University of Virginia Library

Search this document 


  

expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
expand section 
collapse section 
 1.0. 
collapse section2.0. 
expand section2.1. 
expand section2.2. 
  

expand section 

Plate 1 [Frontispiece] (Illustration III a)

  • [Top of page and dividing over archway:]
  • <There is a Void outside of Existence, which if enterd into Englobes itself & becomes a Womb, such was Albions Couch A pleasant Shadow of Repose calld Albions lovely Land
  •  
    His Sublime & Pathos become
    His Reason his Spectrous
    Jerusalem his Emanation
    <O A[ ] * [?behold]  
    Two Rocks fixd in the Earth
    Power. covers them above
    is a Stone laying beneath
    [?Pitying]> behold the [7]
    Vision of Albion>
     

  • [On right side of archway:]
  • <Half Friendship * is the bitterest Enmity said Los
    As he enterd the Door of Death for Albions sake Inspired
    The long sufferings of God are not for ever there is a Judgment>
  • [On left side of archway, in reversed writing:]
  • <Every Thing
    has its
    Vermin O Spectre of the Sleeping Dead!>

All the writing on this page, designed not as a part of the text of the poem but as inscriptions on a large illustration, was applied not in etched masses but in line engraving which was so thin that Blake could easily delete it if he wished by an over-all inking of the plate. He did so in all copies of Jerusalem, but Sir Geoffrey Keynes has been able to recover the text (except for the erasures in line 7) from a proof copy in which the letters have been made visible by outlining "in black with a fine pen"


12

Page 12
against the light brown printing of the plate.[9] (Text as punctuated above derives from this copy.)

Even in that proof, line 7 contains an erasure made by a gouging of the plate that left only the tops and bottoms of what I conjecture to be the b, h, l, d of "behold" and the y and g of "Pitying" (but the whole P is visible). These elements are fairly discernible in enlargements of the Rosenbloom copy and may be faintly seen in the brown and black collotype of Sir Geoffrey's proof (published with the Rinder facsimile).

From the posthumous copies it is apparent that Blake considered the whole text canceled, however, and not to be brought back by careful inking; at least all copies are from the same state of the plate, slightly but significantly modified from that used for the proof. Except for the early erasure in line 7 (perhaps a correction before canceling) Blake did not scratch out any words, but he incised lines of texture for the stone of the arch and lines marking the bricks of the wall — right across his lettering. Inking could do the rest.

Joseph Wicksteed suggested that the obliteration of the text from Plate 1 "was done intentionally to fit the design to function as a Frontispiece, which in Blake's Prophetic Books . . . never have any text"[10] — a rather circular argument, presenting Blake as a self-conformist who caught himself in an inconsistency. A more important consistency is that which he achieved by the tone and placing and silence of Plates 1, 26, 51, 76, and 100 — with the minor inconsistency that the lettering that remains on Plate 26 had been too broadly chiseled to be inked over. The names of "Albion" and "Jesus" on 76 could be hidden easily, and usually were. Was the original plan, after four chapters were decided upon, to have a spaced series of inscribed frontispieces? Did the idea of opacity only gradually gain ground, too late for 26? (See also the comment on Plates 51 and 76, below.)

Clues to possible reasons for deletion may be found in the content of the inscriptions. The text condemning "Half Friendship" implies a plea for whole friendship and may have been jettisoned along with the words of "love and friendship" on Plate 3. The lines on the Englobing Womb are a variant of similar lines in Blake's Milton which are among the few deleted passages in that work.[11] And a drawing of the phallic altar stones


13

Page 13
alluded to here is deleted in Jerusalem 69, though only in the Rinder copy. (Noted by Wicksteed, p. 216, n.3.)

The lines in reversed writing were, of course, secretive from the beginning: a direct rebuke to any verminous fiend who deciphered them in his mirror.