William Blake; The schoolboy

William Blake; The schoolboy

William Blake believed in freedom of speech, democracy and ‘free

love’, for these reasons he disagreed strongly with formal education

and conventional teaching in both schools and churches. He believed

that this constrained people stopping them from having their own

thoughts. Blake believed that children who were not given a formal

education would want to learn off their own accord making learning

more fun and enjoyable for the child. Blake portrays these opinions in

the poem ‘The schoolboy’; which he chose to write in the voice of ‘the

schoolboy’ himself, to stand up for children who’s views on schooling

are rarely acknowledged. Blake’s decision to use a definite article in

the title; ‘The schoolboy’ shows that the poem is a biographical piece

about a specific schoolboy, and allows Blake to voice his own opinions

as if they were that of a school child provoking more sympathy from

the reader than would simply expressing his own views, therefore

making his opinions on formal education more persuasive.

The poem uses strong themes of nature throughout; the first verse

describes a sense of harmony between the schoolboy and nature through

a positive description of the sounds of the birds which the schoolboy

awakes to hear. Pathetic fallacy is used relating the ‘summer’ morn to

the schoolboy’s joy for being awoken in this way. The second verse

starts with the conjunction ‘but’ to link the two verses, yet show the

contrast in mood between them. This negative verse outlines the

child’s dread of school and brings the reader back to reality after

the dream-like feel to the first stanza. The line ‘under a cruel eye

outworn’ suggests that the children are exhausted by school,

personif...

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...is used throughout the poem

referring to the stages of a person’s life as the seasons in the year,

the last stanza uses this metaphor to insinuate that a persons

childhood is the most important time because if they don’t learn how

to have fun in the spring of their life they will not know how to

enjoy themselves in the summer of life. This makes the last line of

the poem particularly effective ‘when the blasts of winter appear’ as

people rarely think about how the way they live their childhood will

effect their later lives, this rhetorical question makes the reader

contemplate whether a formal education in an early life is worth

facing the regrets it will cause them to live with in later life

looking back upon few happy memories. And maybe learning the joys of

life and how to live to the fullest is the most important lesson to be

learned within childhood.