Auguries of Innocence / Blake

This article is about the poem by William Blake. For the book of the same name by Patti Smith, see Auguries of Innocence by Patti Smith.

Auguries of Innocence is a poem from a notebook of William Blake now known as the Pickering Manuscript.

Auguries of Innocence

Armillary Sphere, Belgravia Square, London. Photo by Eugene Regis, 2013. Courtesy Flickr Commons.

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.
 
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
A dove-house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell thro’ all its regions.

A dog starv’d at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.

Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.

The game-cock clipt and arm’d for fight
Does the rising sun affright.
Every wolf’s and lion’s howl
Raises from hell a human soul.

The wild deer, wand’ring here and there,
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misus’d breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher’s knife.

The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won’t believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever’s fright.

He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be belov’d by men.
He who the ox to wrath has mov’d
Shall never be by woman lov’d.

The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider’s enmity.
He who torments the chafer’s sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.

The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the last judgment draweth nigh.

He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar’s dog and widow’s cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.

The gnat that sings his summer’s song
Poison gets from slander’s tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of envy’s foot.

The poison of the honey bee
Is the artist’s jealousy.
The prince’s robes and beggar’s rags
Are toadstools on the miser’s bags.

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;

And when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
  
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Throughout all these human lands

Tools were made, and born were hands,
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;

This is caught by females bright,
And return’d to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven’s shore.

William Blake - Auguries of Innocence (complete)

The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes revenge in realms of death.
The beggar’s rags, fluttering in air,
Does to rags the heavens tear.

The soldier, arm’d with sword and gun,
Palsied strikes the summer’s sun.
The poor man’s farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric’s shore.

One mite wrung from the lab’rer’s hands
Shall buy and sell the miser’s lands;
Or, if protected from on high,
Does that whole nation sell and buy.

He who mocks the infant’s faith
Shall be mock’d in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne’er get out.

He who respects the infant’s faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.

The questioner, who sits so sly,
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.

The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar’s laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour’s iron brace.

When gold and gems adorn the plow,
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.
A riddle, or the cricket’s cry,
Is to doubt a fit reply.
The emmet’s inch and eagle’s mile

Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.

To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.
The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation’s fate.
The harlot’s cry from street to street

Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet.
The winner’s shout, the loser’s curse,
Dance before dead England’s hearse.
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,

Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro’ the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

About

The poem is assumed to have been written in 1803, but was not published until 1863 in the companion volume to Alexander Gilchrist's biography of Blake. The poem contains a series of paradoxes which speak of innocence juxtaposed with evil and corruption. The poem is 132 lines and has been published with and without breaks that divide the poem into stanzas. An "augury" is a sign or omen.

Recognition

The Armillary Sphere in Belgravia Square, London (erected to mark the beginning of the 3rd millennium), bears a quotation from the poem.

In popular culture

• J.B. Priestley's 1937 play "Time and the Conways" prominently features the lines from "It is right it should be so;/ Man was made for Joy and Woe;"
• Lines from the poem were set to music in 1965 by Benjamin Britten as part of his song cycle Songs and Proverbs of William Blake.
• The title of Agatha Christie's 1967 novel Endless Night was inspired by this poem.(Citation needed)
• 3 lines of the poem were quoted by Jim Morrison in the song End of the Night by The Doors from their eponymous 1967 debut album.(Citation needed)
• The lines "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" were quoted by Jacob Bronowski at his 1973 TV series/book The Ascent of Man about the history of mankind seen through the history of science and art
• Bob Dylan recorded the song “Every Grain of Sand” for the 1983 album Shot of Love; the song also appeared on Biograph (1985). Its lyrics read: 'In the fury of the moment I can see the Master's hand / In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.'
• A 1985 compilation album of music by Nick Drake is titled Heaven in a Wild Flower, from the 2nd line of the poem.
• Nadine Gordimer used the sentence "Some are born to sweet delight" as the title of a short story published in Jump, and other stories, 1992.(Citation needed)
• 6 lines of the poem (beginning "Some are born to sweet delight, others born to endless night") were recited in the 1995 film Dead Man, directed by Jim Jarmusch. The film used the lines The lines were recited by the character Nobody the Indian (Gary Farmer).
• The lines of the poem beginning "A truth..." are quoted in Chapter 11 of the Phillip Pullman novel The Amber Spyglass (2000).(Citation needed)
• The opening 4 lines of the poem were recited in the film Lara Croft: Tomb raider]] (2001) by Lara Croft (played by Angelina Jolie), and also by her father (played by Anthony Hopkins).(Citation needed)
• Hannibal Lecter used the lines "A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all heaven in a rage" in the 2002 film Red Dragon, as a clue to FBI agent Will Graham.
• The 1st strophe of Sting's song "Send Your Love," on his 2003 album Sacred Love, is: "Finding the world in the smallness of a grain of sand / And holding infinities in the palm of your hand / And Heaven's realms in the seedlings of this tiny flower / And eternities in the space of a single hour"
• On May 10, 2015, the opening 4 lines of the poem were recited in Season 2 Episode 2 (titled "Verbis Diablo") of the TV series Penny Dreadful,by "The Creature" better known as John Clare (played by Rory Kinnear) to Vanessa Ives (played by Eva Green) during a conversation they were having about theology and philosophy.
• In 2016, a verse of the poem was quoted in the E3 trailer for Hideo Kojima's game Death Stranding.(Citation needed)
• In 2018, the opening 4 lines of the poem were recited in Season 2 Episode 7 (titled "Les Écorchés"), of the TV series Westworld by character Robert Ford, played by Sir Anthony Hopkins.(Citation needed)
• The opening lines were heavily tied into the main plot of Alex Comfort's novel Tetrarch.(Citation needed)
• A playable character in the game Devil May Cry 5, called "V", recites the poem throughout the game during combat and cutscenes.(Citation needed)

See also

• Other poems by Blake

External links

Audio / video

• "Auguries of Innocence" at YouTube

This poem is in the public domain

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