Earth's Answer 大地的答复

Earth - Earth is traditionally personified as female (as in the expression ‘Mother Earth') because the earth gives life to vegetation and produces food by which humankind lives. In Christian tradition, earth is connected to the physical existence of humans, since, according to the creation narrative in Genesis 2:7, Adam was made from the dust of the earth.Here, the earth's prone position and subjection to a male God's control would tally with the view of male / female relations in Blake's day. However, here the traditional warmth and fecundity associated with ‘Mother Earth' has been reduced to darkness, coldness, greyness and stoniness. Instead of the hope of new life, there is ‘des pair'. Instead of a reciprocal relationship with God, Earth seems resentful.Bondage –Terms of confinement echo through the poem –‘Prison'd', ‘Chain'd', ‘heavy chain', ‘bondage' and ‘bound'. This reflects Earth's perspective that she is confined to the darkness because God is wantonly cruel and selfishly fears what Earth might achieve if released from his control. There is no recognition that the darkness and bondage is a consequence of human actions, over which God weeps. According to Christian understanding, it is human rebellion which has opened the way for death and decay.Procreation –the Earth complains that the natural progress for the ‘virgins of youth' towards ‘free Love' is hindered by the darkness. The images of nature coming to fruition –‘bud' turning into ‘blossom', seed being sown for an eventual harvest, after the land has been ‘plow[ed]' are symbolic of sexual activity.ThemesHow the human mind sees the nature of the world and its creatorIn this poem, Earth believes she is the prisoner and victim of a jealous God. According to Blake, this is a consequence of the Fall. However, Blake's perspective on the Fall is not the conventional one. He believed that:It results in people having a divided inner stateThey project all their negative fears and instincts outward into an image of a tyrannical GodThis image of God forbids the expression of human instincts and emotionsThus, their bodies become dead prisons to them rather than means of communication and relationship with others and source of pleasure.Attitudes to the body and the life of the sensesThis connects with Blake's opposition to John Locke. (See Religious / philosophical background > Blake's religious world > Dissenting attitudes to Locke.) Blake believedthat humans are essentially spiritual beings and that the body should be an expression of a person's spiritual nature. Yet, he believes that people do not believe this. They believe that their bodies are purely physical and that reality consists solely in what can be understood via the senses. In this way their senses trap them in a materialist approach to life and they are unable to experience themselves, including their bodies, as spiritual beings. This seems to be the entrapment against which Earth protests.Throughout the Songs of Experience there seems to be an attack on official religion.In contrast to the “Introduction” for Songs of Innocence, this poem introduces a more mature and polished poetic voice in the bard. No rural shepherd converting his heart’s songs to words using merely the tools at hand, this poet has heard “the Holy Word/ that walk’d among the ancient trees.” This speaker’s poetry is characterized by direct revelation rather than by the shepherds’ inner melodies, and therefore holds the authority of both divinity and experience.Also unlike the shepherd of Songs of Innocence, this bard is a prophet intent on calling fallen man to reclaim the world he lost to the “starry pole” of Reason. Man needs to return to his imagination and awaken from his slumber of materialism. However, the Bard’s call must often go unheeded, simply because it is impossible for his audience (in some cases Earth, in others fallen human beings) to pull themselves up out of their spiritually diseased state. While recognizing the preeminence of God and the singular potency of His will to redeem a fallen world, the Bard unfortunately slips into the error of addressing others as if they could be self-redeemed and have a choice in the matter.The Bard’s voice differs from Blake’s own in this way: when Blake “sings” in such poems as “Holy Thursday” and “London,” he recognizes the depravity of man and nature, and the inability of both to purify themselves without divine intervention.。