Comparison and Contrast of William Blake's Poems
Introduction (Innocence)
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a lamb!"
So I piped with merry chear.
"Piper, pipe that song again;"
So I piped, he wept to hear.
"Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy chear:"
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.
"Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read."
So he vanish'd from my sight,
And I pluck'd a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,
And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
Introduction (Experience)
Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future, sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees,
Calling the lapsed Soul,
And weeping in the evening dew;
That might controll
The starry pole,
And fallen, fallen light renew!
"O Earth, O Earth, return!
"Arise from out the dewy grass;
"Night is worn,
"And the morn
"Rises from the slumberous mass.
"Turn away no more;
"Why wilt thou turn away?
"The starry floor,
"The wat'ry shore,
"Is giv'n thee till the break of day."
The Chimney Sweeper (Innocence)
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry "'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl'd like a lamb's back, was shav'd: so I said
"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."
And so he was quiet & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping , he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack,
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black.
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open'd the coffins & set them free;
The down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon the clouds and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags &a...
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...and comfort, in 'Infant Sorrow' the baby is brought forth in pain and sorrow.
At the center of Blake's thought are two conceptions of innocence and experience, 'the two contrary states of the human soul'. Innocence is the characteristic of the child, experience is the characteristic of the adult.
(Characteristic, NOT the body)The Innocence poems deal with childhood as the symbol of an untarnished innocence which ought to be, but which in modern civilization cannot be. These poems all have a childlike directness and a sense of controlled joy in the human and natural world that show none of the signs of a grownup writing for children. In innocence, there are two factors. One is an assumption that the world was made for the benefit of human beings, and the other is ignorance to this world. As the child grows, his conscious mind accepts
'experience', or reality. His childhood innocence is forgotten and lost forever, for innocence is not knowing experience. Blake can wrote his innocence books before he had been exposed to the social injustices of his time. Also, one can write abo ut innocence from remembering it. However, living innocence, and writing about it are two different things.
As Smith explains, I find joy to be some kind of unhappiness and grief, a distinguishable feeling of bittersweet nostalgia and longing that she deems as a dangerous and slippery slope once someone allows himself/herself to delve deeply into it. As insane as joy seems, I find myself wanting it, since most of my life experiences to this moment seem more like pleasure than joy. Perhaps because the ultimate disposability and evanescence of pleasure seems rather representative of my generation’s increasing awareness of the general fleetingness of things, and their skepticism of all the tropes (a house, a family, a career, the suburban life…) previously associated (mostly via Hollywood and other mass media) with a “joyous” life. My generation is one that has grown up seeing about half of all marriages end in divorce. We’ve seen the real estate market and the stock market collapse a few times, and have been brought up in a world where natural disasters, terrorism and apocalyptic doom are not feared as much as expected. Because we have grown up in the age of market instability, escalating debt and climate change, we are much more desirous of short-term satisfaction and contentment. We’d rather travel, eat amazing food, see movies, have adventures, and live via moment-by-moment tweets and Insta-documents, quickly forgotten; we’d rather live in the
As Edgar Allan Poe once stated, “I would define, in brief the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.” The two poems, “Birthday,” and “The Secret Life of Books” use different diction, theme, and perspective to give them a unique identity. Each author uses different literary devices to portray a different meaning.
Yan Martel and William Blake described the tiger’s appearance, soul, and creation similarly. Both authors felt that tigers are fierce, strong, majestic and so on, however they also said how fearful tigers are.
on: April 10th 1864. He was born in 1809 and died at the age of 83 in
The Hate of Tyranny and Celebration of Liberty in William Blake's Poetry William Blake was born in 1757, during a period of great change in western political ideas. The poor had begun to realise that they did not have to live as serfs under the rich, and were breaking free of these old bonds, The main examples of this being The French revolution in 1792 and the American Revolution in 1775, both now considered as some of the most important events in history. Blake was a great supporter of these movements, and believed that the same should happen in England. This is why many of the Aristocracy at the time considered Blake a threat to their comfortable way of life.
