By David Whitmarsh-Knight © 2004-2008

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William Blake's Jerusalem Explained: 

The William Blake Press: Cambridge 2007 

612 pages.

Universally, to be human is to experience restricted scanning: without it, Blake is clear, we could not be an evolving identity, grow or age, die or be united with God. 

Simply put, in love we transform our perceptions to scan/perceive in beauty and hope and joy within and without around us.

Blake explicitly show us his poetic analysis of the causal destruction of fear, poverty, pain, confinement and depression, slavery and human sacrifice. When fear and anxiety are perceived, threat is universal and the spin or ‘vortex’ of such scanning leads to inwardness, paranoia and self-harm or harm to others. 

Albion and Jerusalem are Blake's great human male and female symbols for this self-destruction, or their fall into warring psychic splinters. This book traces their collapse into division and madness, and their re-unification into moral and sexual sanity. Blake thus helps symbolise how we can ‘turn things around’ by scanning/perceiving more and more positive causalities through states of healing in events and realities in our individual vortices. Blake calls the ‘spin’ about us a vortex. The vortex expands and contracts within and without us. 

His epics symbolise how an improved scanning of all we perceive determines what we understand and what we self-realise and so become. He traces these cause and effect linear processes and organises our consciousness by means of four levels of perception: namely one-fold, two-fold, three-fold and four-fold. 

One-fold vision is a component of but cannot perceive two-fold vision. Two-fold vision is of, but cannot perceive three-fold vision. Likewise, three-fold vision is of but cannot perceive four-fold vision. The first, one-fold, is death and there are no perceptions. Two-fold is our world of nature, birth, life and death in which we move in time and space by the cordinates of height, width and depth. This architecture is within the compass points of north, south, east and west. This is our world which Blake envisions by means of a three-fold condition of perception. In this three-fold organisation of perception Blake sees our two-fold world through energies of expansion and contraction from our centre outwards in all directions and inwards to our centre, with an axis of zenith to nadir which holds the motion of three-fold being into vortical certainty in time. Three-fold vision is in time and space. Four-fold vision is infinite, is within and without, and is seen best in Plates 94-100 of Jerusalem. 

Blake's Jerusalem illuminates our ability to organise our consciouness into coherence by a life in which we grasp the 'real' within in the continuum of encounter with the world of external phenomena. The universal truths of our life and our death is Blake's relentless focus.

When I lectured at an Institute of Education/Teacher's College, I was the Head of School: Liberal Arts and Sciences. It was ensured that all future teachers across our 15 or so Departments of Education were taught all that children must physically turn their heads to the right and then turn their heads left before they began to cross a road. This is because a child phisiologically has, but perceptually has not, developed peripheral vision and literally cannot see the coming cars from either side. It is like looking through a torch beam. So the child must not suddenly  walk across. This is an example of ‘restricted field articulation'... the child’s ability to scan his or her peripheral vision is narrow, and their behaviour thereby necessarily modified, sometimes fatally. Moral scanning is concomitant. In Blake's prophetic mythology we are as we peceive.

Blake inspires us to hold to the moral absolute that it is always good to alleviate suffering. Thus Blake is no 'relativist'...and dismisses as morally appaling the sectarian murder and economic murder ... in causing evil to others we in truth self-predate and kill ourswelves. Blakje's contemporary social mechanisms are well studied. Bl;ake's saw the evils of  Malthus, free-trade and the slave trade, destructive work, and the callousness by which NOT alleviating suffering is 'a good', such as in the Poor Laws, workhouses, and the 'Darwinian' horrors legislated into profit making... the legislation legally enforcing the cruelties is seen in the 1834 act in which 'able-bodied' men must practice 'independence', 'continence', 'saving', must 'sell his labour on the market' and neither he nor any dependent is to receive government support. 

