The Theme of the Suffering Innocent in Blake's London
The poem "London" by William Blake paints a frightening, dark picture of the eighteenth century London, a picture of war, poverty and pain. Written in the historical context of the English crusade against France in 1793, William Blake cries out with vivid analogies and images against the repressive and hypocritical English society. He accuses the government, the clergy and the crown of failing their mandate to serve people. Blake confronts the reader in an apocalyptic picture with the devastating consequences of diseasing the creative capabilities of a society.
Choosing the first person form in the first and fourth stanza, the poet reflects his personal experiences with the city of London. He adheres to a strict form of four stanzas with each four lines and an ABAB rhyme. The tone of the poem changes from a contemplative lyric quality in the first to a dramatic sharp finale in the last stanza. The tone in the first stanza is set by regular accents, iambic meter and long vowel sounds in the words "wander", "chartered", "flow" and "woe", producing a grave and somber mood.
The verb "wanders" connotes contemplative walking without specific destination through streets that are described as "chartered". But the word "street" is ambiguous. While it could be the home of people, a neighborhood and a place for emotional refuge, the streets and the river Thames are "chartered"; they are defined as commercial entities where business and cold cash dominates. The scene is set in which the poet sees the unhappy citizens of London. Their faces reflect the common man's physical and spiritual suffering through "marks of weakness, marks of woes". The repetition of the...
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...ld of art and literature. Since the "marriage", the parent generation, is already dead or dying, therefore every new creation is now also afflicted with disease and condemned to death. Consequently this means the end of hope for a renewal of society, but since the stanza begins with the word "how", this is also a voice of accusation and a demand for change.
The theme of the suffering innocent person, dying and being diseased, throws a dark light onto the London seen through the eyes of William Blake. He shows us his experiences, fears and hopes with passionate images and metaphors creating a sensibility against oppression hypocrisy. His words come alive and ask for changes in society, government and church. But they remind us also that the continued renewal of society begins with new ideas, imagination and new works in every area of human experience.
Ten minutes after lining up, I went inside the nightclub. From the door, I could hear the song and the beat of the bass so loud that my heart could feel it. Inside the nightclub, I saw people were dancing everywhere, on dancing floor, on their own seats, everywhere. They would dance and take a big gulp of their beer. Even the bartenders were dancing too, following the rhythm of the loud funky music. The rainbow rays of light moved through the club to make the mood even more exciting and funky.
The sound of music can fulfil someone's ears with the rhythm of the beat or the sweet tone of the melody. Some people enjoy music with a little more “experience.” Rock, rap, and heavy metal are examples of music genres that has a reputation of using drugs to enhance the experience of the music. One other common music genre that has a reputation of drugs is EDM. Electronic Dance Music. It is a type of music typically created by using electronic devices, like a laptop, generated by a person with some talent. This music genre is known for it’s “club drugs” like ecstasy, methanamine, or magic mushrooms. (“CRC Health”) Some people use drugs at raves to “enhance” the experience and also people have tried or are trying to push the usage of drugs at rave to a certain that you can take. Many people want more security checks at raves so they can reduce the injuries and deaths at raves.
The poem is launched by a protracted introduction during which the speaker indulges in descriptions of landscape and local color, deferring until the fifth stanza the substantive statement regarding what is happening to whom: "a bus journeys west." This initial postponement and the leisurely accumulation of apparently trivial but realistic detail contribute to the atmospheric build-up heralding the unique occurrence of the journey. That event will take place as late as the middle of the twenty-second stanza, in the last third of the text. It is only in retrospect that one realizes the full import of that happening, and it is only with the last line of the final stanza that the reader gains the necessary distance to grasp entirely the functional role of the earlier descriptive parts.