All the poems you have read are preoccupied with violence and/or death. Compare the ways in which the poets explore this preoccupation. What motivations or emotions do the poets suggest lie behind the preoccupation?
can be when they are sent away from their families to work at a very
Compare and contrast the poems The Tyger and The Donkey and discuss which poet gives us the clearest depiction of humanity. William Blake is a wealthy, upper-class writer who separates himself from the rest of the wealthy community. Blake has a hate for the techniques used by many of the wealthy, company owners who gain and capitalise through cheap and expendable labour, supplied by the ever-growing poverty in the country. Blake makes a point to try and reveal this industrial savagery through his work. "The Tyger" is presented as a metaphorical approach to the struggle between the rich and the poor; good and evil.
Compare and contrast the poems Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen and The Soldier by Rupert Brooke. What are the poets' attitudes towards war and how do they convey these attitudes? Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" express opposing views towards war and matters related to it.
In his preface of the Kokinshū poet Ki no Tsurayaki wrote that poetry conveyed the “true heart” of people. And because poetry declares the true heart of people, poetry in the minds of the poets of the past believed that it also moved the hearts of the gods. It can be seen that in the ancient past that poetry had a great importance to the people of the time or at least to the poets of the past. In this paper I will describe two of some of the most important works in Japanese poetry the anthologies of the Man’yōshū and the Kokinshū. Both equally important as said by some scholars of Japanese literature, and both works contributing greatly to the culture of those who live in the land of the rising sun.
The theme of authority is possibly the most important theme and the most popular theme concerning William Blake’s poetry. Blake explores authority in a variety of different ways particularly through religion, education and God. Blake was profoundly concerned with the concept of social justice. He was also profoundly a religious man. His dissenting background led him to view the power structures and legalism that surrounded religious establishments with distrust. He saw these as unwarranted controls over the freedom of the individual and contrary to the nature of a God of liberty. Figures such as the school master in the ‘schoolboy’, the parents in the ‘chimney sweeper’ poems, the guardians of the poor in the ‘Holy Thursday’, Ona’s father in ‘A Little girl lost’ and the priestly representatives of organised religion in many of the poems, are for Blake the embodiment of evil restriction.
Authors, William Wordsworth and William Blake convey different messages and themes in their poems, “The World is Too Much with Us” and “The Tyger” consecutively by using the different mechanics one needs to create poetry. Both poems are closely related since they portray different aspects of society but the message remains different. Wordsworth’s poem describes a conflict between nature and humanity, while Blake’s poem issues God’s creations of completely different creatures. In “The World is Too Much with Us,” we figure the theme to be exactly what the title suggests: Humans are so self-absorbed with other things such as materialism that there’s no time left for anything else. In “The Tyger” the theme revolves around the question of what the Creator (God) of this creature seems to be like and the nature of good vs. evil. Both poems arise with some problem or question which makes the reader attentive and think logically about the society.
In 1789, English poet William Blake first produced his famous poetry collection Songs of Innocence which “combines two distinct yet intimately related sequences of poems” (“Author’s Work” 1222). Throughout the years, Blake added more poems to his prominent Songs of Innocence until 1794, when he renamed it Songs of Innocence and Experience. The additional poems, called Songs of Experience, often have a direct counterpart in Blake’s original Songs of Innocence, producing pairs such as “The Lamb” and “The Tyger.” In Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake uses musical devices, structure, and symbolism to develop the theme that experience brings both an awareness of potential evil and a tendency that allows it to become dominant over childhood
of joy or pleasant feelings. We can be happy at one moment, but not the next.
The first component essential to living an abundant life is the ability to feel joy. Joy is an experience of wellbeing in a person’s life. Joy is in some cases something that a person has no control of feeling, but in many cases it is an experience that reinforces positive behavior. Therefore by experiencing joy, a person is more likely to do positive things for themselves and for others. Joy is the basis of many of the positive aspects of life as Abraham Hicks states, "If you woul...