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."