Jerusalem is Scattered Abroad

Abstract

This chapter expands on the complicated relationship between the actual city of Jerusalem and its literary representation. It begins with travel narratives about the real Jerusalem and concludes with Blake’s poem about an imagined Jerusalem, arguing that Jerusalem during the Romantic period is in fact always both real and imagined, simultaneously a material city and the site of an imminent heaven on earth. The second half of the chapter shows that these travel narratives’ vision of a Jerusalem that insists upon being simultaneously literal and metaphorical is key to reading William Blake’s visionary poem Jerusalem. Blake was keenly aware of the contemporary political conditions that framed Britain’s relation to the East, and in particular to the Ottoman Empire (then in control of Jerusalem). Blake uses prophetic revolutionary language to imagine political revolution; Blake’s poem describes a Jerusalem built from the ruins of empire both symbolically and materially. This chapter argues that in imagining such a Jerusalem, the poem offers an alternative to the interconnectedness of empire, calling instead for a planetary network of revolution and resistance.