"Afternoon" by Philip Gladstone

Ah! Sun-flower

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Ah Sun-flower! 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 Sun-flower wishes to go.

"Ah Sunflower" is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Experience in 1794. Ed Sanders of The Fugs set the poem to music and recorded it on The Fugs First Album in 1965. For the passing of the 2nd millennium British composer Jonathan Doveset the text of "Ah, Sunflower" and two other poems by Blake ("Invocation" and "The Narrow Bud Opens Her Beauties To The Sun") in his piece "The Passing of the Year" (2000), a song cycle for double chorus and piano. 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. So they composed a new tune which accommodated both languages. That appeared the following year on their album La vache qui pleure in both English and French recordings. (From Wikipedia)

"Male Nudes with Sunflowers" by Sheri Larsen

While reading Where the Heart Beats by Kay Larson (see my post Where the Heart Beats), I came across an interesting passage about Allen Ginsberg, who was a longtime fan of William Blake.  In his Harlem apartment in 1948, Ginsberg was masturbating while reciting the above poem, but "the poem's elusive heart was not revealing itself."  Then he heard a voice, which he believed was either Blake or God from the "Ancient of Days" intoning their words and revealing the meaning of these words.  According to Larson, Ginsberg saw the solidity of the world seem to flicker and go transparent. In an interview in 1995, Ginsberg stated, "And I was living (in 1948) in Harlem, East Harlem, New York, on the sixth floor of a tenement. There was a lot of theology books around, in an apartment that I had rented from a theology student-friend, so I was reading a lot of Plato's Phaedrus, St John of the Cross...and (William) Blake. And I had the sudden... reading "The Sick Rose" and "The Sunflower", I had the odd sensation of hearing Blake's voice outside of my own body, a voice really not too much unlike my own when my voice is centered in my sternum, maybe a latent projection of my own physiology, but, in any case, a surprise, maybe a hallucination, you can call it, hearing it in the room, Blake reciting it, or some very ancient voice of the Ancient of Days reciting, "Ah Sunflower..." So there was some earthen-deep quality that moved me, and then I looked out the window and it seemed like the heavens were endless, or the sky was endless, I should say."   The vision continued to unfold over the next few days.  The poem awakened a deeper "real universe," a cosmic consciousness for Ginsberg, which he saw everywhere he looked.  Though he tried to invoke the experience again, he was never able to do so. (Probably because he did not have the correct sequence of drugs or alcohol again, but who knows.)  The point is that the poem revealed something to Ginsberg.  Something that we may never fully understand.


The experience my have inspired a later poem by Ginsberg published in 1955. The Ginsberg poem, “Sunflower Sutra” brings to light a very important and universal issue. Although it was written in the 1950’s it is still comparable to the here and now. When Ginsberg wrote this poem, it was the time of conservatives, consumerism, and strong morals. Ginsberg did not relate to such a culture and instead expressed himself through his poems, which blatantly rejected such outlooks on life. “Sunflower Sutra” is about the death of the inner beauty and spirit in one’s soul in relation to the destruction of nature and the realization that it is never too late to bring such creativity and beauty back to life. Ginsberg describes the fall of a mighty the sunflower. Once a bright yellow beacon of life, it now is “broken like a battered crown.” Having been covered by the dirt and grime of industry, by human “ingenuity,” this sunflower is really representing a demise in humanity. Rather than choosing nature as a prime example for life, choosing the “perfect beauty of a sunflower,” we have chosen industry and technology, and have forgotten that we are flowers. Ginsberg berates the dust and grime which have rained down from the locomotives onto “my sunflower O my soul” and wonders “when did you forget you were a flower?” This poem really is not about a flower, but the tragedy of losing one’s inner beauty, the vivacity and brightness which makes one shine.

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and

sat down under the huge shade of a Southern

Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the

box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron

pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts

of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,

surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of

machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun

sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that

stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves

rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums

on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray

shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting

dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,

memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes

Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black

treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the

poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel

knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck

and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the

past--

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,

crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog

and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like

a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,

soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays

obliterated on its hairy head like a dried

wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures

from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster

fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O

my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human

locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad

skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black

mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance

of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--

modern--all that civilization spotting your

crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless

eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the

home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar

bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards

of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely

tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what

more could I name, the smoked ashes of some

cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the

milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs

& sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you there

standing before me in the sunset, all your glory

in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent

lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye

to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited

grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden

monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your

grime, while you cursed the heavens of the

railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a

flower? when did you look at your skin and

decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?

the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and

shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me

not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck

it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul

too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread

bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all

beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed

by our own seed & golden hairy naked

accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black

formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our

eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive

riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening

sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg
Berkeley, 1955