Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Songs of innocence and experience representation
Influence of Christianity on English literature
Songs of the innocence a brief analysis
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Songs of innocence and experience representation
In the Songs of Innocence there are all types of Biblical allusions in his poems. In his poem To Tirzah there are biblical allusions to Jesus dying on the cross and how he was raised on earth. Tirzah was a royal city of the Canaanites that was considered to be a rebellious city. In this poem he is conveying the relationship between mortal body that will eventually die on earth, and the spiritual body, that is more like sleep than actual death. From the bible Jesus came down from heaven and died for our sins. Death is no longer a permanent death but, like Jesus rising on the third day, the soul would actually rise into heaven. In a Christian point of view, God sent down Jesus from heaven to give us a second chance by saving people from sin. …show more content…
In the first stanza states that if the bad didn 't exist then neither would the good. The virtues mercy, pity, love, and peace are all human based traits. Cruelty plays a role in almost like a hidden virtue in the church were once it gets a hold of you it 's almost impossible to let go. The tree itself is referring to is the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. It says, “And it bears the fruit of Deceit” it is actuallyctually talking about where they ate the fruit. “Ruddy and sweet to eat” was how the fruit tasted when Eve ate it and it was bound to kill them. When is says, “And the raven his nest has made, in its thickest shade.” is where he watched them consume the fruit and unleash death upon the world. The last stanza brings, together with gods fighting to find this Tree of Knowledge but they don’t realize that the search was pointless because they already had it embedded in their head to hold in fear, so that they will keep the form of …show more content…
It starts out with a child being sold by his father after the mother died to be a chimney sweeper. Blake goes on to describe the horrors conditions, "So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep", as a way to show that a child cleans the chimneys and at night sleeps in the soot. Blake discusses a boy named Tom crying because he got his head shaved. They did this was because soot got in their hair and built up which caused problems for the children when working. The children never lasted long in chimney sweeping due to the soot getting into their lungs or even betting trapped inside. He tells about how many children died and what they did with them by saying, "That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned or Jack . Were all of them lock 'd up in coffins black". He continues on by saying the child saw an angel who unlocked all of the children 's coffins and set them free to heaven like Jesus rose up on the third day. They left all their mortal possessions behind since they no longer needed them and went up in the sky to heaven. In the bible God sent down angels to deliver messages like the one did in this poem. The angel tells Tom that if he 's a good boy, God will be his father and he will never want joy again. Uplifted by this Tom was happy and continued to do his job without fearing of getting
For example, one line, “Soon our pilgrimage will cease; Soon our happy hearts will quiver, with the melody of peace,” which is saying that one day we will die, and you can’t stop that. “Lay we every burden down; Grace our spirits will deliver, and provide a robe and a crown,” also reveals that you should appreciate what we’ve had, and what was given to us. This song is telling you, in every line, that you can’t live forever, but appreciate what you have, while you
First, the beginning stanza includes lines one through eight and mentions that Heaven is looking at the people of America. Phillis Wheatley writes of "Columbia's scenes of glorious toils" (Wheatley 2). This describes the toils, or situation that the people are trapped in. During the Revolution, the American people are troubled by "freedom's cause," which refers to the war and that America is fighting for freedom (Wheatley 3). Wheatley personifies
"They had fallen from an Ash, and were gray,"(4) Ash trees are very beautiful hardwood trees, and this line indicates the passing of beauty, and ties in with the dying leaves mentioned in line three. This first stanza indicates that something once beautiful is dying.
In the opening stanza, the speaker describes the human craving and longing for material objects. From the very first word of "Meditation 42," a sense of longing and desire infuses the poem as "apples" (ll. 1) often symbolize both temptation and desire. Because Eve allowed the lure of attaining the God's knowledge to overtake her in the book of Genesis, she bites from a fruit on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which is commonly depicted as an apple. In addition, because the "apples" allude to man's fall from paradise they thereby represent man's imperfection and sinful nature. Furthermore, the fact that "apples of gold in silver pictures shrined" (ll. 1) emphasizes the desire or lust for physical, material items of beauty and wealth. These items "enchant" (ll. 2) as the "gold" and "silver" appeal to mankind's covetous nature and tendency to value superficial items. Thus, the speaker conveys his longing and desire for physical riches which "enchant" him. Yet his want for treasures exist as strictly human desire, causing physical consequences as they "make mouths to water" (ll. 2).
The entire poem uses images to enlighten its meaning. For example, in lines 2-3, "Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless naked piping loud..." Blake writes in such a way that allows the reader to see the change that takes place, when a baby enters this world. The poem reveals that it is not a pleasant and peaceful entrance, but an unkind and dishonest world that the innocent is forced to come into. Also, lines 5-6, "Struggling in my fathers hands: Striving against my swaddling bands..." give the reader vivid images. In these lines, the reader can see the baby squirming and trying to move in the tightly wrapped blanket. This shows how the baby will have to go through many struggles in life and the parents will try to protect the child and try to hold the child back from all the harms and troubles that he or she might have to go through.
