After reading several poems of
William Blake, I have decided to analyse the poem “Ah! Sunflower” because this
poem transmits me a lot of things such as calm, purity or
freedom.
Ah! Sunflower, weary of
time,
Who countest the steps of the
sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden
clime,
Where the traveller’s journey is
done;
Where the Youth pined away with
desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in
snow,
Arise from their graves, and
aspire
Where my Sunflower wishes to go!
[1]
In my opinion and after reading the
poem several times, Blake uses the simple image of a sunflower to represent
mankind’s yearning for the eternal and a feeling of enthusiasm for the future.
The sunflower could represent the enthusiasm of spring when all sunflowers fall
short of the glory of the sun. Blake was very influenced by the Bible and
because of this, the poem could be a metaphor of the desire to reach heaven; it
could be a comparison between these two situations. The poem is full of power;
it shows the desire that a human have to aspire. In the second part of the poem,
Blake is admiring the sunflower’s determination to aspire.
The line “Seeking after that sweet
golden clime” represents the tiredness of following the sun and so the sunflower
wants to go to heaven. The other line “Where the traveller’s journey is done”
and “Youth” and “the pale virgin” represents innocence going to heaven (the
whole work is called “Songs of Innocence”) but, of course, the sunflower cannot
go to heaven because its stuck on earth; this may be another comparison with the
poet, Blake wants to go to heaven and he is tired of earth so he is referring to
himself when he says “where my sunflower wishes to go”.
“Weary of time” and desiring to go
to a place “where the journey is done”; here he is talking about the idea of
life after death, a life in which bad things do not exist and there is love,
another reference to the Bible.
According to Wikipedia, “two words
rhyme if their final stressed vowel and all following sounds are identical; two
lines of poetry rhyme if their final strong positions are filled with rhyming
words”. [2]
Firstly and regarding to rhyme,
there is masculine rhyme in the first stanza and in the first and third lines of
the second stanza because there is a rhyme in which the stress is on the final
syllable of the words: (time, sun,
clime, done, snow, go).
In the second stanza, there is
feminine rhyme, a rhyme in which the stress is on the penultimate syllable of
the words (desire,
aspire).
These are “perfect
rhymes”.
In the general sense, “rhyme can
refer to various kinds of phonetic similarity between words” [2]; so, in the
first stanza there is consonance rhyme in the second and fourth lines and there
is assonance rhyme in the first and third lines. In the second stanza there is
assonance rhyme in the first and third lines and consonance rhyme in the rest of
the lines of the second stanza.
Secondly, in the first and third
lines of both stanzas there is a super-rhyme “in which not only the vowels but
also the onsets of the rhyming syllables are identical” [2] (time,
clime, desire,
aspire). (The quotation ideas are extracted
from Wikipedia).
It’s a very symbolic poem and I
think here there is a secret desire of William Blake, a desire to escape from
reality and to reach the eternal life that he so craves.
Moreover, there is a Greek legend
that says the sunflower was created when a woman “pined away with desire” after
the Sun God and so turned into a sunflower, following the movements of the sun
throughout the day. This could be another interpretation of the
poem.
CONTEXT OF THE POEM
The follow ideas have been extracted
from this web page:
(http://www.german.leeds.ac.uk/RWI/2002-03project2/Blake.htm).
”One of Blake’s main influences was
the society in which he lived. He lived during revolutionary times and witnessed
the downfall of
“Living near the end of a century, born in a
period of imperialistic wars, coming to maturity during the American Revolution
and to the full bloom of his genius during the French Revolution, aware of
impending economic change and sick to the bone of ruling hypocrisy, he viewed
the events of his own days as the fulfilment of prophecy…” (Hagstrum 1964, p.
97-98)
Blake’s preoccupation with God and
devil as well as his strong philosophical and religious beliefs remained
throughout his life and he never stopped depicting them in his poetry and
engravings.
Although “Songs of Innocence” and
“Songs of Experience” were completed five years apart from one another in 1789
and 1794, it is believed that they were never issued separately, but instead
always issued together as one volume called “Shewing”- “the two Contrary States
of the Human Soul”. When Blake decided to combine them, he rearranged the poems
and the order of the plates. As well as this, any copies made after 1815 are of
a more elaborate and richly coloured design. There are only twenty six copies of
the Songs left in existence and not all of those have the full fifty-four
plates. Nevertheless, the Songs remain the most popular of all of Blake’s
works.
The most interesting aspect of the
Songs is that they represent the personal transition from innocence and naivety
to experience through gaining and unwanted knowledge of the real world, which
everyone goes through when entering adulthood.
“Songs of Experience are poems belonging to
that period of man’s development which succeeds the joyful state of innocence
and takes its form in bitter disillusion, engendered by moral conventions and
sordid realities” ( Lister 1968,
p.55)
Many believe Blake himself went
through this transition, which is why the two collections were written
separately from one another. There is no reason to believe that Blake had Songs
of Experience in mind when he wrote Songs of Innocence, which adds to the true
essence of the Songs.
At the same time as Blake’s
transition was the downfall of
“Ah! Sunflower”, like so many of
William Blake’s poems, prominently displays many of the characteristics that
made his work so significant. First published in his 1789 collection “Songs of
Innocence”, it incorporates elements reminiscent of the literary movements that
preceded and followed him. By rejecting accepted ideals as readily as he did
conventional forms, Blake created and defined a style and meaning all his own”.
