Ah! Sunflower - Influence On Artists

Influence On Artists

The British painter, Paul Nash (artist), much influenced by Blake, painted a series of Sunflower works towards the end of his life: "Sunflower and Sun" (1942), "Solstice of the Sunflower" (1945) and "Eclipse of the Sunflower" (1945). Nash apparently referred specifically to "Ah! Sun-flower" and felt an affinity with what he thought was the Sunflower's seemingly imminent death (like his own).

Allen Ginsberg was one of the poets who admired this poem. In 1948 he had the hallucinatory experience of hearing Blake reading "Ah, Sun-flower" and two other works (see : Allen Ginsberg#The Blake Vision). Ginsberg wrote his own "Sunflower sutra" in 1955, descriptive, perhaps, of love persisting amidst moral and physical devastation. He also regularly performed readings of the poem.

As befits a song, there have been many musical settings of "Ah! Sun-flower". The following are the most notable.

The British composer, Benjamin Britten's opus 74, "Songs and proverbs of William Blake" (1965) included "Ah! Sun-flower" as the 12th work in the sequence.

The British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams included "Ah! Sun-flower" (no. 7 in the sequence) in his "Ten Blake Songs" cycle (1957).

Ed Sanders of The Fugs set the poem to music and recorded it on The Fugs First Album in 1965.

For the passing of the 2nd millennium, British composer Jonathan Dove set the text of "Ah, Sun-flower" and two other poems by Blake ("Invocation" and "The Narrow Bud Opens Her Beauties To The Sun") in his piece "The Passing of the Year" (2000), a song cycle for double chorus and piano.

In 2002, the Canadian sisters Kate and Anna McGarrigle wanted to record Ed Sanders' setting in French; they asked Philippe Tatartcheff to translate the poem, only to find the words no longer scanned with the tune. So they composed a new tune which accommodated both languages. That appeared the following year on their album La vache qui pleure in both English and French recordings.