Life & Mortality Quote by William Blake

Blake frames empathy as an impossible-to-refuse summons, not a sentimental preference. The questions come like a moral cross-examination: if you can watch suffering and stay dry-eyed, what exactly has withered in you? The brilliance is in the grammar of inevitability. “Can I” doesn’t ask whether empathy is admirable; it asks whether it’s even optional for a functioning human spirit. By posing it as a test of basic perception, Blake implies that indifference isn’t neutrality - it’s a kind of spiritual disability.

The subtext is sharper than the gentle diction suggests. “Another’s woe” and “another’s grief” are generic on purpose, expanding the scene beyond private tragedy into public life: poverty, exploitation, war, the daily bruises of an unequal society. “Seek for kind relief” moves empathy out of the theater of feeling and into the economy of action. Feeling sorrow is inadequate; the ethical minimum is pursuit, effort, repair. That verb “seek” matters: relief isn’t always simple charity you can dispense; it’s something you have to hunt down, sometimes against a system designed to keep suffering invisible.

Context deepens the urgency. Blake, writing in the churn of the Industrial Revolution and in the wake of revolutionary hopes and backlashes, sees compassion as a political and spiritual resistance to a culture that trains people to look away. The couplet reads like a small hymn with teeth: a reminder that the first step toward cruelty is practicing not noticing.