 The Sunflower, the Youth and the Virgin may be all mis-spending their lives, instead of living them in the here and now (what Blake called the "eternal Now").Johnson discusses emblem collections (in particular, those of Otto van Veen) in which the Clytie myth (see above) features, as a background to Blake's work.She believes that the speaker of the poem knows that the "sweet golden clime" that the Sunflower yearns for "is known to be a land of eternal aspiration, not of fulfillment, where even the resurrected dead who have never found "Eternity's sunrise" in the present moment continue to "aspire.""