The Composition
Parry composed the setting of William Blake's poem in 1916, at the direct request of Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, who asked him to set the text for a patriotic campaign called 'Fight for Right,' which aimed to sustain public morale during the First World War. Parry was ambivalent about the patriotic use to which the setting was being put - he was an instinctively liberal man who found the jingoism of the war distasteful - and after the Fight for Right campaign ended, he gave the copyright to the suffragist movement leader Millicent Fawcett, who used it as the anthem of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies from 1917. Parry died in 1918, a week before the Armistice, having heard his setting used by both the political right (patriotism and empire) and the political left (women's suffrage and social reform) - a measure of the poem's ideological ambiguity.
The orchestration used in standard performances was by Elgar, who scored it for the Leeds Festival in 1922. Parry's original was for piano and voice; Elgar's arrangement for chorus, organ, and orchestra is the version that has become the English national anthem de facto, sung at the Last Night of the Proms, at cricket and rugby matches, at Conservative Party conferences, and at innumerable occasions requiring a statement of English national identity.
Blake's Text and Its Biblical Sources
William Blake wrote the poem - untitled; the title 'Jerusalem' was given later - as the preface to his prophetic poem 'Milton: A Poem' (c. 1804-1810). The poem poses a series of rhetorical questions about whether Jesus visited England ('And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green?') and then invokes a militant determination to 'build Jerusalem / In England's green and pleasant land.'
The tradition behind Blake's opening question - that Joseph of Arimathea brought the young Jesus to England, possibly to Glastonbury, during the years unaccounted for in the Gospels - is an apocryphal legend with no biblical basis, known in England since at least the fifteenth century. Blake does not assert the legend as fact but uses it as a mythological frame: the question is rhetorical, designed to establish the imagination of England as a place where the divine has been present and might be present again.
The poem's core vision - building Jerusalem in England - draws on Revelation 21:2: 'I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.' Blake's 'Jerusalem' is this New Jerusalem: not the historical city of Palestine but the eschatological city of the Book of Revelation, the perfect society of justice and love that will replace the fallen world. His call to 'build Jerusalem' is a call to social transformation - to create the conditions for the Kingdom of God - in contrast to the 'dark Satanic Mills' of industrial England.
'Dark Satanic Mills' is one of Blake's most debated images. The traditional interpretation is that it refers to the industrial mills of England's Industrial Revolution - the factories that were transforming the English landscape and exploiting the working poor. But Blake's Satanic mills may also refer to the mills of rationalist philosophy and institutional religion - the mental structures that grind down the human imagination and prevent the vision of Jerusalem. Isaiah 14:12's image of Lucifer's fall ('How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn!') lurks behind Blake's 'Satanic' epithet.
The poem's 'bow of burning gold' and 'arrows of desire' echo Ezekiel 1:27-28's vision of divine fire: 'I saw that from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire.' Blake uses the imagery of Ezekiel's theophany as a figure for prophetic inspiration - the artist-prophet armed with the weapons of the divine imagination.
Parry and Blake
C. Hubert H. Parry (1848-1918) was one of the most significant figures in late Victorian and Edwardian English music. Born into the landed gentry, educated at Eton and Oxford, he became professor of music at Oxford, director of the Royal College of Music, and the dominant figure in English musical life in the decade before Elgar's emergence. His choral works - including the anthems 'I Was Glad' and 'Blest Pair of Sirens' - shaped the English choral tradition that the next generation (Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams) would inherit and transform.
Parry was a man of progressive political sympathies: anti-imperialist, in favor of women's suffrage, skeptical of the jingoism that the war was producing. His decision to give the copyright of Jerusalem to the suffragist movement reflects his understanding of Blake's poem as primarily a social and political vision - a call for justice - rather than a patriotic anthem. The subsequent history of the song, which has become both the anthem of English nationalism and a hymn of socialist aspiration, suggests that the poem's ideological ambiguity is irreducible.
Musical Analysis
Parry's setting is in E-flat major, in 3/4 time, and follows the natural speech rhythm of Blake's verse with considerable skill. The opening stanza ('And did those feet') is set quietly and questioningly - the melody moving upward in the interrogative phrases but not resolving assertively. The second stanza ('And did the Countenance Divine') maintains this meditative quality. The final stanza ('I will not cease from mental fight') breaks out in a broad, rising melody of unmistakable determination, reaching its climax on 'till we have built Jerusalem.'
Elgar's orchestration adds brass for the climactic sections, giving the work the ceremonial weight appropriate to its role as a national anthem, while maintaining the choral character that Parry intended. The combination of Parry's broad melodic sweep with Elgar's orchestral expertise produced an arrangement that satisfies simultaneously as choral music and as civic ceremony.
Theological Content
The Jerusalem of Blake's poem is not primarily a religious but a social concept - the perfect society of justice and human flourishing - but it is grounded in the eschatological vision of Revelation 21. Blake's Romantic theology, which saw the imagination as the primary faculty of divine communion and social transformation as the primary calling of the prophet-artist, gives the poem its peculiar power: it is simultaneously a political manifesto, a religious vision, and a personal artistic credo.
Parry's setting domesticates Blake's radical vision somewhat - the march-like character of the final stanza suggests institutional determination rather than prophetic fire - but the music's genuine melodic strength has given it a durability that transcends any single political reading.
Performance History
From its first performance in 1916, the setting was taken up by movements across the political spectrum. After Elgar's orchestration in 1922, it became a fixture of the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, where it is sung each year as the penultimate item before 'Rule, Britannia!' and 'God Save the King.' It has also been adopted as the unofficial anthem of England in sporting competitions, of the Women's Institute, and of various political parties.
Legacy
'Jerusalem' is the most ideologically contested piece of sacred music in the English repertoire - a poem rooted in Revelation's vision of the New Jerusalem, set by a progressive Victorian composer, adopted as a patriotic anthem by the English right, a feminist anthem by the suffragists, and a socialist vision by the British left. Its survival and continuing vitality across all these competing uses testify to the power of Blake's eschatological imagination and Parry's melodic craft to generate meaning that exceeds any single political or theological reading.