SOURCE: Marks, Mollyanne. “Self-Sacrifice: Theme and Image in Jerusalem.” Blake Studies 7, no. 1 (1974): 27-50.

In the following essay, Marks considers the ideology of self-sacrifice and how it reveals itself in Blake's Jerusalem.

Jerusalem represents a movement away from the more richly embroidered universe of Blake's earlier poetry to a starker myth, in which a few of Blake's giant forms are assimilated to figures, events, and concepts of Judaeo-Christian tradition. The elaborate structure of Jerusalem serves essentially to redefine the language of that tradition, and in particular the concept of self-sacrifice that to Blake was the meaning of Jesus.

Jerusalem thus reaches its triumphant conclusion in a strangely familiar image:

Jesus replied Fear not Albion unless I die thou canst not live But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me This is Friendship & Brotherhood without it Man Is Not 

(96:14-16, E253/K743)¹

This speech occurs just before...