theorems, and make scientific breakthroughs. “My love is like a red, red rose” is the same sort of equation as Newton’s realisation that the force that pulls a falling apple is the same force that guides the orbiting moon (that is, the discovery of gravity united the hitherto separate domains of terrestrial and celestial mechanics). Seeing that two distinct things are in some important way the same is the key ability of the human brain, and—in very basic terms—must be what allows us to learn from experience. As no two moments are alike in all details—as Heraclitus said, “No person ever steps in the same river twice”—we need that crucial power of abstraction to be able to see that the current situation is in some way the same as previous remembered experience. We need a fast, reliable memory, and dreams to train the pattern-matching neural networks, to support this essential metaphor-making ability. Mathematics and poetry are the highest expressions of that same basic evolutionarily-determined skill."

Browsing through old books, I realised that Bronowski had put the matter more succinctly, clearly, and deeply in 'The Nature of Art' from his book The Visionary Eye: "There is a common pattern to all knowledge: what we meet is always particular, yet what we learn is always general. In science we reason from particular instances to the general laws that we suppose to lie behind them, and though we do not know how we guess at these laws, we know very well how to test them. But in a poem the specific story and the detailed imagery that carries it create in us an immediate sense of the general. The experience is made large and significant precisely by the small and insignificant touches. Here the particular seems to become general of itself: the detail is its own universal."