Earth's Answer: Notes

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Our understanding of Earth's Answer depends on how we interpret the questions posed by the Introduction (Experience) and the Bard's motives for asking the Earth to return to Grace. If the Earth sees the "father of ancient men" as cruel, jealous and selfish (symbolised, for Blake, in the figure of Urizen), then she is right to turn away and attempt to remain free. However, because the Earth has fallen from Grace, then perhaps she does not see the truth behind the Bard's plea for her to return, and remains, as she sees it, a prisoner and victim of a jealous God. The elaborate form of personification in this poem, along with the imagery and its associations, allows Blake to express complex metaphysical and theological issues, of the Fall of Man from Grace and Good, in an apparently straightforward way. The figure of "Earth" here, might be loosely interpreted as the representative of Experience itself, but more widely as temporal physical existence.

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