To Empathize With Sorrow

Amos Adams

William Blake’s On Another’s Sorrow is a poem that centers on the theme of empathy.  More importantly, the inherent empathy of all.  There is a clear progression: the first stanza focuses exclusively on the first person (“Can I see another’s woe/And not be in sorrow too?...” (1-2)), the second and third progress from this “I” to a father and a mother, and then to God.  All of these “characters” are not only bound by this progression but by the repetition of what should be considered the poem’s refrain: “No no never can it be,/Never never can it be” (11-12)  Upon first glance, it appears Blake is arguing that it is impossible for one to see the pain of others and not feel some pain oneself.  But this must be taken with a grain of salt; if this poem is read in the context of the whole Songs of Innocence, a stark contradiction pops out.

            Consider lines 7-8: “Can a father see his child/Weep, not be with sorrow filled?”  Only a few poems earlier, in The Little Boy Lost, a father abandons his child.  Two assumptions should be made at the beginning of this poem.  First, that this “father” is not Father, or God.  This can be assumed because god comes in the next Poem (The Little Boy Found)  “like his father” (4).  Second, that the father initially is within earshot of the boy.  “’Father, father, where are you going?/Oh do not walk so fast” (1-2).  These lines suggest that the father is there at the beginning of the poem.  Thus, the contraction between this poem and On Another’s Sorrow comes in line 9: “The mire was deep, and the child did weep..”   It is possible that the father cannot “see his child/Weep” in this moment, but surely the father could hear the distress of the child as he walked away.  And he did nothing.  This would suggest that the answer to (at least part of) On Another’s Sorrow’s giant rhetorical question is not “No no never can I be,” but rather, yes, sure, sometimes it can be.

            I believe that the remedy to this contradiction lies in the title of the series, Songs of Innocence.  The opening lines of On Another’s Sorrow is not speaking in terms of reality, necessarily, but is speaking from the point of view of innocence, especially innocence as naïveté.  That empathy is universal is a blind hope of youth, an ideal to be strived for, but, as I’ve shown, not necessarily truth.  However, the second half of On Another’s Sorrow parallels beautifully The Little Boy Found (which could just as easily be seen as the second half of The Little Boy Lost).  “Think not though canst weep a tear/And thy maker is not near” (On Another’s Sorrow, 31-32)  In the Little Boy Found, as soon as he starts crying, God appears: “Began to cry, but God ever nigh,/Appeared like his father in white” (3-4).  Thus, what these two poems together are saying is not that empathy is necessarily a universal quality of “I,” “father,” “mother,” “he” (US ALL), but that empathy is a quality of God.  Or, to spin that in a way that more tickles my fancy, that God is a quality of empathy.