Blake, it seems, cannot imagine an innocent human city till the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation — in the Bible that begins in a garden and ends in a heavenly city.
Anyone who has lived in a city knows that cities are vile: nasty, crime-ridden, stinking of urine, plagued with rats, cauldrons of disease. And who has known cities also knows that cities are the home of all the civic virtues: elegant, magnanimous, joyous, and alive. These opposed senses of the city somehow dwell within us simultaneously, as they dwell within all human expressions of urban life. The Bible, for example, opens in a garden and starts with a sour view of cities: the first one built by Cain, the first murderer, with Sodom to Gomorrah prominent among the later ones. Until, suddenly, David brings the Ark of the Covenant from the country camp of Shiloh to the urban center of Judaism, and the city of Jerusalem aspires to be a light unto the nations.
Poets are no different in their simultaneously charmed and horrified sense of the city. This past June, The New York Sun ran as its poem of the day William Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,’ which looks at London at dawn and declares, “Earth has not any thing to show more fair.” Today, the Sun offers “London,” a 1794 poem William Blake (1757–1827) that looks at the same era’s London and sees “in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” In rhymed tetrameter quatrains, Blake excoriates the evil of the place: how the cries of the poor blacken the churches, how the existence of girls forced into prostitution stains the institution of marriage. Interestingly, “London” appears in “Songs of Experience” but has no counterpart in Blake’s parallel volume, “Songs of Innocence,” suggesting that Blake cannot imagine an innocent human city till the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation — in the Bible that begins in a garden and ends in a heavenly city.
By JOSEPH CURL
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