The Full Text of “Earth's Answer”
1Earth rais'd up her head,
2From the darkness dread & drear.
3Her light fled,
4Stony dread!
5And her locks cover'd with grey despair.
6Prison'd on watry shore
7Starry Jealousy does keep my den
8Cold and hoar
9Weeping o'er
10I hear the Father of the ancient men
11Selfish father of men
12Cruel, jealous, selfish fear
13Can delight
14Chain'd in night
15The virgins of youth and morning bear.
16Does spring hide its joy
17When buds and blossoms grow?
18Does the sower?
19Sow by night?
20Or the plowman in darkness plow?
21Break this heavy chain,
22That does freeze my bones around
23Selfish! vain!
24Eternal bane!
25That free Love with bondage bound.
The Full Text of “Earth's Answer”
1Earth rais'd up her head,
2From the darkness dread & drear.
3Her light fled,
4Stony dread!
5And her locks cover'd with grey despair.
6Prison'd on watry shore
7Starry Jealousy does keep my den
8Cold and hoar
9Weeping o'er
10I hear the Father of the ancient men
11Selfish father of men
12Cruel, jealous, selfish fear
13Can delight
14Chain'd in night
15The virgins of youth and morning bear.
16Does spring hide its joy
17When buds and blossoms grow?
18Does the sower?
19Sow by night?
20Or the plowman in darkness plow?
21Break this heavy chain,
22That does freeze my bones around
23Selfish! vain!
24Eternal bane!
25That free Love with bondage bound.
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“Earth's Answer” Introduction
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The visionary English poet William Blake published "Earth's Answer" in the Experience section of his most popular work, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). The poem personifies the Earth as a female figure who has been imprisoned by the "selfish father of men" (which might be a reference to the vengeful God of the Old Testament and/or to the way organized religion conceives of God as a cruel, tyrannical figure). The ambiguous poem has inspired a range of interpretations, with many reading it as a repudiation of sexual repression, overbearing rationality, and the oppressive institutions of organized religion. Such things, the poem suggests, have trapped the Earth (and humanity) into darkness by restricting free love and creativity.
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“Earth's Answer” Summary
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The Earth lifted her head from the horrible, gloomy darkness. She'd grown dull and dim, and she had a look of petrified terror. Her hair was a miserable grey.
The Earth said, "I'm being held prisoner on this watery coast. Starlit Jealousy is my prison guard, keeping my cell cold and frosty. Above me, I hear the cries of the God of men who lived a very long time ago.
"I ask that selfish, patriarchal God—who is cruel, jealous, and self-serving: if pleasure and joy are chained up in the darkness of night (i.e., heavily restricted), can they really bring forth youthful innocence and the dawn?
"Does the spring go all shy when its flowers are blooming? Does the planter of seeds only do so under the cover of darkness? Can the plowman (who prepares the soil) also only work at night?
"Set me free from the weighty chains that make my body cold. Self-serving, futile, endless misery that holds Love captive when it should be free!
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“Earth's Answer” Themes
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Organized Religion, Desire, and Oppression
"Earth's Answer" responds to William Blake's poem "Introduction," which calls on the "Earth" to "return" to the way it was before the biblical Fall of Man and "renew" the world's "fallen light." Here, the Earth (personified as a female figure) says she can't do this because she’s been imprisoned in darkness by a tyrannical God. "Earth's Answer" is a highly symbolic poem open to a range of interpretations, but it broadly implies that the jealousy, selfishness, and sexual repression engendered by organized religion have crushed everything glorious about life and "Love." The Earth then calls on humanity to break the chain that binds "Love" in order to return to a freer, more joyful state.
The poem's depiction of a decrepit, dying Earth reveals that something has gone terribly wrong in the world. Earth has become pale and haggard, "her light fled" (that is, her natural glow has been extinguished). Her hair, meanwhile, is "covered with grey despair." She looks ancient, sad, and sickly because she's been chained up in a frosty, watery prison.
"Earth" points the finger for this imprisonment at the restrictive morality that has infected humanity through organized religion. "Earth" cannot be herself—and, it follows, neither can humanity—because the "Father of ancient men," with his "Cruel jealous selfish fear," holds her back. (Though Blake was deeply religious, he didn't accept the authority of the oppressive, vengeful God envisioned by much mainstream organized religious thinking.) Meanwhile, "Starry Jealousy, which might refer to both this jealous God and/or to cold-hearted reason, acts as Earth's prison guard, making sure she can't escape and set humanity free.