This takes us straight into Blake. Blake's myth is written to help enhance our perceptual realities and therefore help us live our lives... all of which are always lived through other humans, nature, materiality and time and space. Blake's psychology of social justice is well studied, especially  in the moral vacuum of child labour globally, 'taxation as theft' as economic attitude, and a theory of production based on the idea of continuous 'reform for increased productivity' and reduced cost. Now we turn to Blake’s Jerusalem. He seeks to enhance out perceptual field articulations, and as with all great art, he succeeds. In Blake’s aesthetics art enhances individual perceptions. He is perfectly clear; to him the purpose of being is unity with God. We survive and improve our lives through such experiences as love and hate, food and shelter, justice, art, science, feeling and thought, and above all through others, living in the image of God, which Blake called the Human Form Divine. Of course his insights are returned each generation.

Blake’s genius in Jerusalem and The Four Zoas engages us in the movements of mind and perceptual scanning of consciousness a degree of comprehensiveness and insight not found in others. Blake’s Jerusalem is a long and brilliant experience of self-healing... a cosmology of consciousness. 

Here is my conclusion: Blake’s art expands our personal perceptual scanning. 

I have taken 10 years to write William Blake’s 'Jerusalem' Explained and likewise, earlier, William Blake’s 'The Four Zoas' Explained, and have outlined his epic story clearly. He is not impenetrable. These two books on Blake's two masterpieces of clarity should transform your perceptions of Blake, Blake’s art and earlier poetry.

Once a reader has been through Blake’s myth from beginning to end then Blake reads swiftly and brilliantly. His plot is a clear as an Agatha Christie plot. In addition to that reading pleasure,we also share great poetry, philosophy, drama and participate in a spiritual vision that re-engages us with the internal landscapes of our consciousness.

As I write elsewhere, the reader is liberated into the practical act of reading an excellent story. Blake is well worth the effort needed to come to terms with his remarkably modern picture of humanity.

David Whitmarsh: "William Blake's 'The Four Zoas' Explained", and, "William Blake's 'Jerusalem' explained": Blake and his myth and spiritual vision, his use of time and space, and energy and matter, plot, personae and sexuality, major themes and symbols traced in these two major prophecies.

Introduction to William Blake's 'The Four Zoas' Explained

William Blake wrote three major prophecies: The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem, Milton and Jerusalem were both illuminated; The Four Zoas was left in manuscript form. My research, conducted over 14 years, detailed Blake's stages of composition, cosmology, mythology and his causal linear narrative called his plot. It is recognised by the award of a Doctorate from the University of New Brunswick, 1984. By contrast to the consensus view of the 'plotless' Blake, this research IS a successful analysis and details the plot with relentless methodological clarity. I believe it is only by such a focus can the plots of Blake's works be known and tested against the text itself. The reader can make his or her own mind up. Once Blake's myth is understood, his epics read fluently and easily, on the other hand if the plot is not grasped then critical conclusions, as now, necessarily remain erratic, personalistic and textually unsubstantiated (see blog).

My doctoral committee rightly questioned whether it was possible to write a PhD thesis on so major a figure without footnotes throughout the analysis per se. All agreed the thesis was original throughout. Professor Emeritus Frederick Cogswell the leading Canadian poet and literary critic and Professor Emeritus David Galloway, the leading Shakespearian textual critic, for example he was chairman of the 450 yr Shakespeare conference at UBC, supervised. In recommending publication, they stated the thesis 'challenged the views of greats in the field' and described it as 'brilliant', a 'remarkable contribution to Blake scholarship' and a 'major breakthrough'. 

Jerusalem is 20 odd years of scholarship further down the line and reflects two further decades of research into Blake's epic prophecies while I lectured in Religion and Moral Studies.

I am disappointed that in twenty years it seems none checked the Canadian national library, Ottawa, where the doctoral thesis sat waiting, like the rest, for research scholars and professional scholars to check completed doctorates ... before having a go themselves. In terms of Blake's plot and aesthetic unity in The Four Zoas, they could have saved themselves and most of all their students, years of work.

