The first thing that struck me when I moved to Meadville was how terrible the concrete looked.

Western Pennsylvania is part of the American Snow Belt — a strip running across the skies above the Northeast US and Southeast Canada known for its fierce winters. The first snows come in October and the ground is frozen until April. The natural landscape moves to the seasonal rhythm with the experience of aeons: when the ground thaws, the grass is still green. Plants hibernate.

Concrete stands up well to earthquakes and hurricanes. Its structure lends itself well to torsion.

Cold, not so much.

Cold makes things expand. Concrete is good at twisting, but it is not good at pulling apart. Take a reasonably-sized, fairly porous piece of concrete. You can pull it in two with your bare hands. Old man Winter is strong in some parts of the world.

In the Spring after the ice melted sunflowers emerged from the broken concrete in front of the town's Methodist church. Seeds generated with each season's flowers waited in the frozen earth for the trigger of rising temperatures. A natural logic bomb.

People prayed to the glory of the Creator inside the darkened building. They were about twenty feet off their mark. Sunflowers sway in the breeze. Their foliage is rough. Their black eyes bear the patterns of fractals: today we use computers to create fractals.

Dew-dotted flowers in the sun. The world is beautiful.

William Blake was offbeat even for a Romantic.

Get to know him a little and you will give up trying to categorize his philosophy. He was a devout Christian but had a powerful naturalistic bend. He had disdain for both science and religion that existed in the interest of self-aggrandizement. He scorned establishment.

Read Proverbs of Hell and savor the irony.

Blake rejected the smug optimism of the eighteenth century and expressed solidarity with those oppressed by government and church, finding inspiration in the American and French revolutions. His verse was simple and structured like Biblical hymn. The rhythms of his poetry dance in small steps and bring a quiet music to our language. The movement of symphony and of Blake's art exist as one in the human spirit.

His idea here is simple. The sunflower seeks Heaven, home of the ghastly virgin and tragic youth. The rest is up to inference. Poetry is a mathematic of feeling.

The reader is unsettled by these inhabitants of Heaven. Heaven is a place for golden angels and clouds shifting in the brilliant light, where earthly burdens are cast away; not for people dead of want and frozen in the snow.

The sunflower opens to the light, dazzling in the warmth of Spring. It knows nothing of death. It turns its face skyward, a tiny wonder aspiring to a larger one. The sunflower is Heaven on Earth.

Heaven is Earth; Earth is Heaven.

Blake was a naturalist.

Bibliography

English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology. Ed. Stanley Applebaum. Dover: Mineola. 1996.