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Blake's Jerusalem: Plate 3
Fully
Restored
by
David V. Erdman
In Studies in Bibliography, XVII (1964), 13-15, I presented a restoration of the deleted portions of Plate 3 of Blake's Jerusalem which left lines 36-37 incomplete. Quite extensive remnants of the deleted words, however, are visible in the reproduction of this plate that was printed opposite page 10, and one reader promptly supplied a clue to their recovery. Mr. Michael J. Tolley, of Massey University College of Manawatu, Palmerston North, suggested that the word above "I" in line 38 "looks very like Και" and that the whole passage might be a quotation of the "words of Jesus" in Greek. It is. I had noted the apparent Και but had failed to consider it as anything but the accidental shape of a deleted English text.
It was a matter of a few hours, with Greek New Testament and concordance, to track down the quotation. With correction of "best words" to "last words" the whole passage may now be read with complete confidence as:
The line is Matthew 28:18, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth" (King James version). The style of the lettering is that of the inscription on the title-page of Vala, with a vertical ligature for the ου.
With this restoration of the whole Preface to Jerusalem we are at last in a position to make out what the full message of the Preface was—and to speculate as to Blake's probable reasons for emasculating it. Did the very ambiguity of the quotation from Matthew lead to its deletion? Was Blake saying that he had yielded up his will to the dictation of an all-powerful Saviour? Or was he saying that, having become "wholly One in Jesus" (line 13), he felt that all power had been given unto him, as it had been in the end given to Jesus, by the Divine Imagination, the God of books? Did Blake find, before publication, that the bold identification of his poetic genius with divine power was shocking to others—or to himself? Or that his "dear Christian Friends" tended to interpret his words in orthodox, Urizenic terms? Or did he first intend a somewhat orthodox message and then change his views?
I am pleased to be able to raise these questions, while accepting the justice of the remark of Blake's mathematician, Obtuse Angle, that "A query & an answer are as different as a strait line & a crooked one."
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