The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Blake · an illuminated book in four chapters · one hundred relief-etched plates, words and designs together · title page dated 1804, etched about 1804–1820 · Copy E, Yale Center for British Art, as reference copy · plate numbers follow Copy E
Mode
Illuminated prophecy; an epic without a narrative line, prose address, long line and lyric, word and design etched on one plate
Mythos
Fall into sleep and awakening; the Giant Man divided from his emanation, the smith who builds the city of art, the self that accuses
Phase
Four chapters of one sleep, the fall told several times over and the awakening gathered into the last; etched about 1804 to about 1820
Presentation
One hundred relief-etched plates in four chapters of twenty-five, each opening with a full-page design and a prose address to a public; Copy E coloured in watercolour and gold
Register
From catalogues of counties and circling laments to the furnaces that become fountains; prose, long line and ballad lyric
Scale
Albion’s body: Britain, Canaan and London street by street; one sleeper, one smith
Governing Proposition
A giant who is England and every human being at once lies asleep, divided from his emanation, and a smith labours through a hundred plates to wake him. The wager of the book is that the accusation which brought Blake to trial, the mills of the philosophers and the moral law are one system, and that it breaks only when a man gives himself away — so the book that opens with Los going in at a dark door closes with Los at his forge.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book begins with a man going in. On the first plate, the frontispiece, Los steps through a doorway into the dark, a watchman or a lamplighter, carrying a globe of light. He is the smith of the poem, and the labourer who will try for a hundred plates to wake a sleeping giant. The next plate is the title page, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, dated 1804, its imprint naming Blake’s lodging in South Molton Street, where he lived from 1803 to 1821. The etching that followed ran to about 1820. The last plate of the book shows the same man at his forge.
The date belongs to a trouble. From 1800 to 1803 Blake had lived at Felpham, in Sussex, under the patronage of William Hayley. In 1803 he put a soldier, John Scolfield, out of his garden there; Scolfield and a second soldier, Cock, complained of him, and in January 1804 he was tried for sedition at Chichester and acquitted. The soldiers went into the poem. Skofeld and Kox are two of the twelve Sons of Albion, and by the usual reading Hyle is Hayley, and Hand the Hunt brothers of The Examiner. The book that took its persons from a quarrel in a garden sets out to show what accusation is.
It is built to a plan. A hundred plates were etched in relief, the words lettered in reverse on the copper and the metal bitten away round them, so that text and design print together from one plate. They fall into four chapters of twenty-five. Each chapter opens with a full-page design, at the quarter points of plates 1, 26, 51 and 76, and with a prose address to a public: to the Public, to the Jews, to the Deists, to the Christians. Each address ends in, or holds, a short rhymed lyric. In the first chapter the address stands on the third plate, because the title page comes between. The copy taken here is Copy E, in the Yale Center for British Art, the one complete copy Blake coloured throughout, in watercolour and gold. The other copies printed in his lifetime are few and uncoloured.
Movement II
The address to the Public, on plate 3, has sheep and goats named at its head, and it is damaged. Words have been gouged out of the copper, and the gaps print as gaps in the address to the reader. What remains explains the verse. Blake sets aside the blank verse of Milton for a line that varies its cadence and its count of syllables from line to line, keeps a plainer style for the inferior parts, and argues that poetry kept in chains keeps its readers in chains. He claims that nothing in the poem is placed by chance. And he puts the continual forgiveness of sin at the centre of the faith of Jesus, which the rest of the book sets out to show.
Plate 4 opens the poem proper by naming its theme: the sleep of Ulro, the passage through eternal death, and the waking into eternal life. The Saviour speaks to Albion as a brother rather than a distant god, and Albion turns away. His sleep is his own righteous refusal: he casts out his emanation, Jerusalem. Los labours on alone. On plate 10 he labours with his Spectre, the part of himself that reasons and accuses, and resolves to make his own system rather than be enslaved by another man’s, and to create rather than reason and compare. The line that carries this is long and free, with no fixed count of stresses, built to hold argument and vision in one breath.
On plate 15 Los looks over the land and sees past, present and future at once. What he sees is the learning of Europe as machinery: Locke’s looms and Newton’s water-wheels, wheels set inside wheels and driven by cogs, against the wheels of Eden, which turn freely and in peace. The philosophers’ mechanism, the mills of England and the war machine of the Napoleonic years are drawn as one system. On plate 16 the counties of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland are divided among the tribes of Israel, the nation laid over the holy land county by county. The first chapter closes on plate 25 with an image and no argument: Albion, the Giant Man, his fibres drawn out of his body by three women.