Unaccountably then until recently this, the first full-scale line-by-line analysis of The Four Zoas, seems not to have been read or noted by writers of all other major studies from Ault, the second major study, 1986, up to 2003 where it is listed in Blake:An Illustrated Quarterly, a journal in which  Justin Scott Van Kleeck lists my the study in his comprehensive bibliography of The Four Zoas. In terms of the research focus here, of immediate significance to the field, for examples, are the detailed outline of Blake's developed cosmology, creation and salvation myth, symbology, mythic personae, their relationships, resolution of the two Nights the Seventh, and a clear 'plot' or detailed linear narrative causality, from beginning to end. Defined, delineated and integrated are the components of Blake's myth; for examples, Albion and Jerusalem, Beulah, Eden, Ulro, the Zoas and their Emanations (with Orc, Tirzah, Rahab), spectre and shadow, the double fall, the chains of sorrow and time, circumference/west, centre/east, zenith/south and nadir/north, Golgonooza and the Temple or Urizen, Blake's Christ (not Los) and Blake's Satan (not Urizen, nor Luvah/Orc), and Blake's apocalypse and restoration to infinite life through Christ. An essential contribution made is the detailing of Urizen's story; I show from the text that Urizen falls twice and this explains his journey in Night the Sixth. 

My research into The Four Zoas' compositional stages, which follows the methodology of the science of textual criticism, examines virtually all lines, deletions, additions, emendations and stages of development of Blake's manuscript. The study reconciles all such parts to the work as a whole and (after Wilkie and Johnson 1978 extended study) precedes all other full-scale studies of The Four Zoas. I show there are three major compositional stages, and a final over write. The consciously crafted stages of the text are analysed, detailed, the poem's completion as an aesthetic literary whole thereby demonstrated, and the most convincing reason yet put forward as to why Blake did not illuminate his completed epic.

This study, it seems unread until very recently, thus remains as fresh today as in 1984. When read, it should move debate on Blake's conscious craftsmanship in The Four Zoas to a new level of appreciation. To my mind Milton and Jerusalem are likewise unified, though each is uniquely developed in its individual mythology. Jerusalem's plot is detailed here, however I have not written an draft analysis of Milton  though I have completed one. My findings in both books here likewise have a direct and helpful relevance to Blake's earlier minor prophecies, especially The Book of Urizen and apply meaningfully to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and to his early lyrical Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.

Because this research seems not to have been read or noted by scholars in the field, I have been asked frequently to make the research more generally available. Hence, this presentation of my conclusions remains, in context,  fresh for current and future scholarship. The issue is Blake's conscious craftsmanship and the concomitant theories of meaning. My findings challenge the establishment canon of post-modern prismatic fractal textualities. I believe this research demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that Blake is a far better poet than these current methodologies seem to allow; without execption it seems (see blog) every critic of The Four Zoas and of Jerusalem denies there is a plot or a linear narrative causal sequence that is Blake's conscious, rational story/plot or logia. However, that there is a plot has been demonstrated for two decades. Now I have published it on the web, see, for example, Justin Scott Van Kleeck bibliography.

This study is the clearest discussion of the plot Blake completes. It  textually definitive interlocking of the two Nights the Seventh is of particular relevance to understanding the work as a whole. My textual analysis clearly demonstrates that Blake intended an interlocking simultaneity. The two Nights need to be visualised as simultaneous, not unlike a coin with two sides. In musical terms, the concept of stereophonic sound with separate sounds in two speakers that fuse in one musical experience is analogous. In Blake's final draft, after Night the First to the Sixth, the two Nights the Seventh open, co-exist, and close in dynamic simultaneity before re-fusion into the formal linear familiarity of Nights the Eighth and Ninth. I think it possible this variant structure departed so far from the tradition of literary linearity that Blake decided not to illuminate it (see blog). The presentation of the 'within and without' is a common theme in literature, art and film. In philosophy of science the point of singularity in which all things turn inside out is a well-known contemporary idea (e.g. New Scientist; 9 10 2004). This happens to Blake's Albion and as shown; mystics, visionaries, literary critics and theologians are familiar with the meta-language and symbolism of Blake's prophetic expression.

