After Damon's book, several decades elapsed before commentators returned to "My Pretty Rose Tree." The first of these returnings occurred in 1955, when Robert F. Gleckner published a short article on "My Pretty Rose Tree" in the Explicator . His article offers a close reading of the poem, combined with a consideration of other relevant works by Blake, in order to argue that it illustrates Blake's concern with how blind adherence to rules and duty--here represented by the speaker's refusal of the "sweet flower" in favor of his "Pretty Rose-tree"--enslaves human beings.
In the sixties, commentary on "My Pretty Rose Tree" took off, as many article-length pieces appeared, as well as discussions in book-length studies of Blake. In his 1963 book, Hazard Adams says of "My Pretty Rose Tree" that the problem which it depicts has no solution, "mainly because desire and reason in experience seek the negation of each other rather than engaging in the mental war proper to contraries" (245). In his 1964 book, E. D. Hirsch asserts that some autobiographical incident probably led to the writing of "My Pretty Rose Tree." He calls the poem satiric, stating that it portrays a "double crime against the divine--the speaker's for not following instinct, and the rose tree's for not advocating, like Oothoon, 'Love free as the mountain wind'" (253-54).
In his 1965 article, J. B. Thompson first reminds readers of "My Pretty Rose Tree" to "allow for Blake's detachment from the dramatic speaker" (33). Thompson also views the flowers of the poem as human beings, the rare flower as the speaker's potential lover, and the rose-tree as the realized lover. Thompson argues that the speaker displays a possessive and selfish love for his pretty rose-tree, that he passes over the rare flower not out of any sense of loyalty or duty to his rose-tree, but because he greedily and presumptuously prefers what he sees as ownership of a rose-tree, with its succession of roses, in lieu of a proffered single flower. Thus, Thompson's take on the poem's ending is that the speaker gets what he deserves, for this is not a poem in which virtue is punished, but one in which "vice receives its just deserts through the frustration of his schemes for self-gratification" (36).
In his 1968 book, John Holloway demonstrates how Blake relied on the traditions of popular literature. In his brief discussion of "My Pretty Rose Tree," Holloway quotes in full a popular folk-song of Blake's time that, like "My Pretty Rose Tree," describes a lover's pursual of the love object in terms of floral imagery. This poem ends with the lover's plucking of the "red rosebud/Till it pierced me to the heart" (21).
In his 1968 article, G. H. Durrant offers a reading of "My Pretty Rose Tree" that sharply contrasts with Thompson's earlier reading: Durrant suggests that Blake uses flowers in his poetry not as images of persons, but as "representing states of mind, or of soul" (2). Within this reading, the flower offered to the speaker in "My Pretty Rose Tree" becomes "the mind's capacity for delight," "the free delight of the imagination, unfettered by rules, remorse or fear" (2). The tragedy of the poem, argues Durrant, is that the speaker refuses the powers of creative imagination (the flower) and returns to the rose tree, which, as a mere natural object, brings only pain to the speaker.
In his 1969 article, T. Olivier considers "My Pretty Rose Tree" in conjunction with another song of experience--"The Poison Tree." Olivier says of "My Pretty Rose Tree" that "The speakerof [this poem] paraded his innocence and expressed his bewildered pain"; thus, our response to the poem "includes a recognition of the speaker's wrong_felt in a smugness, a complacency which is out of keeping with the humility of true Innocence" (74).
In 1969, John E. Grant published "Two Flowers in the Garden of Experience," a detailed treatment of Blake's "My Pretty Rose Tree" and "The Lilly." In his discussion of "My Pretty Rose Tree," Grant argues that the poem depicts the "conflict between desire and duty, impulse and rules, [and] that the speaker's cowardice receives a reward that is a punishment" (336); Grant also discusses the significance of the illustration to this poem, in particular certain details "that have no verbal sanction in the poem" (338). The last section of Grant's article presents a detailed consideration of the depiction and possible significance of both roses and lilies throughout Blake's works.
In the seventies, Mary Lynn Johnson's article on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century emblem writers included a discussion of "My Pretty Rose Tree." Johnson argues that Blake's "My Pretty Rose Tree" is "an ironic reconsideration of the emblem convention," that "the masochism and sexual possessiveness which are glamorized in emblem literature are held up to bitter ridicule by Blake" (163).
Most recently, Zachary Leader briefly discusses "My Pretty Rose Tree" in his 1981 book, critiquing those who read the poem as strictly autobiographical, and asserting that this rampant theory deserves discounting.
Lisa Kozlowski (December 1995)
Adams, Hazard . William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems . Seattle: U of Washington P, 1963.
Damon, S. Foster . William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols . New York: Peter Smith, 1924.
Durrant, G.H . "Blake's 'My Pretty Rose Tree.'" Theoria: A Journal of Studies in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences 30 (1968): 1-5.