Movement III
The second chapter opens on plate 26 with Hand, wreathed in flames, and Jerusalem beside him. The address on the next plate is to the Jews, and it makes the holy city out of London. Its lyric names the fields between Islington and Marylebone, Primrose Hill and St John’s Wood. The holy city is not a symbol laid over London. It is London, named street by street, and the fall of Albion happens in places a reader can still visit.
The Sons of Albion are twelve, and the Daughters twelve. The Sons are the powers of accusation: the soldier whose complaint brought Blake to trial is one, and by the usual reading his patron is another. Nothing in the poem requires the reader to know this. Skofeld is a Son of Albion before he is a soldier from Felpham, and the topical names have become persons of a myth. The book is full of names: of the Sons, of counties, of cathedral cities, and of the tribes that divide them. The catalogues are a doctrine set out at length, that the general is a lie and only particulars are real, and they are also the book’s plainest stretches, where it states its belief in particulars without making one.
Within this chapter the copies of Blake’s lifetime do not agree. A long run of plates stands in one order in Copy E and in another in other copies. Copy E’s order is followed here. What does not move is the plan. The four quarters, the four addresses, the four opening designs and the frame of the first plate and the last stand at the same places in every copy. A poem whose speaker sees past, present and future at once, and whose episodes are states rather than events, can let a run of its plates change places without losing its shape. Its form is a plan, not a road. The same chapter carries a quatrain etched in mirror writing, a line that can be read only against the grain of the copper.
Movement IV
The third chapter opens on plate 51 with three figures named on the plate: Vala, Hyle and Skofeld. Vala is nature turned into moral law. She shades into Rahab and Tirzah, and the boundary between them is never fixed. Her laments, and those of the Daughters of Albion, return through the second and third chapters in near-identical formulas, and Albion’s fall is told more than once. Here the book circles. It is the slowest stretch of the hundred plates.
The address on plate 52 is to the Deists, the believers in natural religion, and its lyric makes a tear an act of the intellect. On plate 55 the argument is put as a rule of conduct: good done to another is done only in particulars, and the general good is the hypocrite’s plea. Accusation made into a system takes every form the chapter can find for it: the Druid altars and the trilithons of plate 70, the gallows at Tyburn, the courts, the mills. On plate 74 Albion’s humanity lies sunk in a sleep like death. Blake’s own trial is in all of it, and none of it needs the trial to be read.
The book was made against its time. Blake etched it over about sixteen years, wrote it, lettered it, printed it and, in one complete copy, coloured it, with no publisher and for a public that did not exist. Late in life he wrote to George Cumberland that he had finished one copy and did not expect to find a buyer. Southey, shown the book, thought it mad, as Henry Crabb Robinson reports. It waited most of a century for its readers. Yeats edited it with Ellis in 1893; Frye built a theory of literature from the prophecies in 1947; and the dispute over what it means, from what an emanation is to which order of the second chapter Blake intended, has not closed.
Movement V
The fourth chapter opens with its own end. On plate 76 Albion stands seen from behind, arms spread, before Christ crucified on a tree. The words will not reach the act this design shows for another twenty plates. The address on plate 77 is to the Christians, and its lyric, in ballad measure, hands the reader the end of a golden thread. The last chapter shows the waking before it tells it.
London comes into the last chapter in person. On plate 84 the city is an old man, blind and bent with age, begging through the streets and led by a child, the design taken from Blake’s own “London”. Then, on plate 96, Jesus speaks to Albion and asks whether he could love one who had not died for him. Albion answers by throwing himself into the furnaces, and the furnaces become fountains. The self that accused gives itself away, and the law that has governed every plate is reversed in one act.
On plate 97 Los strides outward with his globe of light, the man of the frontispiece turned round. On plate 99 every human form is identified, the emanations are named Jerusalem, and Albion and Jerusalem embrace in flames. The last plate, 100, shows Los with his hammer and tongs, Enitharmon beside him, and the Spectre carrying the sun, before a temple of trilithons. The book that began with a man going in at a dark door with a light ends with the same man at his forge. The giant is awake, and the last image is of the work still being made.
