Happy Sesqui, William Blake!
3November 28, 2007 by Colin
Today is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of William Blake, the British engraver, illustrator, poet and all-around artist.
It might be my Anglo-Saxon heritage, where this hymn is virtually required at every church service, but Blake’s Jerusalem really evokes an image of England midway through its industrial development.
These videos evoke no such nostalgia, but the first uses Billy Bragg’s fine cover of the hymn, and the second includes an entire stadium of Britons singing along.
[tags] William Blake, Bragg, arrows of desire [/tags]
I find this really interesting. Because if you read about Blake’s life and the struggles he had, he’s anything but a nationalistic or sentimental man. He was generally quite pissed off about everything. And maybe it’s out of that kind of general grumpiness that good things come. He railed against the industrial revolution, and Britain has often found that he was right. The saddest thing is that his views about religion, responsibility and art were deemed so unsavory that his benmefactor and one of his best friends burned a whole bunch of his work after he died… lest it offend!
Shame.
/df
“…where this hymn is virtually required at every church service”
Yikes! When and where did you last go to church?
Regularly? The Eighties. And I went to boarding school, so there was chapel every day.