SOURCE: McClellan, Jane. “Dramatic Movement as a Structuring Device in Blake's Jerusalem.” Colby Literary Quarterly 13, no. 3 (September 1977): 195-208.

In the following essay, McClellan considers the dramatic elements of Jerusalem and Blake's use of time to build toward the climax of a Last Judgment.

The critical search for a single, clearcut structure in William Blake's Jerusalem has not yet brought to light one pattern that all or even most critics will agree upon. Part of the problem has been defined by Mollyanne Marks, who notes that the majority of structural analyses “detect consistent patterns of development through time.”¹ Such time-based patterns are uneasily imposed upon a poem in which incidents from one time context are repeated in a different framework in a later passage. Indeed, in Jerusalem Blake relies heavily upon a perception of all moments of time as continually occurring. In Chapter 1, Plate 10, Los “stands in London building...