Act III · The Twelve
Plate 3 claims that nothing is placed by chance, and the frame bears it out: the four addresses, the four opening designs, and Los going in at plate 1 and striding out at plate 97 cannot go. What holds the axis lowest is what the subtractive test removes. The catalogues of names, counties and cathedral cities (plate 16 and its kin) state the doctrine that only particulars are real rather than enact it. The laments of Vala and the Daughters return in near-identical formulas, and Albion’s fall is told several times over. And a run of chapter 2 stands in another order in some of Blake’s own copies, so its succession was not compelled.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Accusation is the engine of cruelty and righteousness its alibi: plate 3 sets the forgiveness of sin at the centre of the faith, and Blake’s own accuser becomes a Son of Albion. Abstraction kills: plate 55 holds that good is done only in particulars, and calls the general good the hypocrite’s plea. Locke’s looms, Newton’s water-wheels and the war machine are one system, the projection of a divided mind (plate 15). A mind that does not make its own system lives in another’s (plate 10). Held below the top because much is stated as doctrine through a private mythology, and because the Female Will and the emanation’s return into the male are claims about gender the book asserts and does not earn.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height near the ceiling; frequency uneven. Plate 4 sounds the whole theme at once, the sleep of Ulro, the passage through eternal death and the waking to eternal life. Plate 15’s wheels within wheels are terror made of ideas. Chapter 4 rises to Albion throwing himself into the furnaces and the furnaces becoming fountains (plate 96). The designs carry height the words need not state: Albion’s fibres drawn out by three women (plate 25); Albion cruciform before the crucified Christ, seen from behind (plate 76); Albion and Jerusalem embracing in flames (plate 99). Held from the top by frequency: the catalogues and circling laments of chapters 2 and 3 are long stretches at ground level, and the small, dense etched text works against height.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built from the ground up, load-bearing on every plate. Albion is the Giant Man, England and humanity at once; Jerusalem his emanation, cast out; Vala nature turned into moral law; Los the smith labouring at Golgonooza, the city of art; the Spectre the self that reasons and accuses. Onto it Blake grafted British myth, in the trilithons of plates 70 and 100, and Hebrew myth, in the tribes and the holy city. The particular stays particular: the fields between Islington and Marylebone (plate 27), the soldier Scolfield made a Son of Albion. Held below the top because the persons are functions more than people, Vala, Rahab and Tirzah blurring into one another, and because the names had no shared resonance: the myth had to teach its own grammar.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is Milton’s epic and blank verse, the prophets, the emblem book, the illuminated manuscript and the reproductive engraving Blake was trained in. The departure is total in each: an epic with no narrative line, set in the mind of a sleeping giant who is also London; a long line of free cadence, defended on plate 3 as poetry unchained; a hundred plates written, etched, printed and coloured by one man, with no publisher; a mythology invented whole. The stake was everything: about sixteen years of etching for a public that did not exist, and late in life Blake wrote that he did not expect a buyer. Held a step below the top because the prophetic mode had been tried already in his own Milton and The Four Zoas.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Judged on the illuminated book, Copy E as reference. Plate 76 shows Albion before the crucified Christ at the head of chapter 4, twenty plates before the words reach the act on plate 96: the design knows the end before the text does, and Los’s sight of past, present and future at once (plate 15) is made literal by the page. The frame closes in images, plate 1 answered by plates 97 and 100. Gouged words leave visible gaps on plate 3; a quatrain in chapter 2 is etched in mirror writing. Typeset text loses all of it. Held below the top because a run of chapter 2 can change order without the work knowing anything different, and on many plates design and text run side by side without engaging.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence over promise, covering about 130 years. Since Ellis and Yeats’s edition of 1893 the book has sustained continuous re-examination: Damon (1924); Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947), a theory of literature built from the prophecies; Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954) and The Illuminated Blake (1974); Mitchell’s Blake’s Composite Art (1978); Paley’s The Continuing City (1983); Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993); the William Blake Archive. The readings still disagree on basic things: what an emanation is, whether the Female Will is Blake’s doctrine or Albion’s error, whether the designs gloss the text or argue with it. Held a step below because much of the labour is decoding, which is a sign of difficulty before it is a sign of depth.
