Where the youth pined away with desire.

Ah! sunflower, 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 sunflower wishes to go.

                                     - William Blake

This is a story about change. 

The above poem has always been one of my favourites. I first heard it a few years ago in school and liked it instantly, although I wasn’t sure why because I couldn’t understand it. On the surface it seemed to be nothing more than a few lines of pretty imagery, but there seemed to be something missing:  where is the traveller going? What is the youth pining for? Where does the sunflower wish to go? Everything in this poem seems to direct attention away from itself and point to something else… something else that didn’t exist.

A few years later, I suddenly realised that this absence is key theme of the poem. Everything reaches towards an impossible goal; an imaginary place of fulfilled dreams. The sunflower always faces the sun as it grows, seeking an eternal warmth and light that, in reality, it can never reach. The traveller is constantly seeking his destination, but his identity as a ‘traveller’ suggests that he will never rest. The youth desires some unobtainable goal whilst the ‘pale virgin’ offers a distant image of perfection and beauty that cannot last. I thought the poem was beautiful.  It was about ambition and always reaching for your goals without letting anything distract you from them. But the other day, as I was agonising over some minor aspect of my future for the seventeenth time, someone said something which made me stop and think: ‘sometimes you just have to live in the moment’.

Recently I’ve been worrying a lot about my future. All I’ve been focussed on is reaching after my ‘dream’ job rather than appreciating the one I have, thinking about building ‘contacts’ instead of socialising, obsessing about how I want to be perceived rather than accepting my own self.  Every time I take one step forward I’m looking ahead again, always staring into an unforeseeable abyss. I realised that I haven’t taken one moment to look around to enjoy what surrounds me and take notice of the goals I have achieved.

Now I see the poem differently. There is an air of tragedy in the poem as much as there is hope. The sunflower is ‘weary’ and wastes time by continually striving for something it can never grasp.  The traveller is so focussed on his destination that he cannot see and enjoy the surrounding landscape, or ever be satisfied in settling in one place. The youth wastes away in pining, and although the virgin offers an image of eternal beauty, she is cold and dead inside. 

I have realised, by seeing the poem in this way, that constantly striving for your dreams doesn’t always allow you to engage with reality. Ambition is healthy so long as it doesn’t become a delusion, and dreams don’t provide freedom if they don’t allow you to live.