Blake’s Synthesis: Jerusalem

Abstract

Jerusalem is Blake’s synthesis of his ideas concerning homosexuality with those concerning economic and political justice, religious and sexual freedom, gender, and the means of change and renewal. In Jerusalem these multiple concerns of earlier works reappear, merged, compressed, and at white heat, in a drama of division and reunification through conscious solidarity—a remaking of human consciousness not as an end in itself but as the means to confront intellectual error and political, sexual, social, and religious tyranny as manifested throughout history. Acceptance of homosexuality, in Jerusalem, is both a component part and an emblem of these changes.

they shall arise from Self,

By Self Annihilation into Jerusalems Courts & into Shiloh

Shiloh the Masculine Emanation among the Flowers of Beulah

—Jerusalem 49:45–47