[3]
Blake lived a very difficult process
in which everything was repressed and there was no freedom to do anything.
That’s why he expressed all his feelings writing this work. It was his own
interpretation about he were living.
According to “Gran Larousse
Universal”, William Blake remained misunderstood. In a world where rationalism
succeeded, he rejected the reason which was responsible of the fall of man. He
said “science is the tree of death”. He did not believe in wisdom men because
they are incapable of solving the problems they face because they were beyond
the spiritual realities. According to him, reality is not what we find around
us. Facing with the bourgeois utilitarian philosophy of the eighteenth century,
Blake assured that mankind will be saved only by the strength of feeling and
love. He retreated into his inner visions and created a universe where “heaven
and earth, the visible and invisible” established a relationship. “Songs of
Experience” are full of lyricism and mysticism, but also of rebellion and pain,
they remembered everything that seemed strange to come to be poetic art after
English “isabelinos” poets and created many sources of Romanticism. Blake adds:
“Art is the tree of life” “It was necessary to abandon the father and mother and
the motherland if they were obstacle to art”.
In the tradition of humanism Blake
meant a very modern way of thinking when proclaiming the faith in the
responsibility and freedom of man in his destiny.
He was against reason. He was very
influenced by the Bible; that’s why he believed in spiritual things. In a moment
in which rationalism was so important, the fact he criticised the reason became
him in a left out poet.
Ultimately, Blake was an author who
does not belong to his century. [4]
This source of Blake’s Ah! Sunflower
comes from “The Modern Language Review” (George Mills Harper,
vol.48).
“The impetus for the creation of
Blake’s Ah! Sunflower came from his reading of Thomas Taylor’s translation of
the Hymns of Orpheus. In the
introduction
This concept is obviously related to
the Plotinian doctrine of creation by emanation. Everything in the universe
participates in the first good – usually symbolized by the sun, the properties
of which are everywhere apparent in the phenomenal world.
For indeed we may perceive the properties which
are collected in the sun, every where distributed to subsequent natures
constituted in a solar; that is, to angels, daemons, souls, animals plants, and
stones.
This affirmation of
Hence the sunflower, as far as it is able,
moves in a circular dance towards the sun; so that any one could hear the
pulsation made by its circuit in the air, he could perceive something composed
by a sound of this kind, in honour of its king, such as a plant is capable of
framing. That is,
as Blake said philosophically, “…every
natural effect has a spiritual cause” [5].
Blake disapproved of Enlightenment
rationalism, of institutionalized religion and of the tradition of marriage in
its conventional form although he was married. His thinking was very unorthodox
because of Emmanuel Swedenborg’s influence.
Moreover, Blake
introduced a revolutionary new social, intellectual and ethical order. He was an
eccentric poet to his contemporaries. [6]
But, in my opinion, all this
characteristics became him a poet so brilliant.
Blake wanted to reinterpret the
Bible in his own words; according to Frye “the central myth of all of Blake’s
writings is the Bible, read in its infernal or diabolic sense”. According to
Boime, there is also visual imagery relating to vegetation that it’s may be
linked with Jesus’s parables. He also points that the images of vegetation from
Blake’s illustrations are “visual metaphors related to ideas of
renewal”.
The French Revolution was an
important event in Blake’s poetry; that’s why at this moment Blake published
“Songs of Innocence”, a series of poems in which one can see that Revolution had
begun to turn savage. This darker vision of the Revolution and the
discouragement at the outcome of the promising revolution are translated in this
work. We cannot forget he saw the violence of this period, which scared many of
his contemporaries as a cleansing force that would sweep away the corrupt.
[7]
Finally, “Ah! Sunflower” is a very
famous work and it represents a very important moment in Blake’s life as all
poems that are enclosed in “Songs of Innocence” because he wrote them expressing
all he was feeling without any consideration. He did not care about the
repercussions of what he was talking about. In my opinion, he was a very brave
poet because he was not intimidated by the general thought and expressed his
thinking with absolute freedom. His poems are very deep with many
characteristics of his way to understand all the moments he was forced to live.
They are full of intensity, he said a lot in only two stanzas, purity and
beauty. As far as Blake’s life concerned, I believe his poems are the result of
how he faced up to every moment he lived.
REFERENCES:
[1] Poemas en Inglés (22-11-2007) http://poemaseningles.blogspot.com/2006/04/william-blake-ah-sunflower.html
[2] Wikipedia (22-11-2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme#Types_of_rhyme
[3]
Biography of William
Blake (24-11-2007) http://www.german.leeds.ac.uk/RWI/2002-03project2/Blake.htm
[4]
“Gran Larousse Universal” (24-11-2007)
[5]
“The Modern Review” (George Mills Harper, vol. 48 April 1953 pp. 139-142)
(26-11-2007) http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-7937(195304)48%3A2%3C139%3ATSOB%22S%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M
[6] SparkNotes; Songs of
Innocence: context (27-12-2007) http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/blake/context.html
[7] William Blake: Songs of
Innocence, June 29, 2004 (27-12-2007) http://www.northern.edu/hastingw/blake.htm