On Another's Sorrow

Literary Commentary

William Blake closes Songs of Innocence (1789) not with a lullaby or a pastoral but with an argument. "On Another's Sorrow" builds from ordinary human feeling upward to divine compassion, and its closing stanzas arrive at an incarnation: the Maker becomes an infant, becomes a man of woe, and feels the sorrow with us. It is the most argumentatively theological lyric in a collection that usually prefers to speak through a child, a shepherd, or a nurse.

The engine is rhetorical. Eight of the nine quatrains press the reader with questions whose answer is already settled: Can I see another's grief and not seek relief? Can a father watch his child weep unmoved? Can a mother hear an infant groan? The refrain reappears like an amen: "No, no! never can it be!" The logic climbs from self to parent to Maker. If compassion is native to ordinary feeling, it cannot be foreign to the source of that feeling. The Maker who smiles on all cannot smile through suffering; he must sit beside the nest, by the cradle, moaning with those who moan.

The poem sits at a hinge. Read as the closing movement of Innocence, it sets up what Songs of Experience (1794) will pull apart. "The Human Abstract" will open "Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody Poor," arguing that virtues we thought transcendent are manufactured by the institutions that need them. "On Another's Sorrow" is the confident thesis that Experience will force into doubt four years later. Readers encountering the poem often feel the comfort before they feel the pressure; Blake placed it last so the pressure would arrive with the turn of the page into Experience.

Key themes

• Divine empathy and incarnational theology
• The parental analogy as theological ground
• Rhetorical questioning as argument
• Innocence as doctrine, not naivety
• The hinge between Innocence and Experience

Notable craft elements

• Nine AABB quatrains in hymn-meter rhythm (iambic tetrameter with trochaic first feet)
• Cumulative anaphora carrying the questions upward from self, to parent, to Maker
• Refrain that answers before the reader can: "No, no! never can it be!"
• Pivot at stanza 7 from question to declarative Christology: "He becomes an infant small, / He becomes a man of woe."

Reread prompt

How does this poem read once you know what Songs of Experience will do to its confidence a few pages later?

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