During the Romantic Era (1750-1870), poets used nature as a common motif as they believed it was an extension of the human being. One such poet, William Blake, famously wrote “And we are put on this earth a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love.” A common theme of his writing on the subject of love is the juxtaposition of innocent love and experienced love. For example, both poems, “The Clod and the Pebble” and “The Sick Rose” which first appeared in his book Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1789, generally follow a similar rhyme scheme and development as with all the poems contained within this book. The first half of each poem relates to innocent love, followed by a rhyme scheme discord to represent a turning point, …show more content…
The transition from the negative side of innocence that can lead to being taken advantage of and switching to focusing on love exposed as a dark place that can be constraining. In “The Clod and The Pebble,” the second stanza switches in rhyme scheme. Instead of the quatrain following the pattern of ABAB as in stanzas one and three, Blake changes the rhyme scheme to follow the pattern CDED. This creates discord in the poem as Blake switches the point of view from the clod of clay to the pebble of the brook. Additionally, this discord also defines a significant transition between his theme of inexperienced and experienced love. Equivalently, in “The Sick Rose,” the discord in the quatrains is revealed at the end of poem. Blake follows a rhyme scheme of ABCB in his first stanza and then switches to DEFE for the second stanza. Through this change in the rhyme scheme, he similarly creates discord to represent a powerful turning point—the rose’s death. He also exploits this change to represent the adverse effects of this certain type of …show more content…
William Blake leaves the reader pondering which idea of love is better. Is being “clod-like” the best way to love, as oneself provides solely for the others happiness and development? Or is being “pebble-like” the best way to love, as one’s basic human needs cannot be ignored, thus creating a world out of despair due to the lack of love? In “The Sick Rose,” Blake desecrates the rose’s innocent love with a “dark secret love.” He argues that with reason, love can become sinful and unmentionable. Love can also become destructive and destroy the life of someone in a relationship. Through both of these poems, Blake shows love as either being completely inexperienced or wholly experienced. However, neither poem ends joyfully as William Blake’s poems exemplify the Romantic Era’s concern with inner struggle and examining human potential. Blake shows that in order to gain the most out of love, it must contain both inexperience and experience. Love must be both selfless and selfish, as these aspects of love are vital to each other and cannot be kept apart. Blake establishes that one does not have to singularly choose between inexperience or experience; instead, there needs to be balance between the two as they both define love and coexist in a synergistic
There are many different themes that can be used to make a poem both successful and memorable. Such is that of the universal theme of love. This theme can be developed throughout a poem through an authors use of form and content. “She Walks in Beauty,” by George Gordon, Lord Byron, is a poem that contains an intriguing form with captivating content. Lord Byron, a nineteenth-century poet, writes this poem through the use of similes and metaphors to describe a beautiful woman. His patterns and rhyme scheme enthrall the reader into the poem. Another poem with the theme of love is John Keats' “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” meaning “the beautiful lady without mercy.” Keats, another nineteenth-century writer, uses progression and compelling language throughout this poem to engage the reader. While both of these poems revolve around the theme of love, they are incongruous to each other in many ways.
Love has the power to do anything. Love can heal and love can hurt. Love is something that is indescribable and difficult to understand. Love is a feeling that cannot be accurately expressed by a word. In the poem “The Rain” by Robert Creeley, the experience of love is painted and explored through a metaphor. The speaker in the poem compares love to rain and he explains how he wants love to be like rain. Love is a beautiful concept and through the abstract comparison to rain a person is assisted in developing a concrete understanding of what love is. True beauty is illuminated by true love and vice versa. In other words, the beauty of love and all that it entails is something true.
Some may say love is just an emotion while others may say it is a living and breathing creature. Songs and poems have been written about love for hundreds and thousands of years. Love has been around since the beginning of time, whether someone believes in the Big Bang or Adam and Eve. Without love, there wouldn’t be a world like it is known today. But with love, comes pain with it. Both William Shakespeare and Max Martin know and knew this. Both ingenious poets wrote love songs of pain and suffering as well as blossoming, newfound love. The eccentric ideal is both writers were born centuries apart. How could both know that love and pain work hand in hand when they were born 407 years apart? Love must never change then. Love survives and stays its original self through the hundreds and thousands of years it has been thriving. Though centuries apart, William Shakespeare and Max Martin share the same view on love whether i...
Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats all represent the Romantic style of literature with their unorthodox themes of nature, art, and life; and how those three points can be tied together and used for creative purposes among humankind. Art and life are counterparts; one is lacking without the other. The Romantic period was about passion; finding inspiration and beauty in things people see every day. Wordsworth found childhood memories in a familiar landscape, Blake found himself captivated by the mysteries of how the majestic tiger was created, and Keats’ urn triggered him to put his inquiries of it into poetry. Each man expressed his individual view within their works; and like many of their Romantic contemporaries, their ideas ran against the flow of their time’s societal beliefs.