Before we go any further, I think I should first dispel some rumors and ease your mind of the negative thoughts that must be sweeping through it. What do you think of when you hear the word rave? Drugs? Hoodlum kids running amuck? Loud music that interferes with the whole community’s sleeping habits? Violence? The dictionary defines the word “rave” as a numerous amount of things, such as “an act or instance” or the verb “to talk with extreme enthusiasm,” but this is one case where Webster has got it all wrong. What is the true definition of a rave? In most cases, a rave is simply a dance party where guests experience a sense of camaraderie and elevated consciousness through the presence of music. This means there is an abundance of dance expression, interaction with other such ravers, and a positive mood change. And while there are sometimes drugs involved, there is absolutely no deliberate disturbance of the peace and zero tolerance for violence. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s divulge into the history of this invigorating phenomenon.
William Blake, was born in 1757 and died in 1827, created the poems “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” and Proverbs of Hell. Blake grew up in a poor environment. He studied to become an Engraver and a professional artist. His engraving took part in the Romanticism era. The Romanticism is a movement that developed during the 18th and early 19th century as a reaction against the Restoration and Enlightenment periods focuses on logic and reason. Blake’s poetry would focus on imagination. When Blake created his work, it gained very little attention. Blake’s artistic and poetic vision consists in his creations. Blake was against the Church of England because he thought the doctrines were being misused as a form of social control, it meant the people were taught to be passively obedient and accept oppression, poverty, and inequality. In Blake’s poems “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” and Proverbs of Hell, he shows that good requires evil in order to exist through imagery animals and man.
Marxist views can be frequently spotted within William Blake’s works. The argument that “human interactions are economically driven and are based on a struggle for power between different social classes” is deeply rooted within the lines of Blake’s work. (Gardner, Pg. 146). In fact, “The Chimney Sweeper,” which was first published in 1789, a full half a century before Karl Marx first publicized his Marxist theory in 1848, has several instances of Marxist tones. Critic, Janet E. Gardner, argues that the theological similarities between the views expressed in the poem “Chimney Sweeper” and Karl Marx’s beliefs are easily found. For example, Karl believed that literary characters could be “divided into powerful oppressors and their powerless victims (Gardner, Pg. 145).” Similarly, Blake presents the character Tom Dacre as an accepting victim of the horrible indictment within the economically driven arrangements. An arrangement created to sell and buy children only in order to work and cripple them into a fatal labor. Both Marx and Blake note that the child labor could have come to an end earlier, but the naïve mind-set of the described characters presents them in a dream like nostalgia that even when they “awoke in the dark,” Tom “was [still] happy and warm.” Continuing, the church or government controls the mind of the children in labor; Blake echoes in an extreme sense of the children not seeing the truth or “light” and end up settling with the realities of their life. Similarly, Blake details suggest that the church brainwashes the children into believing that through tedious and cruel hours or if Tom “be a good boy, he’d have God for his father (Blake in Sweeper, L. 18-19).” Blake depicts a metaphysical defiance toward customary ...
Rave culture is highly attractive to the youth audience in general, regardless of class or ethnic background. Raves are non-elitist, and are primarily for the working class. This makes Raves quit different from all other postmodern sub-cultures. The legalization of a Rave has not prevented the illegal taking of the drugs. This means that there are a lot of young people indulging in Rave culture and recreational drug taking every weekend.
“In this poem, the night represents his destination — the poet’s own inner life, possibly self-knowledge. The poet, then, feels at least partially alienated from himself in much the same way that the night promotes a feeling of alienation from other people” (Kidd 2). Therefore, the reader can assume this rest of the poem is going to be about the narrator getting to know his place in this world while he is on a night stroll. The second line of stanza one states “I have walked out in rain –and back in rain” (Frost 157). His repetition of going in the rain twice emphasizes his miserable condition on this dark, rainy night. Nonetheless, he embraces nature and continues on with his walk past “the furthest city light” which tells the reader that he is now in complete darkness. Stanza two focuses primarily on his relationship with society. The narrator is casually walking in the city at night and sees the “saddest city lane” and
Every year, young individuals from a diverse background of ages, races, nationalities, sexual orientations and economic situations come together to enjoy music and culture festivals that raves have to offer. Ravers lose themselves in crowds by dancing and having fun. While raves used to be small and secretive, it has now become more mainstream leading to larger venues, making it the norm it is today. The rave culture is generally filled with love. The only value system that is followed in rave culture is the idea of P.L.U.R. Peace, love, unity, and respect are the ideologies that rave culture promotes that contradicts that of the dominant society.
