What is the real significance of this William Blake poem?

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I am a William Blake fan and his poems touch me deeply.

This particular poem will resonate with those who have experienced Oneness, or glimpses of Oneness.

It is all about the feelings that one experiences in those moments. That timeless infinite moment where time does not exist, and all becomes One.

Line 1. The sensing of the All when contemplating one tiny aspect, such as a grain of sand.

Line 2. Heaven (blissful joy), while seemingly contemplating a small part of creation (a wild flower), but experiencing and becoming One with it and with All.

Line 3 and 4. Infinity and Eternity. This is a description of the feeling we have when we have moved into the Timeless moment. Infinity and Eternity both lie outside the realms of Time, and can only be known and experienced in that space.

In my humble opinion that is what he is trying to describe here. He has described very well, something that really is quite indescribable and can really only be experienced, rather than written about.

Just a personal viewpoint.

Namaste

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When dealing with Blake it is often useful to remember that he was mad by any normal definition of the term. Blake saw things that were not there, and believed he was channeling messages from various demons and spirits (though he wouldn't have used the term channeling). What is interesting about Blake is that he was at least partially aware that his visions and auditory hallucinations weren't real; he was certainly sufficiently in control of his insanity to live an almost normal life. (Though nudism in central London was pushing the envelope even for the eighteenth century). Something which is visibly beautiful (a rose) is carrying some kind of a hidden infection (the worm). Somehow this infection is the result of pleasure (crimson joy), in fact there is some sense in which it is love which is causing the damage (dark secret love). Imagine yourself in a dream where everything looks wonderful, but you just 'know' it is all somehow totally wrong. Blake has created a poem which is distilled paranoia. It probably isn't sensible to talk about what such a poem 'means' (if paranoia would 'mean' something - if you could get a handle on it - it wouldn't be so bad). This poem isn't there to mean, it is there to do something. The poem is what paranoia feels like. That is what it is about.

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RE:

What is the real significance of this William Blake poem?

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

-- William Blake

What does that mean to you, in a metaphysical sense?

Blake (who wrote 100 years or more before Robert Frost) called this poem "Auguries of Innocence," I believe.

To me, the poem says that if we can recover the innocence of our original selves -- if the cynical, discouraged or guilt-haunted adult can "become like a little child" again -- in Jesus's words -- the world will seem infinite and timeless to us.

Recover your original innocence, Blake is saying, and looking at a wildflower will give you a taste of heaven.

There's a Bob Dylan song from the 1960s, probably written under the influence of drugs, that has basically the same message. It's called "Gates of Eden."

When you can get back inside the "Gates of Eden" and recover your original innocence, Dylan's lyrics suggest, the world's problems -- war, injustice, intolerance, hypocrisy and the like -- fade away, and existence is holy and beautiful.

I think that was Blake's vision, too, although Blake's half-gnostic, half-antinomian metaphysics was probably even more complicated that Bob Dylan's.

I disagree with those who read this poem as an intimation of mortality, as some kind of elegy for the fleetingness of life -- a la the Book of Ecclesiastes, or a la Frost's comment that "nothing gold can stay."

Blake as a thinker doesn't generally deny mortality, but there's no mention of it at all in this verse. Nor is there any mention of Jesus.

For better or worse, Blake's vision in this poem is not epicurean or stoic, not focused on the inherent changeability of the universe. It's not focused on salvation through acceptance of Christ, at least Blake isn't talking about that.

It's also not fundamentally concerned with the inevitability of death and suffering -- as, say, Frost's poems and the Buddha's teachings are.

Blake here is celebrating the mystical sense of bliss that can arise from achieving oneness with the moment. "To hold infinity in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour."

It's about mortality and the small place we as individuals take up in the vastness of the Universe and how we live most in the moments that resonate and have special meaning for us.

Reminds me a bit of this poem.

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the pipe,

Throughout the sensual world proclaim:

One crowded hour of glorious life,

Is worth an age without a name!"

- Thomas Osbert Mordaunt (1730-1809)

"One crowded hour of glorious life" means to me those times when we truly are alive with every fibre of our beings.

I think i'm waffling.

I'll stop now.

This is an expression of the art of seeing clearly and its significance is the intimate relationship between one who can contemplate in that place where its roots are bedded.

If it is true that the Infinitely small and the Infinitely large encompass the same space as I have experienced it, I believe it is a reflection of that moment of clarity that comes often to the artist, poet, seer, awakened dreamer.

I agree with Jill E.....and can only add my personal perspective

The words behind the words....as I see them

My take

At one and not in conflict with the universe

You know your place and are OK with that...and where you are supposed to be

At this moment

Life is a moment in time

A life is a collection of moments in time

To recognize that all things point to the Creator of heaven and earth and the giver of life and hope.

Jesus Christ referred many times to the things created by His Father.Jehovah.

He also gives all humankind who would put faith in Him the opportunity for everlasting life in a paradise earth.

its sounds like a rip off of a robert frost poem. I would say that life is fleeting, and you can only be young for so long, before you have to grow up and your innocence is shattered.

Robert frost

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

hhmm, i get from it, its about living life now, as it is, but tho you see what is with your eyes, and feel with your hands,,maybe you shoudl still try to' see' more behind those too, as that is what life is

theres more to life than just what we see and have now