Auguries of Innocence

"Auguries of Innocence" is a poem by William Blake, from a notebook of his now known as the Pickering Manuscript.[1] It is assumed to have been written in 1803, but was not published until 1863 in the companion volume to Alexander Gilchrist's biography of Blake. The poem contains a series of paradoxes which speak of innocence juxtaposed with evil and corruption. It consists of 132 lines and has been published with and without breaks dividing it into stanzas. An augury is a sign or omen.

The poem begins:

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[2]

— Lines 1–4

It continues with a catalogue of moralizing couplets, such as:

A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage[2]

— Lines 5–6

and:

The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spiders enmity[2]

— Lines 33–34

Lines from the poem were set to music in 1965 by Benjamin Britten as part of his song cycle Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. Three lines of the poem were included in the 1967 song "End of the Night" by The Doors.

Nadine Gordimer used the sentence "Some are born to sweet delight" as the title of one of her short stories from the book Jump and Other Stories published in 1992.

The Agatha Christie novel Endless Night's title was inspired by this poem.

Six lines of the poem were recited in the 1995 film Dead Man, directed by Jim Jarmusch. The film used the lines "Some are born to sweet delight, others born to endless night". The lines were recited by the character named Nobody.[3][4]

An early MS-DOS virus, the Amoeba Virus, displayed the first four lines of the poem at booting up and the system hangs.[5]

The first four lines were heavily tied into the main plot of Alex Comfort's novel Tetrarch.

One of the playable characters in the game Devil May Cry 5 called "V", recites the poem throughout the game during combat and cutscenes.

The ninth novella from the young adult series Tales From the Shadowhunter Academy, written by Cassandra Clare and Sarah Rees Brennan, called Born to the Endless Night was named after the poem.

The first movement of Steve Hackman's song cycle, “Dream Cycle,” is a setting of the poem’s first four lines. The entire cycle was recorded in 2020 by Ben Jones.

In the 2001 movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider the first verse is read by the protagonist.

During the Rin Tezuka's route in the Japanese bishōjo-style visual novel Katawa Shoujo, the first four lines are read by the art teacher, Shinichi Nomiya. The scene is named after the fourth line, called “Eternity in an Hour.”

In the second season of the TV series "Westworld", the opening lines are quoted by the character Dr Robert Ford.

References
  1. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. "The Pickering Manuscript." Online. Accessed December 13, 2010.
  2. Blake, William (1988). Erdman, David V. (ed.). The Complete Poetry and Prose (Newly revised ed.). Anchor Books. p. 490. ISBN 0385152132.
  3. Tobias, Scott (June 4, 2008). "The New Cult Canon: Dead Man". AV Club.
  4. "Dead Man – Movie Quotes". Rotten Tomatoes.
  5. "Amoeba (Maltese) Virus". agn-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de. Retrieved 2019-09-11.
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 1986, 3rd Edition, Oxford University Press




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