“The Sick Rose” is a short poem written by William Blake. He is also known as a poet, artist and mystic. Many poets receive their inspiration for writing their poems from sources like a lover, a personal experience, or a historical event. Thus Blake's short poem is not from his imagination, but it’s from the reality that he might witness in his life. Blake’s poem has received many criticisms from critics who tried to investigate “The Sick Roe” and they give their interpretation with many different types of explanation.
Romanticism was both an artistic and intellectual movement geared essentially toward emphasizing nature’s subliminal aura, the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, and ultimately a heightened sense of consciousness. Widely acknowledged for his contributions to Romanticism, English poet William Blake is considered to be one of the most influential poets of the nineteenth century. Blake, a visionary far beyond his years, was adamant in expressing his views on the cosmos; that one cannot simply have the good without experiencing the bad nor can one have the bad without experiencing the good. Near the end of the seventeen hundreds, Blake published two highly acclaimed works supporting his claim that in order for the world to function as it does, all things in the universe must have an opposite, or a contrast. He published his poem collection entitled “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” in 1794 and finished composing his book “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, a few years prior to it. These two brilliant works exemplify exactly just how important a positive balance in the cosmos really is. William Black depicts good and evil in his poems with the use of the reference to joy and sorrow.
In “London” by William Blake the grunge, and domineering nature of a city engaged in a transformation of industry, is articulated through the setting. London of the poem, and the 1700s and 1800s, was griped by a sense of overwhelming entrapment in the mechanical comings and goings of industry. This massive shift is expressed through the stark nature of the setting, and the speaker’s awareness of a sense of confinement, and malaise in the face of great progress. Blake’s choices in the portrayal of industrialized London, is one aimed to express the overwhelming battle between machinery, and flesh in a city gripped by the throws of revolution.
Furthermore, it is indicated by Hobbs that club culture may consist of many smaller cultures and bouncer culture is one of the fundamental parts.2 Although bouncer culture discussed in the article is similar club culture, it is more like a fragmented series of interacting cultures, such as drug culture and dance culture.5 These theories of culture are necessary to interpret the question of drug selling and regulating at Sam’s club.
The drugs were meant to make the dancing experience unforgettable. This included drugs such as cocaine and amyl nitrite and would give a sensation that the dancer’s arms and legs had turned jell-O that was as a result of motor coordination suspension. The high quantities of drugs that were used in the discotheques developed another cultural phenomenon which led to public sex and increased promiscuity (Shapiro, 2005). The dance floor had become seduction arena but in the secluded places such as stairwells of exits and bathrooms, dancers engaged in actual sex. Discos would even be considered the right places for nights out with Studio 54 being good example of a bar that was full of hedonism. People used the balconies for drug use and floor of this bar was decorated with Man in the Moon and a spoon of cocaine as an
Since the 1980’s, electronic music has become a staple in a lot of mainstream music genres. In the 1990’s though, electronic music branched out and became its own genre with a huge and very loyal following. EDM music, or as it’s also commonly referred to, Techno starting appearing in not only the underground scene, but also in the more common music outlets such as the radio. My goal as this research assignment progresses is to not only study the rave subculture, but also learn more about them to educate those who are not aware or do not understand it. I started with finding out more about locations that the subculture inhabits. My experience was incredible, but just the location itself was amazing to me. I enjoyed the opportunity to really get out there and have fun, but also do more research and create connections to further my research of the subculture as the semester progresses.