House-guests are often surprised at how few CDs I own.
Little do they know – this is fairly typical for musicians. It must have
something to do with the amount of music you end up carrying around in your
head. I know several word class players who do not even own a stereo, and never
listen to the radio beyond the news. While my collection is not large, it is
pretty diverse, and what has ended up on my little Ipod shuffle is fairly
representational.
One of my favourite songs is a hymn, the English patriotic
song Jerusalem. It stands out in my collection, the highlight of practically
the only classical album I have ever purchased. The song is from the ‘Last
Night At The Proms’, with the BBC orchestra in London playing the last night of
their annual summer concerts, an evening always devoted to British patriotic
music. This particular version is nothing amazing, the quality is not great,
and with the audience bawling along, not particularly musical. Still, it has
that certain something.
I would not say my family were Anglophiles, but older
relatives from Britain visited regularly, and even now, familiarity with
English mores has a lot of social capital in Newfoundland. In many ways
Newfoundland is still a colony, and the sort of outside approval
Newfoundlanders seem to crave is especially valued when it comes with an
English accent. Our imaginary England was not the England of the Clash and ‘Eastenders’;
it was a place full of heather, quaint pubs, chummy boarding schools and heroic
Spitfire pilots. Queen Victoria herself would have been quite at home there.
When I went to university here, Oxbridge refugees still
largely staffed the English faculty, accents, gowns and the love of Wordsworth
transferred intact to their hardship post. The Oxford Book of English Poetry
loomed large in any course selection, along with lashings of Shakespeare,
Thackery and Milton. It is no wonder the archaic language of folk music comes
so easily to myself, Sean and Alan, having each of us having spent four years
immersed in the world of 18th century letters.
So it is that even though I am all too aware that the real
England bears little resemblance to this bucolic world, I still have a massive
soft spot for it, and I am a sucker for songs like Jerusalem. The lyric comes
from the poetry of William Blake, an 18th century poet and artist
gripped by vivid religious visions.
In his lifetime he was considered to be a madman, but his strange output
is very highly regarded now. To him, God and the angels were personal
acquaintances, and he conversed with the biblical prophets regularly. While
much of his work is heavy going, some of his poems have a child-like
simplicity. Jerusalem is perfect in its brevity and conviction:
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
You can see why it has become the unofficial English anthem,
almost as popular as ‘God Save The King’. It is based on the sort of idea that
drives ‘The DaVinci Code’ – that the young Jesus visited southern England with
his cousin Joseph of Amrimathea, and while doing so, particularly blessed that
Island. Flimsy for a historian, but for someone of a spiritual or sentimental
bent, very inspiring. Blake the visionary saw his duty clearly: to try and
create the mythical Jerusalem of the prophets and the Book of Revelations in his
‘green and pleasant land’. C. Hubert H. Parry put this stirring melody to the poem in 1916, in an attempt
to stir patriotism in the dark days of WW I. It does not matter if you are an
anti-anglophile or a raging atheist, only someone with an ear of lead could not
appreciate the perfect marriage of form and function that exists in this song.
And even if you are both of the above, it might do well to
remember another of Blake’s pearls, a line succinct enough to be any artist’s
motto:
“The imagination is not a State: it is the Human
existence itself."