Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

Overview

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion is William Blake’s vast illuminated epic, engraved beginning in 1804 and completed over many years. It stages a visionary history of the human psyche and of Britain, dramatizing the fall of the primeval man Albion into division and his eventual restoration through imaginative forgiveness. Jerusalem is both the feminine emanation of Albion and the name of a redeemed city or community, the spiritual form of a nation regenerated. The poem fuses prophetic myth, political critique, and personal spiritual psychology into a single symbolic narrative.

Structure and Setting

The work is organized into four chapters addressed respectively “To the Public, ” “To the Jews, ” “To the Deists, ” and “To the Christians.” Blake sets his action across a mythic map of Britain, London, Oxford, Bath, Bristol, and many other places appear as spiritual states, while also ranging across inner geographies: Eden, Beulah, Generation, and Ulro. The poem’s plates combine text and images, so that figures, cities, and cosmic machines are literally intertwined with the words that describe them.

Mythic Drama

Albion, the universal human and figure of Britain, turns inward in Selfhood, mistrusting the imaginative bond that unites persons. He rejects his emanation, Jerusalem, and falls asleep upon his rocky island; his divided “Sons of Albion” spread coercive law, war, and empire. The four Zoas, Tharmas (Body), Urizen (Reason and restrictive law), Luvah (Passion), and Urthona/Los (Imagination and creative art), break from their harmonious unity and contend for rule. Vala, Nature veiled and alluring, binds perception to appearances; Rahab and Tirzah personify the corruptions of state religion and material generation. In the fallen state of Ulro, perception hardens into mechanical causality and moral accusation.

Los and Golgonooza

Against this entropy works Los, the prophetic artist and time-smith, with his emanation Enitharmon. In his furnaces he builds Golgonooza, the city of art where imaginative labor refines perception and prepares a new humanity. Los must struggle with his own Spectre, the self-righteous, accusatory double, while gathering the scattered humanities within the “minute particulars, ” the granular acts of attention and mercy that alone resist abstract systems. Jerusalem, exiled and persecuted, wanders through the island’s cities, her beauty defaced by the Sons of Albion; yet she remains the latent form of communal love.

Themes and Motifs

Blake sets forgiveness against retribution, imaginative vision against the tyrannies of abstract Reason, national pride, and utilitarian calculation. Law, when severed from love, becomes accusation and war, while imagination heals division by recognizing the divine in each person. Gendered division, Albion and Jerusalem, Spectre and Emanation, figures the wider rift between faculties; their reunion images the restoration of a fourfold human form. The poem relentlessly critiques Britain’s imperial violence and its alliance of commerce with religion, reimagining the nation’s destiny as a spiritual rather than imperial Jerusalem.

Imagery and Language

The poem’s imagery is apocalyptic and artisanal at once: furnaces, looms, and anvils alongside suns and stars; rivers and hills of England transformed into organs of the universal body. Place-names double as psychological organs; cities become gates of perception. Blake’s voice shifts among narrator, Los, and communal chorus, generating a polyphonic intensity whose density matches the intricate designs on the plates.

Climax and Resolution

At the crisis, Albion hears the call of the Divine Humanity, Christ as the eternal form of human imagination, and confronts his Spectre. He embraces Jerusalem, practicing mutual forgiveness that dissolves accusation and the hardened Selfhood. The Zoas reunite; Vala’s veil is lifted; Golgonooza opens as the city descends, not in conquest but in recognition. The Last Judgment is inward: a transformation of sight from single vision to fourfold vision. Albion awakens, and the island becomes a body of brotherhood rather than empire, the spiritual Jerusalem realized within and among persons.