Keeping her in this state is unnatural, the Earth insists, is like "spring hid[ing] its joy / When buds and blossoms grow" or someone planting a garden at night. These comparisons are notably erotic, in turn implying that sexuality is something natural and joyful—not something that should be "with bondage bound."
The "Earth" thus demands that someone "Break this heavy chain" that holds her back. Humanity should be free to express itself with unrestricted "delight. Humanity could thus revel in "free Love," which doesn't necessarily just mean sexuality. It's more like human beings could be their instinctive, joyful, child-like selves, free from the stuffy restrictions brought to bear on them by the institutions of organized religion.
In this sense, the poem embodies an idea best summed up by one of Blake's major influences, the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "man is born free but everywhere is in chains." In short, "Earth" wishes to be set free in order to restore human beings to their natural innocence, to give them back the keys to paradise. But the "Earth" also insists that this emancipation must come directly from human beings themselves.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Earth's Answer”
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Lines 1-5
Earth rais'd up her head,
From the darkness dread & drear.
Her light fled,
Stony dread!
And her locks cover'd with grey despair."Earth's Answer" is a direct response to William Blake's "Introduction," the poem that opens the Experience section of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In "Introduction," a "Bard" (a kind of cosmic, time-traveling poet who appears throughout the collection) calls on the Earth to "Arise" and "renew" the world's "fallen light." Humankind has "lapsed," the Bard says, from its instinctive, joyful state.
In "Earth's Answer," the personified Earth responds to the Bard's call to "arise." All she can do, however, is wearily "rais[e] up her head," a phrase suggesting immense physical effort and a weakened state.
The Earth is shrouded by "darkness dread & drear," the pounding /d/ alliteration and growling /r/ consonance conveying just how beaten down she feels. Her "light" has "fled," leaving only a "Stony dread" in its wake (as opposed to, say, soil brimming with life). And her "locks," her hair, are "cover'd with grey despair." In other words, hair is "grey" with fright and worry.
The Earth should be a magnificent, beautiful, flourishing figure. Instead, the poem depicts her as dull and dried up, as though all the life and joy have been suck outed of her. In the next stanza, readers will found out who, exactly, has driven the Earth to this dismal state.
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Lines 6-10
Prison'd on watry shore
Starry Jealousy does keep my den
Cold and hoar
Weeping o'er
I hear the Father of the ancient men -
Lines 11-15
Selfish father of men
Cruel, jealous, selfish fear
Can delight
Chain'd in night
The virgins of youth and morning bear. -
Lines 16-20
Does spring hide its joy
When buds and blossoms grow?
Does the sower?
Sow by night?
Or the plowman in darkness plow? -
Lines 21-25
Break this heavy chain,
That does freeze my bones around
Selfish! vain!
Eternal bane!
That free Love with bondage bound.
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“Earth's Answer” Symbols
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Tending the Land
In the fourth stanza, the Earth asks a series of pointed rhetorical questions: whether spring "hide[s] its joy" when the flowers bloom, whether the "sower" can only plant seeds "by night," and whether the "plowman" can turn the fields in "in darkness."
Again, these questions are all rhetorical: the answer to each is no. These questions are also symbolic: they represent the idea that sexuality is entirely natural, and thus that it shouldn't have to be shrouded in darkness and shame.
The poem implies that it's just as absurd for people to hide their desire as it is for spring to be embarrassed about "buds and blossoms" blooming (an image with intentionally erotic undertones). Likewise, a sower (someone who plants seeds) and a plowman (someone who prepares the soil for planting) would never be expected to do their work secretly—so why should sexuality, which is just as natural, be oppressed?
Sex, love, and desire, in other words, are part of the instinctive rhythms of life. And, like the work of the sower and the plowman, these feelings play a vital role in bringing new life into the world.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“Earth's Answer” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration adds intensity and emphasis to the poem, making the Earth's plea for freedom sound all the more compelling.
The first stanza is packed with /d/ alliteration: "darkness dread & drear," "dread" (again), and "despair." These thudding sounds are like hammers pounding throughout the poem, conveying the immense weight holding the Earth down. Broader consonance, highlighted below, adds to the effect:
Earth rais'd up her head,
From the darkness dread & drear.
