Blake's struggle with History

[Dave]

William Blake's struggle with history


Albion’s desperate murder at Herakles’ hand
could Jerusalem travel westwards on a reverse crusade?
If
white were the only colour
outside  idle mills
Merry England’s ancient feet
green mountain footpaths reserved
for divine faces not
wind rushed boys stopped and searched and nothing found
but penalties missed,
someone dared take the Great out of the mythical.
Modern life is rubbish. (Title of a Blur album)

[Colm Roe]

I enjoyed searching the 'unfamiliars' here. Eventually ending up with the questionable John Gabriel Stedman.
Another poem that questions so much about your island's past, and its current state. (And we all have questions to answer)
Missed penalties and the Windrush generation questions current racism.
Could 'Jerusalem' (Blake uses his poem's title 'Jerusalem' as a symbol of rejuvenation, greenery, and heaven.) return?
Of course it could; not exactly in the way he thought, but it could.
There's no reason why we couldn't all live in a Utopia, but there's a world of reasons why we never will.
You often chastise me for putting humans down...I think you're coming around to my despair.
Global warming might be the way back to Jerusalem though, we'll be a collection of villages...but the cost!
Thanks for posting this Dave.

[Dave]

Thanks Colm I will never being a despairing optimist. I am quite disillusioned with all things English at the moment, though love it when I am there - thanks to Covid that has not been for nearly three years.

The poem is actually a form poem - found a French form that requires all the lines to be different - my kind of organized anarchy.
Dave

[Mark]

   
Dave. I'm not sure I understand the form you mention. Blake is an interesting topic, though I'm not familiar with this particular struggle. I do like history, so that aspect beckons. The second line may have occurred, with the later Moorish occupation of Spain and conquest beyond, assuming Jerusalem implies Islam. And of course, the more insidious current-day immigrant influx. Perhaps your subtle meaning?
I'm assuming the Great is Britain. Old England has nostalgic twinges for me. My colonial forebears are English-Irish/German-Dutch so Europe seems appealing in an ancestral way, which your piece evoked for me. Likely, the modern reality would disappoint.

I do have a query with a syntactical issue here. The "If" is pivotal to the single run-on sentence that completes the poem but I can't find the linkage that completes this - as in: if this, then that.
I'm reading: If white were the only colour..., someone dared take the Great out of the mythical 
Minor niggle, and not sure if I have it right or if it even matters. Perhaps it's the form?