It is one of the best-known pieces of English classical music, famous from its inclusion each year in the Last Night of the Proms. Set as a hymn by Sir Hubert Parry during World War I, the words of the poem ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ were written by William Blake over a century before during another war, that against Napoleon. Blake’s stanzas appearedaspartofthePrefacetohisepic work Milton: A Poem in Two Books in 1804 and, although not widely read during his lifetime, by the end of the Victorian era these stanzas appeared in various anthologies and collections.
One such collection was that produced by the poet laureate Robert Bridges in 1915. was intended to improve the spirits of the nation during the conflict against Germany, which was continuing far beyond the three months that many had predicted a year earlier. It was Bridges, along with Sir Francis Younghusband, the founder of the propaganda effort Fight for Right, and Parry’s former student Walford Davies, who convinced Parry to set Blake’s words to music. On 10 March 1916, Parry handed over the manuscript to Davies with
