Response to Auguries of Innocence by William Blake

In Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake, Blake tries to persuade his audience that less complicated, natural arts, beings, and objects, hold more worth than those things man adorns with great esteem, or importance. For example, Blake claims that "the poor man's farthing is worth more/ than all the gold on Afric's shore...when gold and gems adorn the plow/ to peaceful arts shall envy bow." He also implies that human imposition on nature is a moral wrong. "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."

To remedy these "wrongs," Blake suggests we leave nature be; we should revert back to a state of being, appreciation, and feeling, rather than thinking, questioning, and doing. Blake implies the moral consequences associated with his suggestion at his mention of the doom of the ever-looming judgment day: "kill not the butterfly/ for the last judgment day draweth nigh."

In the larger scheme of the poem, we see that every couplet is a paradox. In fact, the entire poem is a series of paradoxal images and ideas that come together to create a picture of the human condition. This idea of theses and antitheses coming together into a synthesis comes from the Hegelianistic school of thought, which is one of Blake's main influences (http://www.rlwclarke.net/Courses/LITS2002/2001-2002/LN02Blake.htm). This idea is highlighted in lines 51-61 through Blake's examples of the prince and beggar being equally unimportant to a miser, a truth told to hurt is worse than a lie, which is a principal moral wrong, and most importantly, through the example of the presence of joy and woe. The general idea that Blake seeks to convey is that joy and pain are fundamental parts of the human experience his claim also implicates that you cannot have one without the other; one defines the other.

Personally, I can only qualify Blake's claim that every instance of life is a balance of pain and joy. It is true that every being of the human race has felt some degree of joy, be it contentment or ecstasy, just as every being has known some kind of pain; be it a loss, great or small, or true misery. Not every occurrence in life is an absolute joy or an absolute pain. In fact, where an event falls on a scale between joy and pain is highly subjective. For the Pollyannas in the world, every cloud has a bright silver lining. For the Eeyores, a cloud is a cloud and is often indicative of rain.

In my own life, I can choose what will ruin my day and what will not. I can also choose what will make my day and what will not. The effects of the paradoxes in life are all about attitude. This is why I only qualify Blake’s claim. The degrees of each instance in life are so subjective, that it is nearly impossible to defend it.  In the religious world, some beliefs state that all life is pain and suffering. Therefore, we must do good deeds, love one another, forgive one another, take care of our bodies, our souls, our minds, and our lands so that one day we will be unified with that which we have come to call joy, either in Heaven with a Christian God or in Nirvana with the Buddha. Also, something that is a "joy' to me may be a "pain" to someone else. If this series of events continues where I am happy and another person is not, then pain is not a part of my experience and joy is not a part of the unfortunate person’s experience.

As children, we are taught that certain things are bad or painful and others are good and joyful. What if someone grew up under a rock? What then? They would not know the difference between joy and pain, would they? So, for them, pain and joy would not be a fundamental part of life. They would experience things and respond with primal instincts, not so much with sophisticated emotions, such as joy or woe.

Life is a paradox. Life is also a choice of how you respond to the paradoxes of being human. You can love someone and you can hate loving someone. A loss can send you into a spiraling abyss with n promise of return or you can pick yourself up and move on. What makes life and its extreme contradictions manageable is our ability to find our own balance for ourselves between joy and woe.