blake Flashcards
Poems - innocence and safety
Echoing Green- children are happy and people are free, humans and nature in harmony. Young and old share same space under the oak tree symbol for what the government should be like.
Laughing song- meadows, grasshoppers and children are free to “live and be merry”
On Another’s Sorrow- if humans live in a harmonious state hen they will share and dissipate the sorrows of others including those of children and small birds
Poems- innocence and safety BLAKE
Poems relating to this theme often produce ideas of idealistic landscapes much like More’s Utopia which is set up as an example of the present world allowing readers to extrapolate messages into their own lives.
Form of indirect protest.
Poems- Protesting Government Power
London- “mind forged manacles” / “chartered” - oppression/ “marks of woe” - clear where Blake locates the blame. Blake supports the vulnerable and powerless.
The Clod and the Pebble- political world is motivated by selfishness and self love, those who have power want to blind others to their own delights “a Hell in Heaven’s despite” VOLTA halfway through two sides of humanity clay idea god and moulded people Blake criticism of the church
Little Black Boy- industrial magnates making money on the back of proletariat and slave trade was still thriving
Poems- Protesting Government Power BLAKE
Blake directly attacks the repressive arm of government. Poems written in 1794, British Government was deeply conservative and reactionary. Tory Government was terrified of revolution and the industrial revolution was making money on the backs of the thriving slave trade.
Poems- Protesting against abuse of children
Holy Thursday (experience)- “babes reduced to misery/Fed with cold and usurious hand”
The Chimney Sweep (innocence)- Tom Dacres father sold him while his young “could scarcely cry, weep weep, weep, weep” and their treatment by their male employers were often brutal. Children lived in suffocation and burning, lives cut short by cruel employment
The Chimney Sweep (experience)- male tyranny is attacked in the figure of “God and his priest and king” who together make up a heaven of misery of the “little black thing” weeping in the snow.
London- the “chimney sweeper’s cry” is covered up by the church
Protesting against abuse of children BLAKE
The Chimney Sweep is a recurring image in Blake’s poems and foregrounds societies evils. Chimney sweepers were apprenticed at the age of seven.
Blake directly criticises the way adults abuse children.
Blake against the Education System
The School Boy- Blake directly condemns the formal education system which limits the creativity and natural curiosity of children. He says that children who are sent to school on a summer morning “spend the day” sighing in dismay.
Imagery of repressing is used to clinch this point school is referred to as a “cage” and children as buds which are “nipped” by formal learning.
Blake against the Educations System BLAKE
Blake argues implicitly throughout Songs of Innocence and of Experience that the best education comes when children are given freedom to grow. Like Wordsworth, he believed that nature was the best educator because it is instinctive and sympathetic.
Blake suggests that when children are taken away from the natural rhythms of life, they will be cast into a world of winter barrenness.
Blake against Law Conventions and Oppression
The Chimney Sweeper- Children are “locked up in coffins of black” the physically restrictive space of the chimney becoming a metaphorical representation of control and oppression.
Nurse’s Song innocence- Exemplifies how life ought to be lived. The kindly nurse does not curtail the children’s fun and the play she listens to their honest requests to continue with their games and gives them the responsibility about when they should go home.
Infant Sorrow- Blake presents a vignette of a child’s birth. The newborn is “struggling” and “striving” against his father, and at the end of the poem “bound and weary” it gives up hope.
Little Girl Lost- the father who stands in judgement over his daughter for pursuing her desires causes her to shake with terror. Blake prophesises that children of the future will be surprised that in a former time “Love! Sweet Love!” was thought a crime.
London- even the river Thames has been restricted by the hand of a man just like the London streets which is too “chartered”.
Blake against Law Conventions and Oppression BLAKE
Blake protested against the human laws which sought to restrict sexual freedom. He believed love was natural and should not be subject to conventional controls.
Images of imprisonment and binding recur throughout the songs, they are indicators of the lamentable state of the world as Blake saw it, one in which people are controlled and subjected.
Blake and the green world of eco politics
The Tiger- Shows Blake’s highest respect for nature. The creature with its “fearful symmetry” burns bright and defies definition and the poet is in awe of its terrible and magnificent power but does not want to crush it
Earth’s Answer- Suggests that human beings should listen to the Earth. Then the imagination would be freed from all repressive forces.
The Blossom- The Blossom tree is admirable since it offers protection and understanding passing no judgement on The Blossom either to the merry sparrow or the sobbing robin but instead drawing both to its bosom. Nature is given a voice perhaps showing the importance it has in Blakes philosophy.
The Fly- the narrator identifies with the fly and see’s himself and the fly as being at the mercy of some greater power which can brush them both aside.
Blake and the green world of eco politics BLAKE
Blake ultimately suggests that a healthy interaction between human beings and nature and a sympathetic understanding of nature’s powers and laws can increase human joy and well-being.
Blake shows that human life is at its best when it has a healthy relationship with nature when it is part of it and not superior to it. The poems set to remove the anthropocentric view that humans have Blake seems to suggest that nature should be awarded the same rights as human beings. He argues that life in all its forms.
Blake Anticlericalism poems
The Garden of Love-Blake attacks the repressive and damaging influences of traditional religious teachings and morality on these most natural of human instincts. Priests bind their briers the joys and desires of speakers. Celebratory metaphor representative of sexual freedom. “A chapel was built in the midst” Image of a chapel signifies the dreadful changes that have occurred since the narrators last visit to the Garden and as the poem develops religious symbols are shown to occupy the once joyous space. The poem ends with the garden transformed into a graveyard where the narrator laments. “priests in black gowns were walking their rounds/ And binding with briars my joys and desires” -> “binding” shows agent of suppression.
Little Boy Lost (experience)- the child who questions the perceived conventional wisdom of the church is seized the priest who thinks this child has no right to ask questions. The priest believes he is a custodian of the truth and the law and should not be challenged. His reaction to the child is terrifying, it is stripped, bound to an iron chain and burned- similar imagery to Jesus.
Holy Thursday- also shows the tyrannical spirituality presented through religion.
The Little Vagabond- children suffer with hunger and misery. Blake appeals for compassion and responsibility.
Blake Anticlericalism BLAKE
Blakes frequent attack on organised religion- views it as destructive dogmas and ideologies. He also draws attention on miseries caused through church’s demand for obedience and obeisance. Parents go to church to pray while their children are alone suffering. Also offers no respite for children who are suffering with hunger and misery.
