"On Another's Sorrow"In 1947, S. Foster Damon points out that the sentiment expressed in "On Another's Sorrow" is the same one expressed by Walt Whitman in his "Song of Myself."
Robert F. Gleckner's 1959 reading posits the sentiment expressed in "On Another's Sorrow" as the key to understanding the Angels' behavior in "Night": the angels' answer to "Can I see another's grief, / And not seek for kind relief?" is "no." Gleckner asserts that the angels simply respond to the "right" of the wolves and tigers to devour the lambs--as well as to the lamb's "right to die and inherit new worlds."
Harold Bloom's 1963 brief reading argues that the key to the Innocence of a mature consciousness is recognition of sorrow and communion of grief, a concept that "On Another's Sorrow" gets "exactly (and deliberately) backwards."
Hazard Adams (1963) labels this inversion "carefully contrived" ambiguity and argues that it is necessary for Blake's "complete delineation of [his concept of] innocence." Adams also posits that the ultimate argument of the poem is that "innocence should cherish pity."
E.D. Hirsch (1964) also addresses this ambiguity noting that it makes "On Another's Sorrow" seem to be, on the surface, "the most vulnerable poem of the Songs of Innocence." Hirsch argues that Blake acknowledges that "without a knowledge that men can be cruel, callous, and perverse, there would be no point in affirming that the 'true man' is not these things." Therefore, the true answer to the speaker's rhetorical questions [designed to elicit a negative response] is "yes"; the speaker can, indeed, be without sympathy. However, Hirsch argues, such a speaker is ultimately of "annihilate" selfhood and therefore sympathetic. Consequently, according to Hirsch, the poem is "impeccably logical" and therefore "invulnerable."
D.G. Gillham (1966) also discusses the impeccable logic of the poem, pointing out that Blake follows "to the letter" each of Descartes' four steps of logical exposition. Although Gillham also discusses the bifurcated structure of the poem in which Blake deals with the human and divine separately, he points out that Blake makes no attempts to distinguish between the "sorrows and sympathies" of the two. Gillham also notes that Blake makes no attempt to consider the origin of sorrow, but instead focuses only on the representation of sympathy in the poem. Gillham notes that such sympathy is the product of sympathetic love and is very different than Hobbes' and Hume's concept of sympathy which is that of Experience, the sympathy found in "The Human Abstract."
Geoffrey Keynes also discusses both types of sympathy in his brief treatment of the poem (1967). Keynes suggests that the speaker in the poem offers an extended expression of the natural, Hobbesian sympathy presented in "A Dream" and that divine sympathy, or sympathetic love, is "promised by the coming of Christ" in the poem.
In another brief discussion of "On Another's Sorrow," John Holloway (1968) notes that it is identical in meter and rhyme to Wesley's "Jesu, lover of my Soul."
D.G. Gillham's 1973 treatment of the poem is, in many ways, similar to his 1966 reading, addressing the orderly, logical progression of the argument and the division between human and divine sympathy. Gillham expands this discussion noting that, although the poem is an exploration of the nature of God, its speaker is "curiously rational and experimental and never ventures into the realm of the supernatural."
Zachary Leader's brief discussion of "On Another's Sorrow" (1981) also addresses limitations of the speaker pointing out that his outright "rejection of the idea that such a mother [as could "sit and hear, / An infant groan an infant fear] could exist puts the speaker's view in question."
Heather Glen's 1983 reading of the poem also focuses on the speaker, who, according to Glen, has been shaped by an experience of great pain and is attempting to deceive himself. Glen claims that the speaker's overstatement of his point "implies his own doubts that pain is always modified by pity."
Also focusing on the speaker, Stanley Gardner (1986) claims that the poem is unique in Songs of Innocence because the initial speaker is Blake himself. Gardner also points out that the poem contains the first instance in Innocence of the "intimacy of a private reaction, the awareness of a self-report." He concludes that the poem's movement from human duty to "divine participation" is reflected in its movement from rhetoric to reassurance.
--Lydia Whitt (December 1995)
--Updated 10/31/97: David Brown
Works Cited
Adams, Hazard. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963.
Bloom, Harold. Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1963.
Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. New York: Peter Smith, 1947.
Gardner, Stanley. Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced. London: Athlone, 1986.
Gillham, D.G. Blake's Contrary States: The Songs of Innocence and of Experience as Dramatic Poems. Cambridge: UP, 1966.
Gillham, D.G.. William Blake. Cambridge: UP, 1973.
Gleckner, Robert F. The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1959.
Glen, Heather. Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: UP, 1983.
Hirsch, E.D. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to William Blake. Chicago: UP, 1964.
Holloway, John. Blake: The Lyric Poet. London: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1968.
Keynes, Geoffrey. Commentary. Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. By William Blake. 1789,1794. New York: Orion, 1967.
Leader, Zachary. Reading Blake's Songs. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.