Her light fled,
Stony dread!
And her locks cover'd with grey despair.These /d/ sounds have a dull, punishing insistence. The many guttural /r/ sounds in these lines (as in "dread & drear") add a low growl to the lines as well.
Alliteration adds yet more rhetorical power to the Earth's speech in the second-to-last stanza. In line 17, for example, the bold /b/ alliteration of "buds and blossoms" help to capture the sudden, vibrant beauty of spring. In the next lines, the alliteration of "Sower"/"sow" and "plowman/"plow" elevates the poem's language—and, thus, add power to the Earth's argument. Note that these are also examples of the device known as polyptoton, which links both characters (the "Sower" and the "plowman") with the action they perform (sowing and plowing). This emphasizes that such work (and the sexuality, freedom, creativity, etc. it represents) is entirely natural.
In the final stanza, the alliteration of booming /b/ sounds intensify the Earth's call to be freed:
Break this heavy chain,
That does freeze my bones around
Selfish! vain!
Eternal bane!
That free Love with bondage bound.- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Asyndeton
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Personification
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Rhetorical Question
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Repetition
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"Earth's Answer" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Drear
- Den
- Hoar
- O'er
- Father of the ancient men
- Bear
- Sower
- Plowman
- Vain
- Bane
- Free Love
- Bondage bound
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Dull and gloomy.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Earth's Answer”
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Form
"Earth's Answer" contains five quintains, or five-line stanzas. Each stanza has the same (or very similar) rhyme scheme and metrical pattern, which lends the poem some internal consistency.
The poem is mostly a speech made by the personified Earth, who laments the way in which she has been imprisoned by "the Father of the ancient men." Stanza 1 sets the scene, while the rest of the poem is in the Earth's voice.
This poem is also a response to the "Introduction" that appears just before it in Blake's Songs of Experience, in which a Bard (a poet) calls on the Earth to "return" and "renew" the world's "fallen light." Here, the Earth answers that call. As such, there is some formal symmetry between these two poems: both use quintains, a similar metrical shape and rhyme scheme, and recurring images (like the "watry shore" that keeps the Earth locked up).
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Meter
"Earth's Answer" has an unusual meter within its stanzas, though all of its stanzas generally follow the same pattern:
- The first line in each stanza has three stressed beats, the second line has four stresses, the third has two stresses, the fourth has two stresses, and the fifth has four stresses.
- Those stressed beats don't always appear in the same places in each line, though the lines themselves have around the same number of syllables.
Here's how that looks in the first stanza:
Earth rais'd up her head, [three stresses]
From the darkness dread & drear. [four stresses]
Her light fled, [two stresses]
Stony dread! [two stresses]
And her locks cover'd with grey despair. [four stresses]The next stanza uses the same three, four, two, two, four pattern:
Prison'd on watry shore
Starry Jealousy does keep my den
Cold and hoar
Weeping o'er
I hear the Father of the ancient menThis lends the poem some internal structure and consistency. The stanzas get shorter in their middle two lines, perhaps evoking the constricting of the Earth in chains. This also slows the poem down, drawing out the Earth's suffering.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Earth's Answer" has a semi-regular rhyme scheme. Stanzas 1, 2, and three all follow the same pattern (with new rhyme sounds introduced in each stanza):
ABAAB
Stanzas 3 and 4 break the pattern, however. Here's the rhyme scheme of stanza 3:
ABCCB
Note that the "A" rhyme here repeats the "B" rhyme sound from the previous stanza ("men" in stanza 3 rhymes with "den" and "men" from stanza 2).
And here's stanza 4:
ABBCB
That "C" rhyme copies the sound of the "C" rhymes from stanza 3 (and in fact directly repeats the word "night").
The poem feels musical yet not entirely predictable. Those quick middle rhymes also might strike readers as claustrophobic and restrictive, subtly evoking the Earth's imprisonment.
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“Earth's Answer” Speaker
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There are two speakers in "Earth's Answer." The first is the omniscient narrator who pops up here and there throughout William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The first stanza belongs to this speaker, while the rest of the poem is spoken by the Earth, personified as a female figure.
