The SHEPARD

Question 1

Summarise the poem

Answer 1

The Shepard roams freely. He is in touch with natural, instinctive love and has an idyllic life.

Question 2

Describe the structure of the poem

Answer 2

• 2 quatrains
• ABCB ABCB
• Broadly anapaestic rhytm (jaunty)
• Pastoral

Question 3

Biblical allusions

Answer 3

• I am the good shepherd.
• The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

Question 4

Symbolic interpretations

Answer 4

• Blake outlines his own vison of love and relationships, which is characteristic of the innocent perspective.
• constructs a romantic, utopian, prelapsarian world in which nature, the divine and man are in complete communion with each other. In line with pantheistic Romantic tradition.
• Blake warning readers that experience often looms on the horizons of innocence.
• A metaphor of parent-child relationships, The parent as shepherd and the child as lamb, in a happy and pure relationship. Which contrast the reality of raising children in a world of poverty and disease, particularly in a squalid and dangerous city like London