BLAKE & SHELLEY

Yale Center for British Art

Jerusalem

Plate 40

Jerusalem, Plate 41 [46], (E 188)
"And Ely, Scribe of Los, whose pen no other hand
Dare touch! Oxford, immortal Bard! with eloquence Divine,
Divine, he wept over Albion: speaking the words of God
In mild perswasion: bringing leaves of the Tree of Life."

Jerusalem, Plate 40 [45], (E 188)

"O God descend! gather our brethren, deliver Jerusalem
But that we may omit no office of the friendly spirit
Oxford take thou these leaves of the Tree of Life: with eloquence
That thy immortal tongue inspires; present them to Albion:
Perhaps he may recieve them, offerd from thy loved hands.
So spoke, unheard by Albion, the merciful Son of Heaven
To those whose Western Gates were open, as they stood weeping
Around Albion: but Albion heard him not; obdurate! hard!
He frown'd on all his Friends, counting them enemies in his sorrow"

Blake never mentioned Shelly by name although "he must have known of the son-in-law of his friends William Godwin and Mary Wollstoncraft" and of Godwin's disapproval of his sixteen year old daughter's involvement with a man already married. 

It seems likely that Blake must have been troubled by the life Shelley was living as young man. Shelley married a young woman and then left her to elope with the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Until Shelley's wife died by suicide the couple were unable to marry. Shelley's wealthy father cut off his son's financial support leading him to an accumulation of debts and an unorthodox style of living. Shelley's life was short but filled with writing poetry, cultivating friendships and accumilating experience through study and travel. He lived on an emotional razor's edge. Perhaps Blake sumised that Shelley burned too much of his creative energy before reaching his inate potential. 

Since Blake showed an avid interest in reading the poetry of his contemporaries, we may assume that he read the published work of Shelley and admired his talent and many of his sentiments. Foster Damon, in A Blake Dictionary, introduced the idea that Blake was referring to Shelley when he wrote in Jerusalem of the Bard of Oxford.

Damon wrote on Page 314: "The Bard of Oxford. Oxford, the Cathedral City, is also 'an imortal bard,' whose divine eloquence fails to cure Albion. This episode is evidently a tribute to Shelley. Of all the contemporary poets, none was closer to Blake in revolutionary fervor, poetic rapture, intense visualizing, and daring thought. He denounced the tyrant God, and called himself an athiest, although only Blake surpassed him in religious feeling and insight. Shelley not only preached free love but he practiced it, yet without being a libertine. He attacked the oppressors of the poor, the coruption the government. He was an overt fighting Reprobate."

Page 71: "Ely is the cathedral citys of Cambridgeshire; its university, where the clergy are trained, is Cambridge; the greatest man produced by Cambridge was the anticlerical Milton, 'Scribe of Los, whose pen no other hand dare touch' (J 46:6).  With parallel irony, Blake (in my opinion there was no alternative) identified Oxford with the poet expelled from Oxford for his atheism, the anticlerical Shelley, 'immortal Bard; with eloquence divine he wept over Albion, speaking the words of God in mild perswasion, bringing leaves of the Tree of Life.'"

Twice Blake used the word eloquence in writing of the Bard of Oxford. He used it also in his early poem In Imitation of Spenser to intimate that with eloquence the consciousness of negative conditions can be altered: specifically that hate and envy can be dispelled.

Poetical Sketches, (E 421)

"AN IMITATION OF SPEN[S]ER
And thou, Mercurius, that with winged brow
Dost mount aloft into the yielding sky,
And thro' Heav'n's halls thy airy flight dost throw,
Entering with holy feet to where on high
Jove weighs the counsel of futurity;
Then, laden with eternal fate, dost go
Down, like a falling star, from autumn sky,
And o'er the surface of the silent deep dost fly.

If thou arrivest at the sandy shore,
Where nought but envious hissing adders dwell,
Thy golden rod, thrown on the dusty floor,
Can charm to harmony with potent spell;
Such is sweet Eloquence, that does dispel
Envy and Hate, that thirst for human gore:
And cause in sweet society to dwell
Vile savage minds that lurk in lonely cell."