The Earth, in the poem, has seen better days. She's lost her "light," or vibrancy and vitality. "Despair" has turned her hair "grey," and her face bears a look of "Stony dread." She resents her imprisonment in a cold, dark "den" and demands to be set free from the "heavy chain" that's crushing her. The "Father of the ancient men"—that is, the jealous, angry God of the Old Testament/conceived of by organized religion—is her captor, unwilling to let her flourish in her natural glory.
In a sense, this conflict between the Earth and the "Father of the ancient men" is really an internal battle within people's own hearts and minds. (Around the same time this was written, Blake wrote that "all deities reside in the human breast.") The Earth represents the wild, instinctive, sensual, joyful, playful, loving, free parts of humanity. Traits like jealousy, hatred, and cruelty have crushed people's truer, better natures, as have the restrictive teachings of so much organized religion.
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“Earth's Answer” Setting
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"Earth's Answer" takes place after humanity has fallen from grace. People have lost their way, losing much of their instinctive, innocent joy. And this, the poem implies, is due to emotions like jealousy and hatred as well as the restrictions imposed on love and sex by organized religion.
The speaker dramatizes this by presenting the Earth as a personified female figure who has been locked away in a dark, cold den bordered by a "watry shore." This prison comes across as supremely desolate and lonely.
This isn't a literal prison, however, and the poem is using this imagined setting to make a point: that joy, hope, and humanity itself cannot flourish and grow so long as love, sexuality, creativity, and so forth are held in darkness and "chains."
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Literary and Historical Context of “Earth's Answer”
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Literary Context
William Blake (1757-1827) is a poet unlike any other. Often considered one of the first of the English Romantics, he also stands apart from any movement as a unique philosopher, prophet, and artist.
Blake first printed "Earth's Answer" in Songs of Experience (1794), the second volume of his important collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This two-part book examines what Blake called "the two contrary states of the human soul." Many of the poems in Songs of Innocence have a counterpart in Songs of Experience, a twin poem that reads the same subjects from a new perspective.
Blake conceived most of these poems not just as text, but as illuminated manuscripts in which images deepen (and sometimes complicate or contradict) the meanings of the words. Blake designed, engraved, printed, painted, and published these works himself, using a technique he called the "infernal method." In this process, he painted his poems and pictures on copper plates with a resilient ink, then burned away the excess copper in a bath of acid—the opposite of the process most engravers used. But then, Blake often did the opposite of what other people did, believing that it was his role to "reveal the infinite that was hid" by custom and falsehood.
"Earth's Answer" is a direct response to the first poem of Songs of Experience, appropriately called "Introduction." In that poem, the speaker calls on the Earth to restore herself to her former glory and "arise," filling the world with light. While this pair of poems has confounded critics and readers ever since their publication, most agree on their basic gist: the world has become too restrictive/oppressive and needs liberating.
While Blake was never widely known during his lifetime, he has become one of the most famous and beloved of poets since his death, and writers from Allen Ginsberg to Olga Tokarczuk to Philip Pullman claim him as a major influence.
Historical Context
William Blake was a deeply religious man, but he was highly critical of organized religion. He was born to a family of Dissenters, a group of English Protestants who broke away from and rebelled against the Church of England (and instilled in Blake an early distrust of the religious status quo). He generally saw top-down religious structures as getting in the way of a direct relationship between humanity and God.
To Blake, the whole world was infused with divinity, which people could see if only they opened their eyes to the "infinite that was hid" behind the illusions of custom and daily life. In this, he (like many of his Romantic contemporaries) rebelled against the rationalistic worldviews of 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers. He also held the view that deities/mythological figures existed only in the human mind (but were nevertheless real).
Though a committed Christian, Blake's views were highly unorthodox for the time. He believed that organized religion was, for the most part, teaching humanity to deny its instinctive, natural, expressive, and beautiful state of being. This poem is thus a call to arms—to both individual people and society en masse—to think beyond the "mind-forg'd manacles" that keep humanity in chains.
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More “Earth's Answer” Resources
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External Resources
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Blake's Artwork for Earth's Answer — Check out the poem as originally set out by Blake.
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Songs of Innocence and of Experience — Check out the full book as Blake originally published it, including his beautiful artwork.
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Blake's Biography — Learn more about Blake's life and work via the website of the British Library.
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Blake's Radicalism — An excerpt from a documentary in which writer Iain Sinclair discusses Blake's radicalism.
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A Blake Documentary — Listen to Blake scholars discussing the poet's life and work.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Blake
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