And did those feet...?

Since Parry wrote his much-loved setting of Blake’s poem more than a century ago, a wide array of versions of Jerusalem have followed in its famous footsteps, as Jason Whittaker explains

- Jason Whittaker

It is one of the best-known pieces of English classical music, famous from its inclusion each year in the Last Night of the Proms. Set as a hymn by Sir Hubert Parry during World War I, the words of the poem ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ were written by William Blake over a century before during another war, that against Napoleon. Blake’s stanzas appeared as part of the Preface to his epic work Milton: A Poem in Two Books in 1804 and, although not widely read during his lifetime, by the end of the Victorian era these stanzas appeared in various anthologies and collections.

One such collection was that produced by the poet laureate Robert Bridges in 1915. The Spirit of Man was intended to improve the spirits of the nation during the conflict against Germany, which was continuing far beyond the three months that many had predicted a year earlier. It was Bridges, along with Sir Francis Younghusband, the founder of the propaganda effort Fight for Right, and Parry’s former student Walford Davies, who convinced Parry to set Blake’s words to music. On 10 March 1916, Parry handed over the manuscript to Davies with the words: ‘Here’s a tune for you, old chap. Do what you like with it.’

What Davies did was publish the manuscript immediately, as well as conduct a choir of 300 singers at a concert for Fight for Right on 28 March. The reception of the hymn, which would later become known as Jerusalem, was instantly favourable: although George V’s suggestion that it replace God Save the King as the national anthem is probably apocryphal, he and many others in the British establishment clearly enjoyed it, and there seemed no doubt that it would serve its purpose to inspire troops fighting in the trenches and raise the morale of those who heard it at home.