Gleckner, Robert F . "Blake's 'My Pretty Rose Tree.'" Explicator 13 (1955): item 43.
Grant, John E . "Two Flowers in the Garden of Experience." William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon . Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed. Providence: Brown UP, 1969.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr . Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake . New Haven: Yale UP, 1964.
Holloway, John . Blake: The Lyric Poetry . London: Arnold, 1968.
Johnson, Mary Lynn . "Emblem and Symbol in Blake." Huntington Library Quarterly 37 (1974): 151-70.
Leader, Zachary . Reading Blake's Songs . Boston: Routledge, 1981.
Olivier, T . "The Voice of the Bard in Blake's Songs of Experience." Theoria: A Journal of Studies in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences 33 (1969): 71-76.
Thompson, J. B. "Blake's 'My Pretty Rose Tree': An Interpretation." Theoria: A Journal of Studies in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences 24 (1965): 33-37.
After Damon's book, two decades elapsed before more criticism on "Ah ! Sunflower" appeared. In the late forties, two discussions of "Ah ! Sunflower" appeared in books by Rosemary Freeman and C. M. Bowra. In her English Emblem Books , Freeman discusses Blake's "Ah ! Sunflower" within the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century emblem writers. First she quotes in full the seventeenth-century poem "The Marigold" by George Wither, and she then contrasts this poem with Blake's, which she sees as a far superior work. Freeman argues that the methods used by emblem writers were limited, because they would begin with an illustration and then base their poetic interpretation of the symbol upon this illustration. In contrast, a better writer, such as Blake, "begins his ideas and concentrates them into the single image of the Sunflower, which then becomes their symbol invested with all the richness of a complex meaning"; thus, "Blake's Sunflower is inseparable from the idea of time and aspiration" (28-29).
In The Romantic Imagination , Bowra briefly discusses "Ah ! Sunflower," commenting that this poem "belongs to that very rare class of poems in which inspiration carries words to final enchantment." His reading of the poem is best summarized as follows: "The flower which turns its head to follow the sun's course and is yet rooted in the earth is Blake's symbol for all men and women whose lives are dominated and spoiled by a longing which they can never hope to satisfy, and who are held down to the earth despite their desire for release into some brighter, freer sphere" (45).
With the exception of a 1953 article by George Mills Harper, the fifties were a time of dearth for "Ah ! Sunflower" criticism. In his article, Harper argues that the source of Blake's "Ah ! Sunflower" is Thomas Taylor's translation of the Hymns of Orpheus , which was published in 1787. Harper's article discusses in some detail the similarities in imagery and thematic concerns between Blake's "Ah ! Sunflower" and Taylor's work. Although published thirteen years later, a 1966 article by William J. Keith bears mentioning here, as he, like Harper, focuses on sources and possible analogues for Blake's "Ah ! Sunflower." According to Keith, one such analogue is the Clytie myth and the story of Narcissus from Ovid's Metamorphoses . In considering the story of Narcissus, Keith connects this story with that of Persephone, a story whose catalysing action is the plucking of a flower. Keith finds Thomas Taylor's reading of the story of Persephone to be relevant to Blake's "Ah ! Sunflower," as the story centers on "the soul's descent into the material world of generation" (61), a descent from which the soul "afterwards yearns to escape" (62).
Unlike the fifties, the sixties and seventies were decades in which criticism on "Ah ! Sunflower" burgeoned. First in 1962, Joan A. Simons published an article in College English on "Ah ! Sunflower." Simons, a long-time teacher of Freshman Composition, comments on how she has found Blake's "Ah ! Sunflower" to be a poem that works well in introducing her students to the notion of "symbol." Simons' reading of the poem centers on the final line's possessive "my Sunflower," whose "my," according to Simons, indicates that the sunflower represents the speaker's soul.
Appearing in the same year as Simons's article is a piece by Hilton Landry that also focuses on symbolism in "Ah ! Sunflower." Landry's article opens with the lamentation that much of the commentary on "Ah ! Sunflower" consists of "crude and clich‚-ridden interpretations" (613). Landry argues that the poem is not about heaven per se; rather, it is about desire or aspiration, and the "sweet golden clime" of line 3 represents the attainment of desire, the "realm of fulfillment" (614). Landry believes that the key to understanding this poem lies in knowing what a symbol is, and he cites Coleridge's discussion from The Statesman's Manual and applies it to "Ah ! Sunflower."
