Bring Me My Spear; Oh Clouds Unfold!

This morning, for some peculiar reason, I awoke with the William Blake poem turned Christian hymn turned English sporting hooligans' anthem "Jerusalem" in my head. Having been forced to sing it almost weekly (if not more so) at my Christian boys school, each line, nay the timbre of every syllable, is firmly tattooed onto my brain. So with nothing better to do, and with my usual arrogant faux-intellectualism, I will attempt to destroy all common perceptions of this poem/hymn held by those who value it. I shall start with the Christians and move on to the nationalists.

First of all, I should stress that I don't hate Christianity; anyone who'd dare have a conversation with me would find that I have been fundamentally affected by Judeo-Christian values. However, I find many of the followers of Christianity to have some very strange interpretations of its teachings. Because of this is it gives me great delight to picture many an Anglican congregation bellowing out the hymn Jerusalem every Sunday morning. Unbeknownst to them, they are singing a poem that was intended to mock them.

And did those feet in ancient times
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 those dark satanic mills?

This is the first verse of Jerusalem. It basically asks the same question in various different poetic ways - Did Jesus ever come to England? The final line expands on this to ask whether Jesus set up any sort of spiritual centre, or Mecca, if you will, in England?
There is one extremely glaring and highly amusing aspect to this, but I'll save it for the nationalists. The Anglicans have enough to deal with.
The answer to both the questions posed by Blake is fairly obviously no. There's no record of Jesus going anywhere near the British Isles. Blake asks the questions as a way of questioning the spiritual authority of the newly formed Church of England. The Church of England was formed solely so Henry VIII could get a divorce. Modern-day Anglicans will profess their forefathers had Lutheran sympathies, but we all know this is bollocks.

The second verse reads like so:

Bring me my bow of burning gold;
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear; oh 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 and pleasant land.

This is obviously a satirical expression of religious zealotry and its propensity towards violence, bringing it back home in the final lines "Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, til we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land". An attack on those who would expound a hysterical allegiance to a Church formed on such flimsy grounds.

If one was to try and view the poem through the eyes of those who use it for its hymnal value, one could interpret the poem as advocating the idea of Jesus singling out the English as a "chosen people". Surely this goes against one of the reasons for Jesus’ existence? The idea that God was for everyone.

The more you think about this poem the more odd it becomes that it was adopted as a Christian hymn. Blake wrote the poem in 1804. The musical accompaniment was written in 1916 by Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. I find it extraordinary that in the last 90 years someone within the Anglican Church hasn't questioned whether they should be singing this "hymn".

What is also extraordinary is the adoption of Jerusalem by English football hooligans, rugby knuckleheads and most recently The Barmy Army. Aside from the fact that most of the people in the above groups would be about as Christian as your local Rabbi, the glaring aspect to the poem that seems to escape everyone's attention is that around the time Jesus lived there was no such place as England. It was still 3 to 4 hundred years before Anglo-Saxons would conquer the land and another thousand after that before they gained any significant control. Jesus didn't go to England and tell the English they were special, because "the English" were still beating each other with clubs in Friesland and the Saxony lowlands. But jingoism has never concerned itself with facts, has it?

Conservative MP, Daniel Kawczynski, with his Polish surname, has recently called for Jerusalem to become England's National Anthem. Nothing seems to do satire better than reality.