And Did Those Feet...

Literary Commentary

William Blake wrote "And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time" as the preface to his prophetic epic Milton: A Poem in Two Books, composed between 1804 and 1808. Sixteen lines of iambic tetrameter would become, more than a century later, the hymn called "Jerusalem" — set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916 and embraced as something close to an unofficial English national anthem. That a poem attacking the foundations of English institutional life should become England's favorite hymn is an irony Blake himself might have savored.

The poem divides cleanly in half. Its first two stanzas pose four successive questions about whether Christ once walked in England and whether "Jerusalem" was once built among its hills. The second half abandons questioning entirely: stanza three issues a volley of commands — "Bring me my Bow of burning gold" — and stanza four makes a vow. The pivot is absolute. Blake moves from wondering whether a sacred past existed to declaring that he will build a sacred future. The instrument of that building is what he calls "Mental Fight" — not warfare with guns and bayonets, but the struggle of the awakened imagination against every force that deadens the human spirit.

At the center of the poem sits its most debated image: the "dark Satanic Mills." Most readers hear a reference to the factories of the Industrial Revolution, and there is biographical warrant for this — Blake lived near the Albion Flour Mills in Southwark, the first major steam-powered mill in London, destroyed by fire in 1791. But scholars have long argued over alternatives. Peter Porter observed that many critics believe the mills "are churches and not the factories of the Industrial Revolution everyone else takes them for." Blake's own Milton describes "the starry Mills of Satan" as cosmic structures of oppressive rationality. The phrase arguably carries all three registers at once: industrial, ecclesiastical, and mythological.

The poem's afterlife has been as contested as its imagery. Adopted by the women's suffrage movement, the Labour Party, the Women's Institutes, and the Last Night of the Proms, it has served causes Blake would have championed and others he would have mocked. The critic F.W. Bateson called the adoption of this "anti-clerical paean of free love" by churches "amusing evidence of the carelessness with which poetry is read." Blake might have agreed — and might also have been delighted that a poem demanding spiritual revolution has proved impossible to contain.

Key themes

• Spiritual vision versus material and institutional corruption
• The building of an ideal society — Jerusalem as social and spiritual metaphor
• Prophetic imagination as a transformative force
• Critique of rationalism, industrialism, and established religion
• England as simultaneously fallen and redeemable

Notable craft elements

• A structural pivot from interrogative (stanzas 1-2) to imperative and declarative (stanzas 3-4), mirroring the shift from doubt to resolve
• Anaphora in stanza 3 — four lines beginning with "Bring me" — creates escalating urgency and ritual incantation
• The charged ambiguity of "dark Satanic Mills," which refuses to settle into a single referent
• Iambic tetrameter with trochaic inversions at key moments, lending a hymn-like regularity that Parry would later exploit

Reread prompt

On a second reading, notice that Blake never answers his own opening questions — he replaces them with something else entirely. What does that substitution reveal about his understanding of prophecy?

Read Full Analysis →