Blake Flashcards
The Lamb
INNOCENCE
KEY THEMES:
- Religion as a force for good
‘Gave thee clothing of delight’ ‘gave thee life’ ‘bid thee feed’
- God gives followers all they need and more to survive just because of his love. Omnibenevolent.
Lamb made ‘All the vales rejoice’ ‘by the stream and o’er the mead’ - lexical patterning with nature implies intrinsic connection between God and+ natural world, as opposed to man-made institution of the Church.
AABB rhyme: importance of a personalised relationship with God; nursery-like rhyme implies innocent, basic relationship with God should be favoured.
On Another’s Sorrow
INNOCENCE
Ognore i cba
It uses many emotive interrogatives to question the teachings of the Church and emphasise Swedenborgian values of safety and security. No cynical tone. It uses anaphora, a reasonably regular structure, alliteration and first person subjective viewpoint - lyrical outlook.
The Schoolboy
INNOCENCE
KEY THEMES:
- Education (opposes formal education system; better taught when growth, freedom and creativity are encouraged).
‘Under a cruel eye outworn’
- Teacher - authority figure.
- Synecdoche: child is under constant surveillance.
‘How can a bird that is born for joy sit in a cage and sing?’
- Rhetorical questions highlight the falsity of the superstructure.
- Personification:
- Interrogative compares children to birds, prevented from fulfilling their potential due to the restrictive ‘cage’ of the education system.
Children = ‘tender plants’ whose ‘buds are nipped’ and ‘blossoms blown away’.
- Extended metaphor of gardening suggests children are being pruned like plants - their education restricts their growth.
- Metaphor connects nature and children: instrinsically connected.
‘Sighing’ ‘drooping’ ‘anxious’ ‘dreary’ ‘dismay’
- Semantic field of boredom.
The Little Black Boy
INNOCENCE
Reader in a position of experience, listening to voice of innocence.
‘And I am black, but oh! My soul is white.’
- Colour juxtaposition places binaries at either end of the scale: reinforces white = good black = bad.
- Child is innocent + not conscious of oppression. Inside he is white - represents purity at a time where black people were seen as impure.
‘When I from black and he from white cloud free, and round the tent of God like lambs we joy’
- Command of English falters - internalising his oppression through his regressed language.
- He must be like the white boy in order to go to Heaven - it is predicated on certain conditions.
‘I’ll shade him from the heat’
- Sense of subservience/deference.
‘And be like him, and then he will love me’
- He is sure of God’s love, but just wants English boy to love him. The only way for black and white people to love each other is in death.
The Echoing Green
INNOCENCE
Nurse’s Song
INNOCENCE
Blake encourages the idea of children being educated through nature, rather than the formal education system. This allows for freedom to grow, and express creativity.
In Nurse’s Song the children are allowed to play in nature and because of this joy and freedom, the nurse’s heart is ‘at rest’ and ‘everything else is still’. This idyllic imagery shows the children to be enjoying playing and learning in nature, and it is celebrated that the nurse allows them to do so.
The internal rhyme creates a simple rhythm, like a nursery rhyme, showing that education by nature allows for a simple and child-like existence. The nurse lets nature act as an authoritative figure, controlling when the children should tire.
Nature is their educator, and so they cannot go to bed while nature is awake. Blake encourages education through understanding nature - supporting the eco-critical idea:humans and nature should be balanced.
Holy Thursday
EXPERIENCE
Hypocrisy of child poverty coexisting with supposed societal charity.
‘Babes’ being ‘fed’ with ‘cold and usurous hand’ - sense of detachment from ppl giving charity and receiving it. No genuine altruism behind society’s gifts to children.
Land is ‘rich and fruitful’ with charity but Blake laments ‘It is a land of poverty!’ - blatant hypocrisy that society deems it acceptable to be charitable on ‘Holy Thursday’ while ignoring the destitution and victimisation of children that occurs all year round.
‘Babes’ been ‘reduced to misery - victimhood is not innate. Children born innocent and joyous, but it is the external society that diminishes them into a state of experience.
Starkly contradicts the notion that societal charity elevates and benefits children; instead, that same society is responsible for their oppression in the first place.
The Divine Image
INNOCENCE
Implies that God is us - the path to God is through our personalised spiritual connection with him, not the Church.
‘Mercy, pity, peace and love’
- Abstract nouns turned into proper nouns. Personified essence of what it means to be human - they come from within.
- In an era of social stratification, everyone can pray to these traits and find God.
‘[…] is God our father dear […] is man his child and care’
- Syntactical parallelism: blending between what is divine and what is temporal. We are the divine image - divine virtues embodied by humans.
Holy Thursday
INNOCENCE
Children possess an innate strength that juxtaposes their lowly position in society.
