SOURCE: Thorpe, Douglas. “Razing Jerusalem: Blake's Word as World.” In A New Earth: The Labor of Language in Pearl, Herbert's Temple, and Blake's Jerusalem, pp. 123-76. Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Thorpe examines Blake's Jerusalem in terms of physical objects that mankind creates or builds and that are subsequently destroyed.

What is the body? That shadow of a shadow of your love, that somehow contains the entire universe. 

A man sleeps heavily, though something blazes in him like the sun, like a magnificent fringe sewn up under the hem. 

Rumi, trans. by Coleman Barks

Thus far we have seen the goal of our poet (whether in Pearl or in The Temple) to lie in a radical reorienting of the reader's perception of the world, a reorientation we have equated with the parables of the New Testament, and more particularly with...