The schoolboy Flashcards
Summary
This is about a schoolboy who hates being cooped up in his classroom and would much rather play outside in the summer sun, suggesting that the school system traps students and prevents them from achieving their full potential.
‘I love to rise in a summer morn’-
Despite the schoolboy having a horrible time; he remembers what it is like to ‘rise in a summer morn’ without constraint, but this memory intertwines with all his present experience of school and regulation, only to make him more miserable and further entrench he is wasting the too brief summer and spring.
Form and structure
-The five-line stanzas rhyme ABABB. The first four stanzas are self-contained. Each presents a point in the speaker’s argument or an illustration of it. The fifth stanza differs, by running on to the final stanza. This seems to echo the content.
-These beautifully formed stanzas may be seen as constituting an appeal, from the heart, against the early imposition of unnecessary unnatural education.
‘Nor sit in learnings bower’
The middle stanzas skilfully develop crucial metaphors such as ‘Nor sit in learnings bower’.
‘Nor in my books can I not take delight’
-Blake is trying to use convey through the message that it is not ‘books’ are not uninspiring and discouraging, it is the circumstances in which is he required to read.
-The imposition of controls and constraints on his reading, is deeply damaging in igniting his love for learning.
‘How can a bird that is born for Joy sit in a cage and sing’- 3rd stanza.
-The boy himself becomes the bird, emphasising his unity with nature in a metaphor which presents school as a kind of spiritual imprisonment.
-The ‘cage’ symbolises the entrapping classroom and the ‘bird’ symbolises the boys spiritual sole which further represents the entrapment of imaginative vision.
What does the repetition of ‘Joy’ symbolise?
The repetition of ‘Joy’ symbolises the freedom school takes away as the presence of school within the second stanza ‘drives all joy away’
How does Blake highlight his concern about how social institutions such as schools crushed the capacity of imaginative vision?
Blake contrasts the pastoral features within this poem with the unnatural institution of school to highlight his concern about the social institution such as schools that have crushed the capacity of imaginative vision.
-‘In learning bower’ suggests the seclusion nor the contract with nature is available in the classroom, but both are found in the illustration who’s comfortable seated at the tree reading a book.
-‘cruel eye’ prevents the children from realising his inborn tendency to learn.
