Ah! Sunflower - Themes and Interpretations

Themes and Interpretations

There are many interpretations of this deceptively slight, but well-known, poem and artwork : Kozlowski provides a summary of academic thought on the work (something that Blake would have abhorred) up to 1981. Grant gives the most comprehensive overview of the poem.

Northrop Frye believed that the interplay of "imagination and time" is the "axis on which all Blake's thought turns.""Ah! Sunflower" seems to be an example of this dialectic, as the various responses of critics outlined below show.

The poem has three main elements of (ambiguous) 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, discussed below.

As for the Sunflower (originally the Heliotrope), this, ever since the myth of Clytie (Oceanid) (to be found in Ovid, see below) has "been an emblem of the faithful subject" in three 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). 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. The speaker's personification of an inanimate flower suggests that the soul or lover, (options 1 or 3 in the list above), or both, is intended.

Grant, who thinks that "in the Songs of Experience, flowers represent different aspects of love", and Antal both discuss Blake's use of flower imagery: particularly his anthropomorphic use of the Rose and the Lilly. "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."Grant, in noting the positioning of the three flower poems on one plate, believes that,"as a group, the poems evidently present a threefold vision of love...earthly love, poetic love and Human love."There may well be a movement from the (what Blake called "unorganized", ie: ignorant) innocence of the Songs of 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", what Blake called "organized innocence."

Rather than a desire for Heaven, the poem may be a meditation on (frustrated) desire or aspiration itself. Perhaps the figures of the Youth and Virgin depict repressed morality, as suggested by Harold Bloom. "The Youth and the Virgin have denied their sexuality to win the allegorical abode of the conventionally visualized heaven", he says. Arriving there, they find themselves "merely at the sunset." The lovers "trap themselves in the limitations of the natural world by refusing the generative aspects of their state." (See article on generation). Their "minds are bound as the Sunflower is literally bound." Bloom also read the poem as saying that "to aspire only as the vegetative world aspires is to suffer a metamorphosis into the vegetative existence". "The 'sweet, golden clime', then, "can be seen as a symptom of repressed desire rather than an alternative to it."

A theme related to this concerns creative energy (both generative and imaginative). Or, rather, the lack of creative energy that is depicted in the poem - both visually and aurally. Bloom, referring to Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, says that "the Human, standing still, becomes the wholly natural", and is, quoting Blake, "unable to do other than to repeat the same dull round over again" (just like the Sunflower). Only when the "contraries" (including "Reason and Energy") in the human conditon are married together in "creative strife", will a way out of stasis (towards "Eden") be found.

Others also think that maybe the two humans are symbols of misplaced asceticism - perhaps as much "conceptual and imaginative" as "actual denial of the flesh." It is quite possible that Blake is criticizing the New Testament view of a life of self-denial: the stinting of earthly desires in order to gain entrance to an after-life of bliss - the Sunflower, the Youth and the Virgin all mis-spending their lives, instead of living them in the here and now. Johnson gives the context of emblem collections (in particular, those of Otto van Veen) in which the Clytie myth (see below) features, as a background to Blake's work. She believes that the speaker of the poem knows that the "sweet golden clime" that the Sunflower yearns for "is known to be a land of eternal aspiration, not of fulfillment, where even the resurrected dead who have never found "Eternity's sunrise" in the present moment continue to "aspire."" Blake is emphasizing, she thinks, "that aspiration itself (if it is present-hating and future-loving) is a form of confinement". For Johnson, Blake is turning the emblem convention around and criticizing the "frustrated desire, deferred pleasure, and preoccupation with the hereafter that rack the characters" in his poem.

Or, again, as Kremen suggests, perhaps he is pitting the Christian notion of the resurrection (free of generation) against "the prophetic regeneration within Nature". Hirsch says that the poem depicts how the "longing for Eternity does not belong to the special province of the Christian imagination but is grounded in nature itself--in the Sunflower as well as in Man".

George Mills Harper suggests that the impetus for Blake's creation of "Ah! Sun-flower" came from his reading of Thomas Taylor (neoplatonist)'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 a prison: the Sunflower and the humans, who are literally rooted to and buried in the earth, wish to escape to divine eternity.

As well as a Neoplatonist context conferring the idea of earthly imprisonment and spiritual freedom, the poem may also allude to the myth of Clytie and Hyperion (as described in Ovid's "Metamorphoses") . Clytie (Oceanid), a girl or nymph, was in love with Hyperion (mythology), (in some classical writers also identified with Helios or Apollo), the Sun god, who in turn was in love with Leucothoe (or Leucothea), the sister of Clytie. Hyperion/Helios and Leucothoe met in secret, but Clytie, jealous of her sister, betrayed the lovers and Leucothoe was killed by her angry father. As a result, Hyperion scorned Clytie, who, still a virgin, pined away, went mad, sat rooted to the ground and turned (ie: metamorphosed) into a Sunflower or possibly a Heliotropium, condemned, or fated, by her love, to always turn her face to the Sun (Hyperion/Helios) as it/he moves across the sky.(Note that, in actuality, there is no evidence for Sunflower heliotropism. See: Sunflower#Heliotropism misconception).

If Blake had this 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."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.

Keith, as well as suggesting a tie to the myth of Clytie, also points to that of Narcissus (mythology) (also to be found, amongst other ancient sources, in the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid) and to the Persephone (also known as Proserpina) myth, where the "soul's descent into the material world of generation" leads to a yearning to escape.

Magnus Ankarskjö believes that, in Blake's "fallen" (see: Fall of Man) 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.

The poem is set after two events : the metamorphosis of the Sunflower, and the deaths of the two humans. It may be argued, as by Antalthat, despite these constrictive transformations, the soul, or love, remains or persists. This, again, might be an echoing of Ovid. That is, his use of the Pythagorean view that, although everything else changes, the individual soul is unchanged until, perhaps, it undergoes the supreme transformation that Blake (and St. Paul) hints at, and "might ultimately shake off the body altogether... and attain the final bliss of losing itself in the universal, eternal and divine soul to which by its own nature it belonged."

As well as noting that, "besides the Ovidian references, the poem has strong spiritual connotations," and that the "possibility of an afterlife" is being held out, Antal also notes that "in Metamorphoses the source of the transformed figures is always an outside divinity while Blake internalises it, emphasising that the source of spiritual transformation should be looked and found inside man." The Sunflower, the "hot" Youth and the emotionally "frozen" Virgin, will, at some point (assuming a reading contrary to the one of Johnson), be finally free to love in Heaven, or, at least, be finally free of the shackles of natural law that afflict the world- and time-weary Sunflower and the Moral Law that afflicts the humans. (See: Moral absolutism#moral absolutism and religion. Blake regarded natural desire as "vegetated", like the Sunflower - the word "vegetated" being used by Blake "in other contexts to mean "bound by natural law""). Such a reading would refer to Blake's possible notions of free love, breaking earthbound (both natural and societal) conventions (see: William Blake#Sexuality), and/or refer to ideas of generative, divine sex.