Ah! Sunflower

Ah! Sunflower
By William Blake

Ah! sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire;
Where my sunflower wishes to go.

About the Poem

‘Ah! Sun-flower’ by William Blake is a multi-layered poem that depicts a weary sunflower, tired from counting the sun’s progress. Despite seeming quite simple, this poem is fairly complicated. There are numerous different possible readings, and it is likely that most readers will come away with different interpretations of what the sunflower is supposed to represent. In the second stanza, after explaining that the sunflower is “weary of time,” the speaker says that it wants to join the “Youth” and the “Virgin” in what is presumably Heaven.

Blake’s mysterious “Ah! Sun-flower” suggests that life itself is a state of longing. The poem’s image of a sunflower reaching towards the light and warmth of the sun evokes the human longing to be reunited with God in heaven. In this interpretation of the poem, life on earth is a journey back to God’s loving embrace.

About the Poet

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his “prophetic works” were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language.” While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as “the body of God,” or “human existence itself”.