There’s nothing patriotic about William Blake’s Jerusalem

In this week’s diary, Tristram Hunt puts his money behind Jerusalem as a new English National Anthem. ‘God Save the Queen’ isn’t going anywhere as the United Kingdom’s theme, but there’s room for a local melody when Team England take to the field (as the MP Toby Perkins pointed out, it’s hard to square English rugby fans singing ‘God Save The Queen’ as we face off against the Welsh). But Tristram, for the love of the Holy Lamb of God, please don’t let it be Jerusalem.

The truth about Jerusalem is that it isn’t a patriotic poem at all. Parry’s music gives the hymn an upbeat tempo – especially with the booming orchestration by Edward Elgar – but William Blake’s original words are as laced with resentful irony as Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony. Famously, Blake asks four questions in succession, and the answer to each is a resounding no. Christ’s feet never trod in England; the Lamb of God didn’t gambol – preposterous as the image is – around the Cotswolds; the Holy Spirit wasn’t regularly spotted in London fog; and most directly of all, there was no sense of Jerusalem in the dark Satanic mills of the Industrial Age.