Currently, I have added the first full-scale line-by-line analysis of Jerusalem, which can be found here, in which the findings are moved, developed and expanded into Blake's illuminated masterpiece. To my mind, neither Milton nor Jerusalem can be properly accessed without incorporating the findings of this research on The Four Zoas.

This web site thus contains the first full-scale analysis of Blake's The Four Zoas (PhD, 1984) and the first full-scale analysis of Blake's Jerusalem (2005) My revised draft is published by The William Blake Press: Cambridge and is now available on Amazon.com. As noted both are fresh to the field virtually throughout. Each study in turn gives us Blake's plots or causal linear narrative and so allows us to relate the parts of each epic respectively to its whole. This means we can begin to understand Blake's meanings in terms of the work as a unified artwork. In terms of Blake's conscious craftsmanship, it seems to me this web site shows that in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, Blake wrote clear beautifully structured aesthetic wholes.

It is I think, no longer critically reasonable to claim these two epics are impenetrable, without plot, incoherent, fractal or that Blake's myth is arbitrary or inconsistent. Also I believe these studies here significantly clarify much of Blake's Anglo-Celtic, Trinitarian spiritual vision (see blog).

I believe it is time for the new generation of Blake scholars to be methodologically refreshed by clear scholarly evidence of Blake's linear causal narrative clarity, unity of literary structure and plot, poetic technique and literary philosophy in his major prophecies. For example, the use of dramatic irony demands a grasp of the plot, or linear causal narrative, as a whole... and Blake's plots in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, it follows (currently shown only in this web-site), have not yet been properly studied in terms of Blake's genius for plot construction. It seems to me the work is thought impenetrable simply because none worked out the causal linear narrative or plot, and so blamed Blake or admired Blake for  what is a methodological failure. In fact, once the language game of Blake is 'played out' in Wittgenstein's sense of things, or grasped as a narrative linguistic whole, his epics become exciting and swiftly moving stories, rich with transformational insights, brilliant visual adventures, and dramatic intensity and poetry of the highest order. It makes it possible to claim that of course the myth was completed... Blake promised us that and as shown he is quite right to claim he laid a path or 'golden string' to follow.

In terms of literary philosophy I think this literary study helps balance the visual studies in particular of Ault and Viscomi. The brilliance of their insights to my mind is significantly enhanced by my  detailing of Blake's completed myth and its causal linear narrative. As it stands Ault's work is claimed to be incommensurate. Wonderfully original, I conclude the dimensions revealed by these scholars are not incommensurate with the field as a whole, but rather have expanded it. 

Finally, my thanks to my wife Rhonda whose support and work helped make this analysis possible; to Papworth Hospital, University of Cambridge, for its medical brilliance in the many months I recovered there and during which time I wrote some of  William Blake's Jerusalem Explained. Sadly soon it seems developers will close and empty Papworth Hospital, it had a lovely site which contributed hugely to healing and to the mental health of patients, staff and visitors, especially to children visiting. I want to thank Jody Shipley for his expertise in designing the web site, and to Tom Swindell for his assistance.

Curriculum Vitae

Educated at Dulwich College; University of Pennsylvania (Thouron Scholar); University of New Brunswick (Doctoral Fellow of the Canada Council); Education studies at University of New England; Graduate Theology and Religion studies at St. Andrews College, Sydney University, and at IOCS, University of Cambridge.

Senior Lecturer 1, (R). Tenured at the University of New South Wales: positions held include Head of Graduate Studies and Department Head, History and Theory of Art. 

Academic Fields: Textual Criticism/Palaeography; Philosophy of Religion (mythology, spiritual aesthetics, sacred art, drama and literature); History of the Stage; Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama and Theatre.