Ginsberg claims to have had a supernatural vision whilst reading Blake's "Ah! Sun-Flower" from the Songs of Experience and masturbating. He continued to have visions (often involving the voice of Blake reciting his own poems), apparently not drug-induced, for some time afterwards, until he was carted off for a spell in a mental hospital. There, they apparently told him to stop reading medieval mystic writings. A warning to all of us that are addicted to Hildegard von Bingen!This is the poem that started it all:
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.
Verily, a sublime poem. The Songs of Experience are all about a reversal of the expected; an inverting of naive optimism (as encapsulated in the ridiculous poem "The Blossom" from the Songs of Innocence). Blake preserves the singsong, nursery rhyme structure of Innocence, but changes the image into a sad sunflower (surely an oxymoron). The image of death as the sun (the "golden clime") is an unusual one; as death is traditionally understood through winter images. Instead, Blake refers to the Virgin and Youth, normally the symbols of vitality and Spring, as being "shrouded in snow" and in "graves". This is coherent with Blake's belief that virginity was sinful, and that the path to spirituality was through an open sexuality and sensuality. He has turned the both the poetic symbolic tradition, and Christian ethics, on their heads in one little nursery rhyme. Magnificent.
Of course, I do encourage attempting Ginsberg's experiment yourself, but please print out the poem and take it to bed with you, as no-one likes a sticky keyboard.
