Gabe Fine
Blog 1
In William
Blake’s “On Another’s Sorrow,” Blake explores concepts such as empathy, sorrow,
and God’s love. By exploring both the notions of human empathy as well as
divine empathy, Blake eventually arrives at a conclusion that points to the
nature of what it means to be human, and, perhaps more importantly, what it
means for Christ to become human.
The first three
stanzas all explore humans’ relationship to the sorrow of others. Blake asks a
number of a rhetorical questions regarding humans’ ability to relate to each
other through the commonality of their sorrow: “Can I see another’s woe/ And
not be in sorrow too?” he asks (1-2). He then moves on to describe how a
father’s empathy for a child and mother’s empathy for an infant are all certain
occurrences: “Never can it be” that people won’t feel empathy for another.
The next
three stanzas then ask parallel rhetorical questions, but in regards to “he who
smiles on all” ––namely, God (13). Blake arrives again at the conclusion that
God must feel empathy. In fact, his empathy perhaps extends even further, to
the “wren with sorrows small” and the “small bird’s grief” (14-5). However, in
the seventh stanza (interestingly a holy number in Christianity), the poem
seems to take a bit of a turn when Blake declares the stakes of God’s empathy.
“He becomes an infant small,” Blake writes, describing Christ’s incarnation
(25). However, although the idea of Christ becoming a child, akin to the
innocent lamb, is consistent with Blake inclusion of this poem in his Songs of Innocence, he goes on to
explain that Christ actually “becomes a man of woe,/ He doth feel the sorrow
too” (27-8). In this way, perhaps, “On Another’s Sorrow” may be more pertinent
to the Songs of Experience. That is,
Blake is saying that Christ’s empathy may literally stem from his incarnation,
not only as a child, but also as one who grows into a man, and thus undergoes
the sufferings of experience.
I am
reminded, for instance, of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane as well as his final words
on the cross in the gospels of Matthew and Mark: “My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). In this climactic moment, Christ has felt the ultimate
suffering of mortal man, and even goes so far as to wonder if he might be
spared of it. With this in mind, we can return to “On Another’s Sorrow” and see
the way in which Blake actually indicates this is most salient aspect of what
it means to be human: to suffer. Thus, while this poem does follos the
Christian trope of exalting Christ’s sacrifice, saying, “He gives to us his
joy,/ That our grief he may destroy” (33-4), Blake’s words actually seems to go
beyond simple praise. Rather, they seem to point towards the significance of
the nature of Christ’s incarnation:
that in order to make himself human, he must inevitably make himself a “man of
woe” and “feel the sorrows” of humanity (28). In fact, Blake might actually
spin the end of the gospels when he writes, “Till our grief is fled and gone/
[Christ] doth sit by us and moan” (35-6). In other words, as long as temporal
human history continues, Christ will suffer along with his people, offering all
of his joy until the final day of reckoning when all “grief is fled,” and human
suffering can finally end.
The Annunciation by Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1982.319/
The Agony in the Garden by Raphael
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/32.130.1/
No comments:
Post a Comment