What are the "dark Satanic mills" in Blake's Jerusalem?

Question

The short poem Jerusalem by William Blake - not to be confused with his much longer epic poem of the same title; I'm talking about the "did those feet in ancient times" one - contains the following lines:

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

What are the "dark Satanic Mills"?

The obvious, and most literal, interpretation would be that they're meant to be the industrial mills which were appearing all over England around the time Blake wrote this poem, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But I've heard other theories, such as that they're meant to represent churches (Blake was a "radical Christian" who had little time for the established church) or even the academic institutions of Oxford and Cambridge. I'm interested in seeing evidence for different interpretations here.

Answer 1

To approach this question, it's worth looking at the entirety of the passage that precedes it:

The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible; but when the New Age is at leisure to pronounce, all will be set right, and those grand works of the more ancient, and consciously and professedly Inspired men will hold their proper rank, and the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakspeare and Milton were both curb’d by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword.

Rouse up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the Camp, the Court, and the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress mental, and prolong corporeal war. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works, or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works: believe Christ and His Apostles that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever, in Jesus our Lord.

Blake contrasts Graeco-Roman ideals to Judaeo-Christian ones. The arts of the classical world are inspired by the muses, i.e., the daughters of Mnemosyne, the Greek personification of memory. Something that relies on memory is by definition a recapitulation, i.e., not new and fresh. Blake seeks to institute radically new art that would be rooted in imagination rather than memory. This imagination would be inspired by the eternal world of Jerusalem. Even though Jerusalem itself is obviously old in a temporal sense, because Christian truth is eternal, it is always radically new. So when Blake says he will not rest

Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land

it's not so much a rebuilding of something that was once there, as a recapturing of the radical, eternal promise of Christianity.

Blake's own answer to the question he asks in the lines you quote is obviously "yes": England, too, shared God's presence and it too has been, is, and can be Jerusalem. The present state of England is fallen and corrupt, much as Shakespeare's and Milton's poetry is. But even among the Satanic mills of current-day England, Jerusalem lives on eternally.

So what are these satanic mills? In Blake's contemporary context, they're obviously the mills of the Industrial Revolution. But there's also a contrast between these satanic mills and the divine mill; proverbially, God's mill grinds slow but sure.

Against the rapidity of factory life in late 18th C England, Blake posits the slow workings of eternity. Just as God's face once shone on what are now clouded hills, the mills of London obscure what was once Jerusalem. Nevertheless, those mills, being Satanic, are just part of temporality, and mere excrescences on the eternal truth of Christianity.

From this perspective, it makes sense to see the mills as actual mills. I'm sure Blake would agree that the churches of his day were part of the temporal corruption of the eternal truth of Christianity; nevertheless, there's no warrant for saying that the mills are not straightforwardly mills.

Answer 2

I agree with @verbose, there is no reason to assume Blake didn't mean mills or factories when he said Mills. If drawing a parallel to churches does exist it is fairly subtle.

Here's another way to look at this. Good poetry is evocative. Imagine you are Blake writing contemporaneously. You are probably smart enough to draw parallels between churches and mills - not least as physical structures and places where humans congregate. And he would also know that some of his readers were also capable of drawing such connotations.

Obviously poetry in general contains suggestive references and metaphors, Blake's work is no different. Blake writes of mills and churches in his other works - especially The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake was also critical of the Church.

It would be a convenient veil to talk of 'Mills', which could be criticised for invading the countryside, when you actually wanted to criticise the Church.

I think based on this we have a scenario where Blake was aware that talking about mills juxtaposed with religious and spiritual references would be suggestive enough to lead some people to think also of churches. At the very least describing Mills as Satanic conjures up thoughts of worship. How far Blake wanted to take that is open for debate.

Answer 3

From Verbose's answer: "In Blake's contemporary context, they're obviously the mills of the Industrial Revolution"

Hardly.

In 1804 there were no mill towns and very few mills in towns: the image conjured up in the popular imagination by the expression "Dark Satanic Mills", of tens of factories belching out smoke and turning the sky dark, is not one any human being would even have imagined in 1804. Such landscapes only started to appear circa 1840s.

Arkwright and others built coal-powered mills starting in the 1770s. These were not the first powered mills: mills powered by rivers, wind or animals had existed for centuries. Invariably the new coal-powered variety were stand-alone "plants" built in the countryside, particularly close to canals so that large quantities of coal could be delivered to them cheaply - roads at the time were few and usually just dirt tracks, and the canals were a crucial factor in ushering in the industrial revolution, a kind of superhighway between coal mines, the new powered mills and the hubs of production of raw materials and of consumption.

These coal-powered mills were surrounded by countryside. Working conditions were generally better than in the later intense phase of the industrial revolution, and wages were much better than for hard and unhealthy agricultural work.

By "Dark Satanic Mills" Blake thus unquestionably means the churches of the Established Church (Church of England). They were "dark" and "satanic" because, as Blake saw it, their primary function was to suppress the natural cravings for truth and freedom of the ordinary people whose lives they blighted, with "mind-forged manacles".

This is a powerful expression, precisely because of the metaphor of mills: by 1804 someone like Blake would have been able to observe the new industrial mills in operation. It is important to understand that there is no evidence for explicit or even implicit criticism of the industrial culture they were to usher in in Blake's writing: he did not foresee this. Most people lived a precarious hand-to-mouth existence in the fields in Britain then, working very long and hard days and enlisting the labour of small children at times of intense agricultural activity: similar working conditions in the mills did not single out the mills as uniquely egregious. Life for most people was egregious.

What Blake did observe, however, is that mills churned out vast quantities of products, all of them alike, and this is the force of the metaphor: churches similarly churned out souls, stripped, as he sees it, of the aspirations and individuality which are human beings' spiritual birthright.