The idea of the innocence having been created or forced to exist is lost as the poem focuses on the children and how innocent they are. This stands out particularly in the second stanza which uses end rhyme and repetition to underline just how many children seemed to be going into the church. It is also in that same stanza that the children are referred to as lambs, which is a common symbol for innocence. It is not simply the multitudes of children, but the multitudes of the innocent that have been gathered. ...
In a dream the boy has an “Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, he’d have God for his father, and never want joy” (Blake 19-20). This gives the boy the motivation that he needs to continue his life and so as he awoke, he “was happy and warm; / [and] if [he did his] duty [he] need not fear harm” (Blake 23-24). The young boy decides to suffer through his brutal everyday life so that one day he can go to heaven, where he will be happy. These two polar opposite approaches to dealing with the misfortune of the characters is what shapes both the theme and tone of the poems. Another similarity between these two poems is their extensive use of imagery.
We can see the poem deals with the entire story of man's fall from grace, including background for Satan's motives. In Paradise Lost, Eve was tricked by Satan, who assumed the form of a serpent, into eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Satan had whispered into her ear when she was asleep, and when he spoke to her later, he used his cunning to mislead her:
In the second stanza the poet describes the tree as thin, dry and insecure. Insecurity is a human nature that has been used to describe a
This poem was about very religious. In this poem she talks about her admiration of God and how she and all humans are humbled by God's creations. She says, "The higher on the glistening sun I gazed. Whose beams was shaded by the leafy tree; The more I looked, the ore I grew amazed, and softly said, 'What glory like to thee?' Soul of this world, this universe's eye, No wonder some made thee a deity; had I not better known, alas, the same had I". This quote means that a tree because of its beauty amazes her. Also, she is saying that the thing responsible for creating such a thing must just as beautiful if not the most beautiful on the earth.
Although, I wished that the poem included more about the resurrection. It was good that it discussed Jesus return and the Day of Judgment, to encourage man’s repentance and salvation in Christ. I wondered if this poet who must have lived sometime in the Early Middle Ages actually had a dream where he imagined a tree speaking to him about the death and resurrection of Christ and then he wrote it down. If that was the case, then I can understand why the poem is not perfectly accurate and somewhat jumbled, when compared to scripture. Often our thoughts are jumbled, when we dream. The order of events seems to be a little offset. For example, the earth did not tremble, until after Jesus spirit left Him. The poem appears to put the trembling ahead of Jesus death. However, there is a lot of the good, the true, and the beautiful in this poem. It celebrates the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross and it encourages us to look to Him on the cross, so we don’t forget how much He loves us. Also, it encourages us in our faith and knowing that Jesus will return someday, to take us into eternal glory with Him. It was good that the poem concluded with the Dreamer feeling enthusiastic about the cross, looking forward to eternal glory, and desiring to share the good news with others. This is the way that
In lines 4 – 8 when Blake writes, “There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head, That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved: so I said ‘Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’ These lines symbolize faith in the biblical sense. Young Tom’s is like that of the sacrificial lamb of God and when the narrator tells Tom to stop crying because he knows that the soot can not longer spoil his white hair he, is saying to Tom, once he makes this sacrifice nothing else can hurt him. Blake is saying that if the children make the sacrifice of living out their lives here on Earth, no matter how dark and dismal their lives may seem at the time, they will be rewarded in heaven as long as they know the glory of God and trust in him.
Starting with the first stanza, Blake creates a dark and depressing tone. He uses words such as died, weep, soot, and cry to support this tone. In the first two lines the child shares his family with us, stating his mother’s death and the fact that his father sold him sharing that the child must come from a poor background “When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue”(Lines 1-2). The image of a poor child getting tossed into another unhappy place sets the tone for the beginning of this poem. Blake uses the word “weep”, instead of “sweep” in the first stanza to show the innocence of the child “Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep”(3). The fact that the child cried “weep” instead of sweep shows that the child could not be any older than four. Blake describes that they sleep in soot also meaning they are sleeping in their death bed. The average life span of children who work in chimneys is ten years due to the harsh work environment. The child portrays sorrow in the last line of the first stanza “So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.”(4)
Blake's poems of innocence and experience are a reflection of Heaven and Hell. The innocence in Blake's earlier poems represents the people who will get into Heaven. They do not feel the emotions of anger and jealousy Satan wants humans to feel to lure them to Hell. The poems of experience reflect those feelings. This is illustrated by comparing and contrasting A Divine Image to a portion of The Divine Image.
In the poem, “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake, the author attempts to educate the reader about the horrors experienced by young children who are forced into labor at an early age cleaning chimneys for the wealthy. The poem begins with a young boy who has lost his mother but has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake uses poetry in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane and dangerous practice of exploiting children and attempts to shine a light on the plight of the children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free the children from their nightmare existence. Right away in the first lines of the poem we learn through the child narrator that his life is about to change dramatically for the worse.