Where Sunflower wishes to go William Blake and Vincent Van Gogh

"There is a certainly another world, but it is in this one".

Paul Éluard

Ah! Sunflower

By William Blake

Ah Sunflower! weary of time,

Who contest the steps of the Sun:

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the travelers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,

And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:

Arise from their graves and aspire,

Where my Sunflower wishes to go.

William Blake writes the poem to the sunflower. Vincent Van Gogh paints his devotion to the sunflower. For both artists, the sunflower symbolizes the connecting forces between life and death, longing for heaven or a state of paradise. Life itself is defined as the experience of longing, a desire to experience Divinity. Both artists possess the power within them, not through knowledge, but through imagination. As Paul Éluard, the French surrealist poet, said, there was another world, but for William Blake and Vincent Van Gogh - It was in this one.

Blake was once asked by his friend, the English lawyer Henry Crab Robinson, about the Divinity of Jesus; Blake replied, "He is the only God. And so am I, and so you are".

William Blake is considered a mystic and visionary; his poetry is diverse. He viewed himself as an ancient prophet who brought revelation to the nations of the earth. How often we compared the faith of Van Gogh to the prophets in the Bible, the painter who was a religious missionary with the same aim to bring revelation to people, to preach to them through painting. Both Blake and Van Gogh were deeply religious men, but they both had their own perspectives on many religious topics. Both viewed themselves as someone who could come close to Divinity carried a wilderness within, and not be afraid to explore, express, and set the world ablaze.

Clytie, a water nymph from Greek mythology, passionately fell in love with Apollo, turning herself into a Sunflower to follow him in the sky every day. The sunflower faces the sun as it moves through the sky. In a way, we all hold this sunflower within us as we move through our life, being a tiny reflection of God or a tiny reflection of the mystery of our existence; we all long for this paradise, to be united with Divinity and love.

The colors melt and burn out when I look at Van Gogh's Sunflowers—burning flames of fire between life and death, touching heaven and hell simultaneously, stretching upwards. But the only one who feels or touches the flame knows what it means to be alive.