Grain of Sand — Blake Heretics Tumbler

“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”

— William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” c. 1803. From the Pickering Manuscript; first published 1863.

A tumbler goes where you go — desk, commute, everywhere in between. Blake’s grain-of-sand quatrain makes a fitting companion: four lines he wrote around 1803, in a manuscript that stayed unpublished until decades after his death.

The poem makes a claim about scale: that the distance between a grain of sand and a world, an hour and eternity, is a question of attention rather than measurement. The opening four lines compress that whole argument into the smallest possible space — fitting, given the subject. A tumbler does something similar: small enough to hold all day, holding more than it looks like it should.

The Design

The four lines print vertically down the body of the tumbler — no punctuation, capitalized nouns, the quatrain running the length the way a long thought does. Something small carrying something large.

Also on the Grain of Sand Tee, Grain of Sand Mug, and Grain of Sand Journal. More Blake: Soar High Tee.

About This Tumbler

• 20 oz stainless steel — stays cold all day, hot all morning
• Matte black finish — the poem reads clean against it
• Lid and metal straw included
• Hand wash highly recommended — not dishwasher or microwave safe

Who It’s For

The person who carries the big ideas in small containers. The one who travels with intention. Anyone who has ever looked at something the size of a grain of sand and felt it open.

Hold infinity. Keep it cold.

William Blake, in Plain English

• Lived 1757–1827, in and around London
• A printer, painter, and poet who treated all three as one practice
• Aldous Huxley took the title “The Doors of Perception” from Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”; Jim Morrison named his band after Huxley’s book
• “Auguries of Innocence” runs 132 lines — the opening quatrain is what’s remembered; the 128 couplets that follow are rarely quoted
• Recovered in the 1860s; the full poem first reached print in 1863