"Ah! Sun-flower" is an illustrated poem written by the English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Experience in 1794 (no.43 in the sequence of the combined book, Songs of Innocence and of Experience). It is one of only four poems in Songs of Experience not found in the "Notebook" (the Rossetti MS).
The poem
Poetic structure and tone
The poem consists of eight lines, in two quatrains.
The metre is largely one of anapaestic trimeter with an admix of initial iambs and trochees to break up the rather monotonous rhythm that the anapaestic line confers. Thus Blake is able to show the cyclical monotony that the protagonists are suffering, while at the same time giving a forward note of impetus and hope to the movement of the lines.
The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD; all the rhymes are masculine.
The ambiguous use of the word "Ah," (a note of delight, surprise, pity?) and the repetition of the word "where" are noteworthy - these are discussed by Grant; the disturbance of the anapaestic rhythm in line three by Edwards.
"The speaker begins with a sigh that suggests the same weariness that he attributes to the Sunflower (a suggestion emphasized by the heavy stresses in the song). The wistful tone and the implied sympathy for the time-bound victims are disarming. But, as many critics have noted, the poem is not without irony...the sense of timeless rest is soon complicated by the ambiguous syntax." Indeed, Bloom goes so far as to say that "the lyric's tone can be characterized as a kind of apocalyptic sardonicism."
Technique
The printmaking technique used for the whole page is relief etching, with pen and watercolour, touched with gold.
The dimensions of the printed impression, including all three poems (see illustration), are: 14 cm x 9.4 cm (based on the King's College, Cambridge, copy - copy "W"). (See the external link at the bottom of this page for a comparison, provided by the William Blake Archive, of 13 versions of the design. Size and colouring varies across the different copies.)
The "Ah, Sun-flower" design forms the middle part of the overall layout (the positioning is mentioned below in the "Themes and interpretations" section).
"The text and title appear in a cloud (which...may indicate the speaker's confusion)."Blake, 1998, p.190
A "tiny golden human form of the Sunflower, with petal-like arm, root-like leg, and hair flowing back" appears in the top-left, but, other than a blue patch of sky at the top-right, there seems to be little direct connection with the poem. Grant discusses the illustration in some detail. Leader points to the unbridgeable distance between the Sunflower and the blue space as being illustrative of unfulfilled aspiration.
Themes and interpretations
General
There are many interpretations of this deceptively slight, but well-known, poem and artwork : Kozlowski provides a summary of academic thought on the work up to 1981. Grant gives the most comprehensive overview of the poem.
Northrop Frye believed that the "merging of imagination and time is the axis on which all Blake's thought turns.""Ah! Sun-flower" (with its constrictions of space-time and its hint at creative, energetic imagination as a potential way out) seems to be an example of this dialectic, as the various responses of critics outlined below show. Another key to Blake's thought mentioned by Frye is that for "Blake,...the fall of man" (see:Fall of Man) "and the creation of the physical world were the same event." The world we see and live in is therefore a "fallen" natural world (a world of "Generation") in which, since "God is Man", humans are "miserable in the state of nature."Frye, 1969, p.41
The poem has three main (ambiguous) elements of interest: the "sweet, golden clime," the Sunflower, and the Youth and Virgin. The poem's ambiguities concerning the speaker's (not necessarily Blake's) stance on the attainability or otherwise, and on the nature, of the "sweet golden clime" (the West, Heaven, Eden?), have led to different, sometimes conflicting views of the poem. LeaderLeader, 1981, p.166-167 notes the "critical controversy surrounding 'Ah! Sun-flower' and 'The Lilly'...", but thinks that the ambiguities are part of Blake's deliberate strategy - perhaps to put doubts in our minds about the speaker of the poem (whom Leader calls "the Bard"). He says: "...our inability to accept either a pessimistic-sardonic reading of the sort advocated by Bloom or Wagenknecht (one in which the 'poem's sweet golden clime' is an illusion, and 'aspire' means 'fail to attain'), or a more straightforward, unironic interpretation such as Hirsch's, again seems part of a larger plan." (See below for these critics' thoughts).
In the discussion that follows, it is worth bearing in mind Leader's reminder that Blake did not have a fixed system of symbolism. "Many of the plants, flowers, birds and beasts in Songs are iconographic in nature, but their meanings, whether traditional or not, change and develop from plate to plate."Leader, 1981, p.57
Sun-flower and other flowers
The Sunflower itself could be a literary symbol that could be interpreted in myriad ways. It could be representative of a "fallen" human, as above, or persistent love; frustrated or corrupted love; lost innocence; the poetic imagination; spiritual yearning; or a combination of any of these.
Persistent and frustrated love
The poem may allude to the myth of Clytie and Helios (as described in Ovid's Metamorphoses). Clytie, a girl or nymph, was in love with Helios, the Sun god, who in turn was in love with Leucothoe (or Leucothea). Helios and Leucothoe met in secret, but Clytie, possessed by jealousy, betrayed the lovers and Leucothoe was killed by her angry father. As a result, Helios scorned Clytie, who, still a virgin, pined away, went mad, sat rooted to the ground and turned (i.e.: metamorphosed) into a Heliotropium, condemned, or fated, by her love, to always turn her face to the Sun as it/he moves across the sky.Blake, 1972, p.221, footnote xx in part Often in modern retellings the heliotropium is supplanted for the sunflower (note that, in actuality, there is no evidence for Sunflower heliotropism. See: Heliotropism misconception).
