Earth's Answer is a poem by William Blake within his larger collection called Songs of Innocence and of Experience (published 1794). It is the response to the previous poem in The Songs of Experience-- Introduction (Blake, 1794). 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. Poem Summary In “Earth’s Answer”, we see that the Earth raises her head from “darkness dread and drear” (2) and that the light about her has fled (3). Her hair is described as being covered with "grey despair" (5). She states that she is imprisoned on the "cold" (8) "watery shore" (6) which is by the “selfish father of men” (11). Earth then gives a series of questions, asking if Spring is budding flowers and if the sower and plowman are working by night (16-20). The final stanza shows Earth asking that the chains be broken and that she be set free (21-25). Themes and motifs According to Gleckner, when reading the Songs of Experience, we must keep in mind that this section reflects a "ravening world of the devourer; an adult world of responsibility, decisions, sex, and disease; a dark, confined, dirty, urban world of palpable, not evanescent blackness; a world of wandering and lostness, ale-houses and churches...". This means that the themes will generally be darker than those of the Songs of Innocence. Religion Throughout the Songs of Experience there seems to be an attack on official religion. Since "Earth's Answer" is a response to the "Introduction" to Songs of Experience, it is important to read them in context and in conversation with each other. In the "Introduction", the Bard acts as a prophet in that he is reporting divine speech. The verbal parallels in the Bard's speech reflect Genesis—thus suggesting that the God present in the poems is the God from Old Testament. This signals to the reader that the poet intends to reflect the "traditional view of the Fall as a movement away from happiness, completeness, and Divinity". Keeping this in mind, as readers transition to "Earth's Answer", it becomes clear that Blake attacks “official religion throughout Songs of Experience” by using the “Christian theme and subduing it completely to his own