William Blake
“Auguries of
Innocence
from The Portable Blake
Viking Press 19?2
Once again in this section we will focus
on one specific selection from William Blake, ignoring many other possibilities
which could easily be given a holistic interpretation. The particular selection
which was made contains a structure
which has not been examined previously and
therefore is appealing by virtue of the unique and uninvestigated nature.
We'll
focus on the "Auguries of Innocence", a fairly lengthy
poem, due to which we'll not give discussion of all the lines but rather
comment in such a way that the structure and flow of ideas is more dominant
than the line by line interpretation. The sequence of the theme, indeed the
internal dimension of the poem, gives representation to the reality of
wholeness moving in itself; we'll find it easy to highlight all of the related
principles embodied in the structure of the poem. It begins with a famous and well-known pair
of couplets which will be considered carefully.
Auguries of Innocence
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your Hand
And Eternity in an
Hour.
Commentary: The first four lines embody
the very nature of wholeness and within
their boundaries we will find the seed of the entire poem. The
characteristic of the first element of a
poem containing in seed form the entirety of the poem is a very significant
structure because it is expressive of the principle that wholeness creates from
within itself. Further the evolution of the poem can be traced
systematically to the content and structure of this beginning. This
structure of the whole within the whole, as
we've seen in other sections, is the same as the sequence of the entire
creation of the universe. The poems first utterance contains the
entirety of the poem and yet certainly not
in its full development nor in is maximum
diversity, but rather in seed form. So we
begin with the wholeness contained in the first four lines of the poem.
These express some very familiar principles:
the whole is contained in the part and every part contains the whole. In this
particular case the whole contains the part is expressed in the totality of the louur lines, each of which is a partial
expression of the total wholeness. The part contains the whole is expressed in eacch of the four lines separately as the world in a grain of sand, heaven
in a wild flower, infinity in the hand, and eternity in an hour. Each 01 these parts uniquely expresses a different
aspect of wholeness. The world as a whole is contained in the part - the
grain of sand; heaven as a wholeness is
contained in a part -the wild flower;
and so on each subsequent line developing a slightly different characterizatioon of wholeness contained in parts.
Also in this stanza we see an interesting differentiation of wholeness on the level of physical and non-physical oppositions
and temporal spatial oppositions. The first line reflects the reality of the
wholeness of the physical world in
that the world is in a grain of sand, and the second line embodies the wholeness of the non-physical world
in heaven contained in the sweetness of a wild flower.
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