Score: 9.2 / 10
A published work, so force and reach are scored together. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: poem, picture and printing made one act by one hand; an epic made of a mind rather than a story; an invented myth made the instrument of prophecy against the mill, the war and the moral law. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: almost no readers in Blake’s lifetime; Yeats’s edition with Ellis in 1893; Frye’s criticism, grown from the prophecies, redirecting a field through Anatomy of Criticism (1957); Alan Moore’s Jerusalem (2016). But most of Blake’s reach runs through the Songs, and the hymn “Jerusalem” comes from the preface to Milton, not this book, and is not credited.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over two centuries, scored with no discount for age. For seventy years the book barely survived as a book; its fullest form is one coloured copy, and its persons were taken from a quarrel of 1803. It came through. Copy E is safe in a public collection, facsimiles have reproduced it, and the William Blake Archive puts every copy in reach. Its topical names outlived their owners by becoming myth: no reader needs to know who Scolfield was to read Skofeld. What holds it low is the narrowness of what survives. Survival here is mostly scholarly, few readers outside the field have read the whole, and the surface needs more annotation than any other work on the desk.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of three crafts at once. The relief etching is load-bearing: a hundred plates lettered in reverse on copper and bitten into relief, text and design printed together, at a scale no one had attempted in the medium. Copy E’s watercolour and gold make each plate a painted page, and the designs at their best (plates 25, 76, 97, 99 and 100) are among Blake’s finest. The long line carries argument, catalogue and vision, and the lyrics are exact, as in the quatrain of plate 52 that makes a tear an act of the intellect. The costs: the etched text is small, dense and on many plates hard to read; some figures are stiff and repeated; the verse falls into formulas; the gouged gaps of plate 3 are a correction left showing.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The two most distant elements, the soldier’s accusation at Felpham, folded into the Sons of Albion, and Jesus on plate 96 asking Albion whether he could love one who had not died for him, obey one law: the self that accuses against the self that gives itself. Locke’s loom, the Druid sacrifice, Tyburn, Vala’s moral law and the plea of the general good are accusation made into a system; Los’s labour, the addresses’ forgiveness and Albion’s leap into the furnaces are self-giving. The range is as wide as any on the desk. What resists: the persons’ identities shift (Vala, Rahab and Tirzah; the status of Hand); Albion’s body, England and Canaan are mapped onto one another more than once, not always alike; and chapter 2’s order is looser than its frame.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Many orders, held in one body, Albion’s. Consciousness: the fourfold man divided into warring faculties, his humanity sunk in a sleep like death (plate 74). Sexuality and gender: the emanation, Vala, the Daughters. Labour: Los at the forge, the mills and looms. The state and war: the courts, Tyburn, the Druid altars. History, from British prehistory through Israel to Blake’s London; science and philosophy, in Bacon, Newton and Locke; the city street by street and the nation county by county; the natural order, as Vala; the sacred, from the Fall to the Crucifixion. They are integrated, not listed: each order is a part of the sleeping giant. The family and ordinary private life are held weakly; people appear as powers, rarely as persons.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier IV — Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.6, The Encompassed at 9.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, with The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 9.2. A departure total in verse, form, myth and means, paid for by sixteen years of etching for no public; many orders held as the parts of one sleeping giant; and a myth built from the ground up that bears the load on every plate.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8, held by the catalogues of names and counties, the laments that return without changing, a fall told several times over, and a run of the second chapter that can stand in another order. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 and The Imperishable at 8.6. All three come from the same facts: a book made against its time, for readers it did not have, that keeps parts its argument does not need.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis alone: The Swerve at 9.6, The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 7.8, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and the summit is not reached. The aggregate alone would hold the work in Tier IV: the twelve sum to 107.2, below the 107.4 the upper tier requires, so Pressure on Tradition at 8.5 would pass the gate and leave the placement unchanged.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Jerusalem as an illuminated book, words and designs together, plate by plate, with Copy E — the one complete copy coloured throughout, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection — as the reference copy. Plate numbers follow Copy E. No text, image or facsimile of the book was in hand, so nothing on this page is quoted: Blake’s words are described or paraphrased, and each is placed by plate. The colouring of Copy E is credited in general terms only, and no judgment rests on the appearance of a single coloured plate. The copies differ in the order of a run of plates in the second chapter; Copy E’s order is followed, and the other is not given. Figures that could not be verified, among them the size of the plates, the number of lines, and the number of impressions pulled after Blake’s death, are not given.