"Sublime Labours": Aesthetics and Political Economy in Blake's "Jerusalem"

Above the archway in the original frontispiece, Blake describes A pleasant Shadow of Repose calld Albions lovely Land / His Subhme & Pathos become Two Rocks fixd in the Earth / His Reason his Spectrous Power, covers them above / Jerusalem his Emanation is a Stone laying beneath (1:36).1 Northrop Frye argues that Blake's opening image suggests a Druidic trilithon, which represents a geometrical or abstract form of the perversion of the three classes that Blake identifies in Milton and thus symbolizes fallen aesthetics: the Subhme & Pathos are uprights with the fallen reason covering them. 3 In addition to these canceled lines, Blake also stresses the notion of correct aesthetic perception and the integral nature of these aesthetic categories later in his preface to the first chapter, To the Public, where he describes his ordering principles of this poem: Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts-the mild & gende, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaie, for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other (3).