ABSTRACT
Blake wrote the Everlasting Gospel above the revised version of 'Was Jesus humble?', but a common style and theme, with recognizable development, link a dozen otherwise disconnected fragments, short and long. Most are in NB, squeezed into the few remaining spaces wherever B. could find room, but three are on a separate piece of 1818 notepaper, which appears to date the whole group. Randal Helms made an invaluable study of the development of the sequence through its many biblical allusions. The listing a to n used in the poem was devised by Erdman and is now generally accepted, superseding Keynes's earlier arrangement. B. takes the Christian traditions of 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild', and overturns them, showing that the deeds and words of Jesus display quite another kind of Saviour. Humility, chastity and gentleness emerge as virtues indeed virtues unrecognizable to traditional morality.
