page_title: Earth's Answer
section_title: Illustrations
hierarchical_section_title: Earth's Answer / Illustrations
caption_attribution_description: English: Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy V, 1821 (Morgan Library and Museum) object 31 Earth's Answer
context_page_description: Earth's Answer is a poem by William Blake within his larger collection called Songs of Innocence and of Experience. It is the response to the previous poem in The Songs of Experience-- Introduction. In the Introduction, the bard asks the Earth to wake up and claim ownership. In this poem, the feminine Earth responds.
  "Earth's Answer" is composed of five stanzas, each having five lines. With the exceptions of the third and fourth, the stanzas follow an ABAAB rhyme scheme.
context_section_description: For Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake used a method called illuminated printing, in which he had complete control over both his poems and the illustrations. The Norton textbook states that when it comes to reading this illuminated manuscript:
   "To read a Blake poem without the pictures is to miss something important:  Blake places words and images in a relationship that is sometimes mutually enlightening and sometimes turbulent, and that relationship is an aspect of the poem's argument. 
  The illustration itself contributes and adds to the nature theme.  There is a vine-like vegetation that both frames the poem and divides the stanzas.  Along the left margin, the vines are straight and vertical.  On the right, the vines become thick, leaves, flowers, or even grape-like.  Many of the letters are mixed with the vines and nature (Such as "And" in line 5, "of" in Line 9) or emulate the vine-like vegetation ("Youth" in line 15, "heavy" in line 21).
  The William Blake Archive analyzes the snake along the bottom of the page:
   "Across the bottom an open-mouthed serpent crawls to the right across the grass. The text appears over a large expanse of sky that is dark at top and bottom left but light around the serpent's head at bottom right, as if to suggest sunrise or sunset."
caption: Copy V of "Earth's Answer" printed and hand-painted by Blake in 1821. This version currently resides in the Morgan Library and Museum.[6]
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