In addition to the previously mentioned articles, several discussions of "Ah ! Sunflower" appeared in books published in the sixties. In his 1963 book William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems , Hazard Adams briefly discusses "Ah ! Sunflower," commenting that he sees the flower as "the supreme vegetative symbol" of "deathly cyclical enclosure." According to Adams, the sunflower is "outward-seeking natural man," who is "always seeking beyond the stars, forgetting in [his] material prison that vision is inward" (245). Also published in 1963 was Harold Bloom's book Blake's Apocalypse , in which he offers a brief reading of "Ah ! Sunflower." Bloom identifies the speaker of this poem as "Blake himself" (139), and he argues that the Youth and Virgin of the poem "have not escaped nature, by seeking to deny it; they have become monuments to its limitations." Bloom summarizes the poem's meaning as "To aspire only as the vegetative world aspires is to suffer a metamorphosis into the vegetative existence" (140).
In his 1964 book Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake , E. D. Hirsch, Jr. states that "['Ah ! Sunflower'] is as much a poem of Innocence as of Experience," and he says of the youth and virgin of stanza two that "The resolution of their unhappiness is a fulfillment in the realm beyond this life." In summary, Hirsch says 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" (255).
In his 1968 book Blake: The Lyric Poetry , John Holloway briefly discusses "Ah ! Sunflower," glossing Watts' "The Rose," and he goes on to state that the poem is a "categoric repudiation of wretched if edifying despondency about transcience, whether in flowers or in men and women" (45).
In the seventies, many more book-length studies of Blake were published, several of which discuss "Ah ! Sunflower." In his 1971 book Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes , Thomas R. Edwards mentions Blake's "Ah ! Sunflower," arguing that the meaning of Blake's poem is partly revealed in its use of rhythm. As his central example, Edwards discusses the disturbance of the poem's anapestic metre in line 3 of the poem, a disturbance that results in the production of some "rather tinny music." Edwards' point is that this disturbance in metre should function as a "signal to beware of taking the sentimental, consoling possibilities" of the poem too seriously.
In her 1972 book The Imagination of the Resurrection: The Poetic Continuity of a Religious Motif in Donne, Blake, and Yeats , Kathryn R. Kremen comments that "Ah ! Sunflower" can be seen both as "an experiential parody of false sexual desire (Church chastity)" and a poem that sets "the prophetic regeneration within nature" against "the Christian resurrection 'from generation free'" (148-49).
In his 1973 book Blake's Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral , David Wagenknecht sets up his reading of "Ah ! Sunflower" as a response to Bloom's reading, which he sees as inadequate. Wagenknecht focuses on the ambiguous meaning of "Ah!"--commenting that it could be an expression of pity--as in Bloom's reading--or of wonder, which is what Wagenknecht seems to think. Wagenknecht argues that the youth's and the virgin's deaths in the poem are "metaphorical but no less 'real' for that," that they are trapped because they cannot recognize their "vegetable nature"; they demonstrate, according to Wagenknecht, that "Conceptual or imaginative asceticism is surely as reprehensible as actual denial of the flesh" (106).
1974 was a pivotal year in "Ah ! Sunflower" criticism, for this was the year in which John E. Grant and Mary Lynn Johnson published detailed treatments of the poem. In his monumental study of the poem, Grant first responds to what he sees as some central problems in the critical history of Blake's "Ah ! Sunflower." Grant first discusses the story of Clytie from Ovid's Metamorphoses as one possible analogue for the poem. The second part of his article presents a detailed reading of the poem, in which Grant critiques past critical views and offers what he sees as a corrective view. Examples of issues he treats in this section include the proper split between Blake the artist and a given speaker of one of his poems; the significance of the possessive "my" in "my Sunflower" and the ambiguous use of "Ah" in the poem; the significance of the fact that Blake's sunflower is represented as a female in the illustration to the poem; the problematic scansion of the poem, and how it affects our reading; and a detailed explanation of the various "where" clauses with which this short poem abounds. The third section of Grant's article considers Blake's illustration of the poem in more detail. Grant's massive article also contains an appendix, in which he examines what he calls "Blake's Iconography of the Sun-flower." Here Grant traces occurrences of the sunflower throughout Blake's works, discussing possible unifying themes with later works and "Ah! Sunflower." After the appendix, the article includes a series of Blake's and other contemporaneous artists' drawings of sunflowers.
In her article, Johnson follows in the footsteps of Freeman by re-examining the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century emblem tradition as it relates to Blake's works. In her discussion of "Ah ! Sunflower," Johnson enumerates examples of various sunflower emblems with which Blake was probably familiar. Johnson also argues that the poem's theme is that "aspiration itself (if it is present-hating and future-loving) is a form of confinement" (166).
Lastly, in his 1981 book, Zachary Leader briefly discusses "Ah ! Sunflower," commenting that "the flower symbolizes the dispiriting life among days of reckoning days in the garden, watching the repetitive sun." He also mentions the poem's illustration, stating that "there seems also to be a sense of aspiration unfulfilled in the distance across the page from the mortal sunflower towards the clouded sun; or, in some copies, towards an empty space" (143).
