To see a World in a Grain of Sand and…

These four lines open “Auguries of Innocence”, a poem William Blake copied into a set of fair copies now known as the Pickering Manuscript, after one of its later owners. After this vision of the infinite in the smallest things comes a long series of rhymed couplets, each an omen, or augury, linking a small cruelty to a cosmic consequence: “A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage”; “A Dog starvd at his Masters Gate / Predicts the ruin of the State”; “Each outcry of the hunted Hare / A fibre from the Brain does tear”.

Blake, a London engraver, poet and painter, wrote the poem around 1803 but never published it; it was printed long after his death in 1827, when his work was rediscovered.

The opening quatrain is far better known than the rest of the poem. It sums up Blake’s way of seeing: the conviction that eternity is not elsewhere, but here, in a grain of sand or an hour.

Auguries of Innocence, first lines (Pickering Manuscript), 1803

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work