The poet and artist William Blake didn’t get about much, but it is arguable that, as a visionary thinker, he travelled further than any other Englishman of his era. This is hinted at in his poem The Mental Traveller:

I traveld thro’ a Land of Men
A Land of Men & Women too
And heard & saw such dreadful things
As cold Earth wanderers never knew.

The only place that the artist seems to have physically visited outside his native London is Felpham, on the coast in West Sussex, where, very possibly, The Mental Traveller was written. Blake was invited to stay in the village in 1800 by the poet and biographer William Hayley, who paid the rent on a (still extant) cottage, to facilitate Blake’s production of illustrations for his (Hayley’s) The Life of Cowper, The Triumphs of Temper and other works.

The arrangement left Blake the mental space to produce his own work, too, and the three years he spent in Sussex inspired a burst of creativity, resulting in multiple engravings, and two prophetic poems, Milton: A Poem, and Jerusalem: The Emanation of a Giant Albion.

What we now know as the poem and hymn Jerusalem originated as part of the preface to the former work, reflecting Blake’s yearning for a spiritual and ideal England, akin to the uncorrupted state of the biblical Jerusalem. In the opening four lines of the poem, Blake imagines Christ visiting England:

And did those feet in ancient time
walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
on England’s pleasant pastures seen?

If you visit Blake’s Cottage in Felpham, you will recognise that his home afforded him a fine view of the Downs. Since the countryside around Felpham was the only countryside Blake ever got to know, it is far from fanciful to surmise that the ‘mountains green’ and the ‘pleasant pastures’ were inspired by the nearby downland hillsides, grazed by livestock.

There’s a further Sussex connection to Jerusalem. In 1916, the composer Hubert Parry, who lived and worked in Rustington, just seven miles from Felpham, was invited to set Blake’s poem to music, by the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges. The poem thus became a hymn, which rapidly gained in popularity. It was adopted by the Women’s Institute as their anthem in 1924, and has been recorded by artists as diverse as Paul Robeson (1954), Emerson, Lake and Palmer (1973), Billy Bragg (1990) and Katherine Jenkins (2016). It is frequently performed at significant sporting and cultural events, not least the Last Night of the Proms. There have been many calls for the poem to be adopted as England’s national anthem. Perhaps, as it is so site specific, there should be a campaign to make it the county anthem of Sussex. Jerusalem, after all, carries far more gravitas and emotional power than the rather plodding oompah of Sussex by the Sea.

Alex Leith