ABSTRACT
OF THE DOZEN or so occasions when I have seen adult Brits cry in front of strangers, this song accounts for four. Sung to one of the finest hymn tunes ever written,1 it encapsulates the dream of turning early industrial England, with its satanically inhuman factory mills, into a free Jerusalem for all. The feet that Blake mentions are those of Jesus, whom medieval folk traditions believed to have journeyed across England, and the new Jerusalem is a state of justice and equality, a kind of Christian socialism pioneered in one country. There are several parallels, both in Europe and the United States, of likening the nation to the original Chosen People who were promised Jerusalem, that is, the achievement of a divinely just social order on earth. The thought is not as mad as it looks.