The Sunflower (originally the Heliotrope), ever since the myth of Clytie, has "been an emblem of the faithful subject". It has been an emblem of this in three or four ways: 1) the "image of a soul devoted to the god or God, originally a Platonic concept" (see below); 2) "an image of the Virgin devoted to Christ"; or 3) "an image - in the strictly Ovidian sense - of the lover devoted to the beloved". (The authors of these quotes have pointed out that it has also stood as an emblem for the art of painting). The speaker's personification of an inanimate flower suggests that the soul (a word to be used with caution in Blake) or lover, (options 1 or 3 in the list above), or both, is intended.
Lost innocence
If Blake had the Clytie myth in mind, then the Sunflower would be a symbol of lost innocence (or experience lacking the necessary mix of innocence), while the two human figures are symbols of lack of experience (or innocence lacking the necessary mix of experience). Bloom points out that "Blake does not prefer Innocence or Experience" and that, "without the simultaneous presence of both states, human existence would cease."Bloom, 1971, pp.33,34 The "two contrary states of the human soul" (the sub-title of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience) are therefore being explored in this small poem.
The link to the Clytie myth also points to two other major themes that run throughout the Songs of Experience and which feature in "Ah! Sun-flower" in particular: "the blighting effect victimization has on victimizers as well as victims"; and "problems...about transcendence versus transformation...".Leader, 1981, p.165, 167
Corrupted love
Keith, as well as suggesting a tie to the myth of Clytie, also points to that of Narcissus (to be found, amongst other ancient sources, in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, like the Clytie tale). The Narcissus story tells of love corrupted by inward-looking selfishness, rather than by jealousy. It may be no accident that the Youth in the poem has connections to flower-imagery (the Narcissus being the Wild Daffodil).Keith, 1966, p.58
Magnus Ankarskjö believes that, in Blake's "fallen" world of experience, all love is enchained. So "Ah, Sun-flower", as well as the Clytie myth, (where physical change follows upon a moral one), may be illustrative of divine, innocent love, corrupted and enslaved by human nature - through the experience of possessive jealousy and also, perhaps, defensive self-denial. The positioning of this poem after that of "My Pretty Rose Tree", a poem suggestive of love corrupted by (undeserved?) jealousy, and before that of "The Lilly", which might advocate an open, pure, if not innocent, love, free of possessive defences, could support this interpretation.
Poetic imagination
Grant and Antal both discuss Blake's use of flower imagery: particularly his anthropomorphic use of the Rose and the Lilly. Antal says: "In his Songs of Experience Blake relies on the rich symbolism of the rose and the lily so as to find his central flower-figure in the 'spiritual' Sunflower."Antal, 2008, p.28 Grant thinks that "in the Songs of Experience, flowers represent different aspects of love."Grant, 1969, p.334. Quoted by Antal Also, in noting the positioning of the three flower poems on one plate, he believes that,"as a group, the poems evidently present a threefold vision of love...earthly love, poetic love and Human love."Grant, 1969, p. 333. Quoted by Antal There may well be a movement from the innocence of the Songs of Innocence (what Blake called "unorganized", i.e.: ignorant innocence), on to the tragic and fateful desire of earthly love ("My Pretty Rose Tree"), and then through to the pure, divinely human love of "The Lilly" via the creative, poetic imagination of "Ah! Sun-flower". "Here in his Songs sexual desire is shown sinful, but only experience can lead man to insight, only through experience man is able to reach a higher state of innocence",Antal, 2008, p.38 (what Blake called "organized innocence.")
Spiritual yearning
George Mills Harper suggests that the impetus for Blake's creation of "Ah! Sun-flower" came from his reading of Thomas Taylor's introduction to and translation of The Hymns of Orpheus (1792). Through the words of Plotinus, everything in the universe participates in the "first good", symbolized by the Sun. Blake said that "every natural effect has a spiritual cause": the Sunflower's apparent following of the movement of the Sun is not just a natural effect, but is also the result of divine nature attracting the souls of plants and, as with the Youth and Virgin, human beings. For Taylor and Blake (who may have known Taylor as well as read him), material life is like a prison: the Sunflower and the humans, who are literally and figuratively rooted to and buried within the materialistic earth, wish to escape to divine eternity.
In addition, in the context of Blake's poem, the Sunflower may "represent" the Church of England (corrupted, repressive and earthbound in Blake's view); or the yearning of the human spirit for the liberty of Eternity; or a child of God whose desire, unlike the earthly frustrations of the Youth and Virgin, leads to heaven.
Youth and Virgin
The two human figures also seem to be symbols of something and much of what the critics have said about them might also apply to the Sunflower. They are dead, unlike the Sunflower, and yet have the same aspirations towards what might be the "unfallen world, called Paradise in the Bible and the Golden Age in the Classics."Frye, 1969, p.40
Frustrated desire or aspiration