Eternity - Analysis

Joy as a living creature, not a possession

Blake’s central claim is blunt: joy dies the moment you try to own it. The poem opens with a warning about the person who binds to himself a joy. That verb binds turns happiness into something you can tie down, like property or a captive. Blake doesn’t treat joy as a feeling you can store up; he treats it as a living thing with its own nature, and its nature is motion.

The violence hidden in wanting to keep what feels good

The second line makes the cost explicit: trying to hold joy destroys the winged life. The image of wings matters because wings are made for leaving. To bind a winged thing isn’t just to stop it; it’s to damage it. There’s a sharp tension here: the desire to keep joy looks like love, but Blake frames it as a kind of harm. Wanting permanence—wanting to pin down a good moment—becomes a betrayal of what made it joyful in the first place.

A gentler kind of contact: kissing what’s already departing

The poem turns on a different gesture: kisses the joy rather than binds it. A kiss is brief, intimate, and it doesn’t try to control. Even more telling is the phrase as it flies: the speaker doesn’t demand that joy stop moving in order to be felt. The tone shifts here from warning to a kind of calm instruction—almost tender—about how to meet fleeting happiness without turning it into a hostage.

What eternity's sun rise really promises

The final line—Lives in eternity's sun rise—doesn’t promise endless pleasure so much as a changed relationship to time. Eternity isn’t located in a longer grip on joy; it’s found in repeated beginnings, like a sunrise that keeps arriving. Blake’s contradiction is the poem’s engine: you reach what feels eternal not by clutching at moments, but by consenting to their flight—and still offering them the small, human honor of attention.