Prayers = ‘mighty wind’ ‘harmonious thunderings’ - children themselves have an inherent power of their own that unites them with God.
Metaphorical description as ‘flowers of London town’ -children inherently natural, direct link to pastoral world. Bucolic imagery. Distinguishes them from typical urban setting of London - in corrupt, capitalistic world of experience, children provide semblance of innocence/purity - not yet been victimised.
‘Like Thames waters flow’ - Simile: children as free, powerful and natural, OR they are being carried on/manipulated by the procession. Carried along by a force bigger than themselves.
‘Multitudes of lambs’ - innocent, but also symbol of sacrifice. Children a sacrifice to make the wealthy feel good about their charity.
Lineation: longer lines link to children’s procession.
The Chimney Sweeper
INNOCENCE
Victimisation of children who are bound and constricted by the profession they are forced to pursue.
Instantly victim: ‘mother died’ when he was ‘very young’ - bereft of any meaningful familial love.
Suffering exacerbated: child ‘sold’ by his own ‘father’ to a chimney sweep. Familial relationship between father + son is financial as opposed to loving/nurturing - child victimised through their lack of parental care.
Child’s victimisation not constrained to domestic sphere - after being sold to the labour market they subsequently become a victim of capitalist superstructure that dominates working classes.
‘So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep’
- Child reified: even in sleep they take on the characteristics of the work they perform. Dehumanises + strips of individuality. Merely a means to an end to uphold prevailing capitalist ideology.
Tom Dacre’s head ‘curled like a lamb’s back’ - Biblical allusion - inherently innocent/pure. Perhaps nothing but a sacrifice to wider capitalist system …
..metaphorical description of chimneys as ‘coffins of black’ - perhaps implying profession will inevitably result in death.
The Chimney Sweeper
EXPERIENCE
‘A little black thing among the snow’
- Dehumanised by the soot - a product of the work he performs.
- Juxtaposes pure, untainted snow: he has been corrupted by experience.
‘Crying weep, weep in notes of woe’
- Assonance + aspirant alliteration: creates sound of misery.
‘They are both gone up to the church to pray’
- Church = institution - indoctrination means that parents prioritise praise of God over happiness/wellbeing of their child.
‘Who make up a heaven of our misery’
- Juxtaposition: Heaven is built on misery + exploitation.
Night
INNOCENCE
The Clod and the Pebble
EXPERIENCE
Clod = clump of earth - malleable, unlike pebble (represents refusal to be moved/changed).
‘Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care’ - Clod advocates selfless love, and thus is able to build a ‘Heaven in Hell’s despair’.
But is then ‘trodden with the cattle’s feet’ - if you lobe selflessly you will
‘Love seeketh only self to please, to bind another to its delight’ - Pebble suggests we love selfishly/for ourselves and bind others to ourselves for our own enjoyment. Love binds people together in marriage: institution of the Church.
Two views separated by a reporting stanza: binary opposition/diametrically opposed.
The Sick Rose
EXPERIENCE
4 readings:
1. Representation of destruction of beauty in WOE.
2. Innocence destroyed by experience - this is irreversible.
3. Corruption of sex - women are destroyed by it (STIs)
4. Suppression of sex; the idea that it is sinful is corrupting, not the act itself.
‘O rose, thou art sick’
- Addressed to rose - more respectful - Blake criticising that she would have been deemed to lose her value.
- Ven
‘Invisible worm’ - sinister.
- Penis. Associated with pain and destruction. Phallus, in general, is destructive.
- Worm personified: agency, premeditated.
‘Howling storm’
- Personification: the world is a howling storm. Perhaps her resistance to what is happening. Male lust.
1 sentence - short + fast. Sense of momentum: how quickly it can happen.
The Tiger
EXPERIENCE
PAIR WITH THE LAMB
‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night’
- Trochaic meter provides rhythm and intensifies the epizeuxis + dental/plosive alliteration: powerful opening, contrast to The Lamb.
- Addressing tiger - personified.
- Fire imagery: capacity for creation within fire (industrialisation). But also capacity for destruction. Tiger created out of fire, contrast to Lamb who exists in full form without reference to creative process.
‘Twist the sinews of thy heart’ (whole stanza)
- Dental alliteration - sounds like construction/hammer - sounds like what it is describing.
- Contrasts with The Lamb’s liquid alliteration.
‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’
- Opposition in the world is essential - tiger exists to provide symmetry to the lamb.
“What immortal hand or eye / Could (dare) frame thy fearful symmetry?
- Ironic: referencing symmetry but there is no natural rhyme.
- Same question as The Lamb, but pejorative.
Interrogatives/questions but no answers are provided, unlike The Lamb.
