His Probable Reasons
Blake's reasons for making those deletions in Jerusalem
which can be recovered for discussion range from the obvious to the
complex to the inscrutable. Changes of plan, aesthetic and moral
considerations, changed thinking, increased secretiveness, the effects of
depression irreversible whether or not temporary — all appear to
have
operated, singly and in combination, to produce the deletions and alterations
noted below as well as numerous rearrangements and replacements of whole
plates, about which the evidence is highly confusing in our present state of
knowledge about such things as Blake's graphics.
An incalculably drastic change of plan is hinted at by the deleted
phrase "In XXVIII Chapters" etched in the title page (Plate 2) of a work
which in its extant form is geometrically arranged in a Fourfold scheme of
four chapters.[7a] The deleted "End
of the 1st Chap:" on Plate 14 does not tell us how long the
chapters
were to be, in any earlier scheme, because we cannot tell where this plate
stood in any earlier sequence. Nor can we easily tell what to make of the
date "1804" on the title page, undeleted, although it is well to recognize
that the date is incised, not etched, and can have been added to the plate at
any time (both in the sense that the plate may have been old or new when
it was dated and in the sense that "1804" can have been added in that or,
commemoratively, any subsequent year.)[8]
Other deletions related to changes of plan occur on Plates 1, 29, 35
(perhaps), 37, 41, 91, and 94-95.
Aesthetic as well as schematic considerations may have influenced
the decision to delete all text from Plate 1, to make it a silent and sombre
frontispiece to the series continuing in 26, 51, 76, 100. That Blake may not
have been dissatisfied with the text of Plate 1 in itself, however, seems
indicated by the fact that he made a separate "proof" in color and outlined
the letters carefully in dark ink. Moral and
aesthetic considerations may have combined to cause the elaborate
re-engraving required to uncouple the male and female figures on Plate 28
— though here too it may be significant that a print of the first state
has
survived. On Plate 37 the mending of "pale . . . feet" to "blue . . . feet"
may be doctrinal as well as aesthetic. Rhetorical improvements were made
on Plate 4, with deletion of the double exclamation mark, and on Plate 82,
with the reduction of duplication in lines 47-48 and the removal of the
"redning skeleton in howling woe" from line 69. The amplification of one
plate to two near the end of the work (Plates 94 and 95) may be due simply
to recalculation as the 100th plate approached — or it may have
involved
rejection of another plate, for reasons we cannot discover, though possibly
from the overriding desire to increase the "illumination" on 94-95.
Changes of idea may have influenced the deletions on Plates 1
(perhaps), 4, 7, 35, 36, 47, 73, 77, 84. But the self-destructive deletions
of Plate 3, withdrawing the affectionate terms addressed to the oncedear
Reader, effacing and yet not quite thoroughly effacing the poet's
confessions of faith and enthusiasm: these are of a different order. Blake
had done something of this kind in a less irreversible way when he had
added a stanza of harp-shattering despair to the Preludium of his
America: at the bottom of a page, so that when his depression
lifted he could cover the stanza and print the page free of gloom. The
momentary effects of dismay upon the Preface of Jerusalem
remain even in the most brightly colored copy, remained perhaps in his
own will — for he could, after all, have made a new plate.
