Auguries of Innocence

The highly rhythmic poem largely follows an AABB rhyme scheme with exceptions at the beginning and toward the end. The first four lines contain an alternate rhyme scheme, that is, ABAB: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.” The second deviation occurs in Lines 121-24, which all contain the same end rhyme and thus follow an AAAA rhyme pattern. Moreover, the end rhymes become increasingly similar in the last section of the poem, with lines often ending on “delight,” “Night” and “Light.” While the poem is mostly organized as couplets or pairs of rhyming lines, the first stanza follows the form of a ballad.

The poem’s meter is not very regular, though Blake mostly uses the iamb—a stressed sound following an unstressed sound—as his basic foot. The most common meter is the iambic tetrameter, containing four (tetra) pairs of iambs, as in Lines 31-32 (emphases denote stressed syllables): “He who | the Ox | to wrath | has mov'd | Shall nev | er be | by Wo | man lov'd.