Get on up!

As we speak I'm trying to work my way through William Blake's Jerusalem (the four chaptered epic poem, rather than the hymn which is in fact taken from the preface of Milton).

Anyway, I'm currently on plate 44 of 99, and I stumbled across this description of Ulro on lines 21-25 of plate 44. In Blake's mythology, Albion is both a name for Britain/England and also the primordial man who falls in the opening plates of Jerusalem. Ulro is the name for our, fallen world. Sadly, as with everything in Blake, that's a gross oversimplified paraphrase of two terms which extremely flexible and difficult to define in concrete terms. Anyway, this is what Blake has to say about Ulro at this point in his poem:

"Such is the nature of the Ulro, that whatever enters
Becomes Sexual & is Created and Vegetated and Born.
From Hyde Park spread their vegetating roots beneath Albion,
In dreadful pain the Spectrous Uncircumcised Vegetation
Forming a Sexual Machine, an Aged Virgin Form."

It's a fairly damning indictment of how difficult I'm finding this poem that all I could summon up by way of an association is this:

I promise I'll post something serious when I finish chapter 2 (only five more plates to go...)