Jerusalem. The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Chapter III
Notes
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Blake's scribal errors, here corrected without annotation, are: 5:3 “incohererent” for “incoherent”; 16:51 “the the” for “the”; 38:37 “Of of”; for “Of”; 40:37 “conjoinining” for “conjoining”; 64:31 “frownining” for “frowning”; 65:62 “him from him his” for “him from his”; 94:23 “Chastitity” for “Chastity”.
In the present text all restored deletions are printed in italics, within brackets.
Title (Plate 2)] In XXVIII Chapters del while etching (beneath the “on” of “Albion”)
1804 . . . Molton St.] incised (Hence possibly, added at any, time)
Plate 1. Entire text deleted, both by incised lines emphasizing the texture and mortar-lines of the stonework and by solid inking of the plate. Text incised and so not very legible even in posthumous copies. But before the lines were cut across the text, Blake pulled a proof on which he outlined the lettering by pen and ink (see facsimile bound as frontispiece to the Blake Trust edition of the Rinder copy).
1:7 Albion behold Pitying] del by scratching the copper (a somewhat conjectural reading)
3: SHEEP GOATS] incised (hence possibly a late addition)
3: 2nd paragraph, 3rd line: Ancients acknowledge . . . Deities] Ancients entrusted . . . Writing rdg mistakenly supplied in earlier edition (I had simply not taken the proper care in deciphering the dots remaining after deletion). (Error noted by M. J. Tolley.)
5:59 The parentheses were added in copy B but not later copies.
7:65 Image del (but retouched into legibility in copies BD)
8:40-41 Full stops seem required at each line end. It is the Spectre who must “labour obedient” for Los because Hand and Co “labour mightily” in negation.
Plate 10 is an added plate, made to fit between 9 and 11.
10:47 Righteous] mended from righteous
11:3 anvils;] I insert semicolon in place of comma, for the “Los. compelled” clause must end here.
14:34] Followed by colophon: End of the 1st Chap: del
17:21 labour] revised in copy B to labours (inattentively?)
18:36 cry Hand] revised crudely copy B to criest ?Thou
21:37 Childrens] mended from; childrens
21:44 warshipped] possibly an error for worshipped yet quite possibly a punning coinage. Albion's children “Carried in Arks of Oak” are sailors pressed into naval service (thus “warshipped”); the six months of “silent death” would be the fall-winter quiescence before the spring campaigns, or the long sea voyage to Aboukir Bay. To worship them in this whipped condition (line 42) is to warship them in the oaken “arks” of the British navy; compare the sword-bearing half of a soldier pictured in 11 as worshipped by a kneeling congregation. (Polysemous reading suggested by Nelson Hilton.) The “a” is made with the usual serif at top right, never given to an “o”, which is made in a circular sweep. The “a” is made with a curved stroke that begins at the top, comes up to make the serif and down again to connect with the next letter. Of course an “a” can look something like an “o”, but even the “a” in “massy” (misread in America c as “mossy”), which lacks the protruding serif, has the more vertical right side produced by the up-and-down motion described.
22:10 Hatred] mended from Ratred
23:7 But thou! O wretched Father!] Jerusalem now speaks.
24:58 Dead . . . Alive] mended from dead . . . alive
24:60 Followed by a line deleted almost without trace; compare 47:1.
Plate 26, engraved in white line, portrays “HAND” in flames and with nails in his extended palms, turned toward “JERUSALEM”, who lifts her hands in amazement. The rhymed lines are incised in outline alongside the figures.
27:15 Willans] mended (perhaps from “Williams”)
Plate 28 exists in an early state (in a proof page in the Morgan Library); extensive changes were made in the picture, but not the text, before final printing. Female and male figures embracing in the center of a large flower were re-engraved from a position in which they could be assumed to be copulating to one in which they could not. Perhaps illustrating Jerusalem-Vala's attempt “to melt his [Albion's] Giant beauty, on the moony river” (19:47). (In 1977 the Morgan acquired another working proof, intermediate between the early and the final states.)
Plates 29-46 are found in two arrangements. The sequence followed here is that of copies A C F; numbers within brackets indicate the sequence of copies D E.
29:47 involve] Possibly a mistake for “involves”; yet the construction “behold the cloud involve me” would not be unBlakean.