Sorry, ladies
Sir: Richard Cockett (Arts, 10 September) must have been too obsessed with the inanities of the last night of the Proms to check with the office library. Elgar was not a viscount, but a baronet; the Poet Laure- ate Robert Bridges was never Sir Robert; and it was Hugh Gaitskell not Clement Attlee whom Nye Bevan described as 'a
desiccated calculating machine'.
Otherwise, he and I can agree that Blake's 'And did those feet' means the opposite of what the WIs, bless their good works, think it means. He sees the `dark Satanic mills' as the munition factories of the Napoleonic wars and, symbolically, the growing shadow of Benthamite rationalism.
The late F.W. Bateson, Oxford scholar and Blake expert, claimed that Blake's mills were, based on his use of the word `mills' elsewhere, the 'mills of God', i.e. the deca- dent Anglican Churches of his time, with their emasculating taboo on sexual freedom.
So the poem is an attack on the Anglican Church and a call for sexual freedom, i.e. Jerusalem — 'Bring me my bow of burning gold', a phrase Freud would have had no difficulty with. Sony, ladies.
Keith Brace
Greenbank, Frogmore Road, Snitterfield, Warwickshire
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