The imagery of nature and humanity intermingling presents Blake's opinion on the inborn, innate harmony between nature and man. The persona of the poem goes on to express the `gentle streams beneath our feet' where `innocence and virtue meet'. This is where innocence dwells: synchronization with nature, not synchronization with industry where `babes are reduced to misery, fed with a cold usurous hand' as in the experienced version of `Holy Thursday'. The concept of the need for the individual's faithfulness to the laws of nature and what is natural is further reiterated in `the marriage of heaven and hell' in plate 10 where Blake states `where man is not, nature is barren'. The most elevated form of nature is human nature and when man resists and consciously negates nature, `nature' becomes `barren'. Blake goes on to say `sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires'. This harks back to `the Songs of Innocence' `A Cradle Song' where the `infants smiles are his own smiles'. The infant is free to act out its desires as it pleases. It is unbound, untainted. Blake's concern is for the pallid and repressed, subjugated future that awaits the children who must `nurse unacted desires' and emotions in this new world of industrialisation. Despairingly, this is restated again in `the mind-forg'd manacles' of `London'. The imagery of the lambs of the `Songs of Innocence' `Introduction' is developed in `the Chimney Sweeper' into the image of `Little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head, that curl'd like a lamb's back, was shav'd'.
Abstract: William Blake's Songs of Innocence contains a group of poetic works that the artist conceptualized as entering into a dialogue with each other and with the works in his companion work, Songs of Experience. He also saw each of the poems in Innocence as operating as part of an artistic whole creation that was encompassed by the poems and images on the plates he used to print these works. While Blake exercised a fanatical degree of control over his publications during his lifetime, after his death his poems became popular and were encountered without the contextual material that he intended to accompany them.
To what extent does the presence of nature impact the poems in “twenty love poems and a song of despair”
The rose is common to both ‘The Sick Rose’ and ‘Sea Rose’ as a product of nature that has been turned into the subject of observation. However, this manner of observation, reflected in the tone used, varies for the two poems. Both poems make use of strong language and sounds to describe the rose. In Blake’s poem this harshness is present in the title ‘The Sick Rose’ and the first line of the poem ‘O Rose, thou art sick’ (1). The repetition of the words ‘sick’ and ‘rose’, which is incidentally the only repetition found throughout the poem, places a strong emphasis on the rose’s failing, on its ‘sickness’. The personal address with the use of ‘o’ and ‘thou’, amplifies this failing, as it establishes the speaker’s relationship to the rose, thus giving the declaration of the rose’s sickness greater weight coming from someone who knows the rose.
On the other side, “Love Poem” is very different from the previous poem. This seven stanza poem is based on a man describing the imperfections of his lover. In this, the speaker uses stylistic devices, such as alliteration and personification to impact more on reader, for example as the speaker shows “your lipstick ginning on our coat,”(17) ...
“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.
Upon reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, a certain parallel is easily discerned between them and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Blake, considered a radical thinker in his time, is today thought to be an important and seminal figure in the literature of the Romantic period. Being such a figure he has no doubt helped to influence many great thinkers throughout history, one of whom I believe is Carroll. There are many instances throughout Carroll’s story where comparable concepts of innocence and adulthood are evident. Through its themes of romanticism, Carroll crafts a story that is anti-didactic by its very nature.
The types of love in a poem can be reflected in many ways. One of
In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake differentiates between being experienced and being innocent. In the poem "Spring," the speaker focuses on the coming of spring and the excitement surrounding it which is emphasized by the trochaic meter of the poem. Everyone, including the animals and children, is joyful and getting ready for the new season, a season of rebirth and a new arrival of nature’s gifts.
LaGuardia, Cheryl. "WILLIAM BLAKE: SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE." Library Journal 128.9 (2003): 140. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 13 July 2011.
...he sweat and painstaking talent artists put into a piece of art. Likewise, when an onlooker sees a couple in love, how are they to distinguish whether it is true love or merely youthful, immature love? For this reason, only experienced lovers are capable of detecting true love in others. The potential beauty of love is held at the mercy of the two lovers. Thus the extent to which the love will mature depends on the unpredictable course the journey of love takes throughout its progressive stages. As with a painting, at it’s beginning, love has the potential to be something powerful and immortal. Easy love is happy, immature love. For love to be deep and meaningful, it must face challenges and overcome adversity. Love is the artwork of nature. Like the beautiful and serene calm after a vicious storm, love is often dangerous and uncomfortable before it can be lovely.