On the whole, I'm ashamed to admit, I don't really "get" most poetry. To me, much of it seems to have been laboriously chiselled from the perpetrator's tortured brain. Not only laboured, but mannered too, in so many cases (though I love to little pieces "Miss Joan Hunter Dunn" by Betjeman - wonderful!). Yet, every now and then, something pops up that kind of cuts me to the quick, says something that I had inside me that I couldn't properly articulate for myself. To me, great poetry is the stuff that brings my own inchoate notions to articulate fruition. It doesn't happen often (I think I was turned off at school by having to study the lengthy and turgid poems of the addled Wordsworth). The little snippet of Blake I quoted a day or two ago:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour

...is as beautiful an idea as anything by Mozart or Bach. It's a lovely nugget, a bright light to reach out to, still yet moving, in a long poem that is somewhat patchy elsewhere in its invention, but it's none the worse for that. Now Jack, enigmatically, inserted the word "sarcasm" in front of the well-known Blake-Parry anthem. I'm not sure whether he sees the poem in the same light as me, but I think the first half of the poem is a cynical rejection by Blake of the apocryphal tale of Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea sanctifying England when they allegedly made the trip to Glastonbury. Not of the trip itself (who knows?) but of the notion that sacredness was somehow bestowed on a country, just because the sacred feet of Jesus might have touched the soil, that could then go on to exploit people fully as shamelessly as the slave trade in those dark satanic mills (I come from Lancashire, where those dark satanic mills still belched out their smoke and sent people to early graves when I was a little lad). The second half of Blake's polemic (that's what I think it really is) serves to sweep away the complacent, received religious "wisdom" expressed in the first two stanzas, and almost amounts to a socialist aspiration to seize the means to transform England into a proud and decent country. Jaysus, I've typed bullshit there all right, but do pardon my sudden stream of consciousness outbreak!