Lisa Kozlowski (December 1995)
Adams, Hazard . William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems . Seattle: U of Washington P, 1963.
Bloom, Harold . Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument . Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1963.
Bowra, C. M . The Romantic Imagination . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1949.
Damon, S. Foster . William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols . New York: Peter Smith, 1924.
Edwards, Thomas R . Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.
Freeman, Rosemary. English Emblem Books . London: Chatto, 1948.
Grant, John E . "The Fate of Blake's Sunflower: A Forecast and Some Conclusions." Blake Studies 5 (1974): 7-64.
Harper, George Mills . "The Source of Blake's 'Ah! Sunflower.'" Modern Language Review 48 (1953): 139-42.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr . Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake . New Haven: Yale UP, 1964.
Holloway, John . Blake: The Lyric Poetry . London: Arnold, 1968.
Johnson, Mary Lynn < /a>. "Emblem and Symbol
in Blake." Huntington Library Quarterly 37 (1974):
151-70.
Keith, William J . "The Complexities of
Blake's 'Sunflower': An Archetypal Speculation." Northrop Frye,
ed. Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays .
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1966. 56-64.
Kremen, Kathryn R . The Imagination
of the Resurrection: The Poetic Continuity of a Religious Motif
in Donne, Blake, and Yeats . Lewisburg, Pennsylvania:
Bucknell UP, 1972.
Landry, Hilton . "The Symbolism of
Blake's Sunflower." Bulletin of the New York Public
Library 66 (1962): 613-16.
Leader, Zachary . Reading Blake's
Songs . Boston: Routledge, 1981.
Simons, Joan O . "Teaching Symbolism in
Poetry." College English 23 (1962): 301-02.
Wagenknecht, David . Blake's
Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral .
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973.
THE LILLY
Blake's short poem "The Lilly" has been scantily discussed by
commentators. First, in his 1924 book, S. Foster Damon provides a brief gloss on "The Lilly" as
follows: "Blake now distinguishes between spiritual love and
worldly love. The Lily fears nothing, and is ready to give her
entire self" (282).
In the sixties, two significant readings of "The Lilly" appeared in books by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. and John Holloway. Hirsch argues that "The Lilly" belongs to the group of "satirical poems" in Songs of Experience . According to Hirsch, in contrast to the rose and sheep, the lily " is modest and humble, because she makes no attempt to appear as something she is not . . . her whiteness is not 'stained' by the sin of hypocrisy but is preserved by the cleansing fires of 'sensual enjoyment' and by the divine grace of 'gratified desire'" (256-57). In contrast to Hirsch's reading, Holloway argues that the poem's placement among Songs of Experience suggests that the lily is "a sham" (24), a flower like those that grow in "The Garden of Love," the next poem in the collection. Thus, the "Love" referred to in the poem becomes love that is "sanctimoniously and self-absorbedly all talk and no do" (24).
In 1969, John E. Grant published a detailed article on "My Pretty Rose Tree" and "The Lilly." According to Grant, the theme of "The Lilly" is that "even in Experience invincible innocence continues to be the standard of the good and is always attainable in spite of the challenges to which it is subjected" (341-42), and that "however subject the natural body might be to force and threats, man's spiritual body, like the Lilly, could never be essentially debased" (345). Grant also discusses the poem's illustration, his most important point here being that the "Lilly white" is only sometimes drawn as a white flower by Blake, who just as often makes the lily various shades of blue and green. Grant's article also traces the use of lilies as images throughout Blake's work.
Five years after Grant's article, Mary Lynn Johnson published an article on Blake and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century emblem tradition. In it she considers Blake's poem "The Lilly," arguing that the text and design for the poem "emblematize and celebrate a fresh conception of purity, the purity of gratified desire." She goes on to assert of Blake's lily that "To be unstained by thorns is to allow the 'stain' of personal contact, which is the only true whiteness" (169).
Lastly, in his 1981 book, Zachary Leader briefly discusses "The Lilly," first noting the editorial changes that Blake made to the poem. Leader argues that the result of the deletions of two earlier lines result in a poem "which focuse[s] on a different, perhaps indirect, but more insidious spiritual peril"; these changes transform the poem into "an instinctive truth not for telling in any other way" (142-43).
Lisa Kozlowski (December 1995)
Damon, S. Foster . William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols . New York: Peter Smith, 1924.
Grant, John E . "Two Flowers in the Garden of Experience." William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon . Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed. Providence: Brown UP, 1969.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr . Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake . New Haven: Yale UP, 1964.
Holloway, John . Blake: The Lyric Poetry . London: Arnold, 1968.
Johnson, Mary Lynn . "Emblem and Symbol in Blake." Huntington Library Quarterly 37 (1974): 151-70.
Leader, Zachary . Reading Blake's Songs . Boston: Routledge, 1981.