Ah! Sun-flower
Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
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.
[7] (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.
The "Ah, Sun-flower" design forms the middle part of the overall layout (the positioning is mentioned below in the "Themes and interpretations" section).
"[8] A "tiny golden human form of the Sunflower, with petal-like arm, root-like leg, and hair flowing back"[8] 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.
There are many interpretations of this deceptively slight, but well-known, poem and artwork : Kozlowski[10] provides a summary of academic thought on the work up to 1981.
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.
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?
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."
In the discussion that follows, it is worth bearing in mind Leader's reminder that Blake did not have a fixed system of symbolism.
[17] 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.
Bloom points out that "Blake does not prefer Innocence or Experience" and that, "without the simultaneous presence of both states, human existence would cease.
"[18] 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.
[23] 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.
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.
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.
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)[citation needed]; or the yearning of the human spirit for the liberty of Eternity;[32] or a child of God whose desire, unlike the earthly frustrations of the Youth and Virgin, leads to heaven.
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.
He points to a connection between Persephone, who might have been gathering Daffodils (confused with the Asphodel in English tradition), before being taken under the Earth by Pluto.
Only when the "contraries" (including "Reason and Energy") in the human condition are married together in "creative strife", will a way out of repeating the same dull round over again (towards "Eden") be found.
"[42][43] 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.
Johnson[44] discusses emblem collections (in particular, those of Otto van Veen) in which the Clytie myth (see above) features, as a background to Blake's work.
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".
[45] Hirsch[46] 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".
That is, his use of the Pythagorean view[49] that, although everything else changes, the individual soul is unchanged until, perhaps, it undergoes the supreme transformation that Blake (and St. Paul)[50] hints at.
"[51][52] Antal notes that, "besides the Ovidian references, the poem has strong spiritual connotations," and that the "possibility of an afterlife" is being held out.
"[53] The Sunflower, the "hot" Youth and the emotionally "frozen" Virgin, might, then, (assuming a reading contrary to the one of Bloom, Johnson and others), be finally free to love in Heaven or Eden.
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.
