London, The Garden of Love, The Tyger - Presentation

Ackroyd Quotes

"The last great religious poet in England."

"The very curve and cadence of his sentences are derived from the Bible."

Essay: Landscapes/Nature

Explore some of the ways poets have made use of landscapes and/or the natural world in their writing with reference to Daffodils and Blake's poems

The Romantic poets, particularly Blake and Wordsworth, were fascinated by the natural world. Both authors used pastoral landscapes to evoke joy, to create idyllic prelapsarian scenes only darkened by the coming Fall - the threat of urbanisation and the Industrial Revolution. As in Daffodils, Blake explores nature with extensive use of pathetic fallacy (specifically in poems such as Laughing Song  and The Ecchoing Green) but the Londoner also depicts it with more nuance and ambiguity than Wordsworth. For the former, it sometimes seems that nature is completely shaped by the narrator, whose imagination projects onto the environment anything from desire to jealousy.

Perhaps the stereotypical Romantic portrayal of the natural world is shown in The Ecchoing Green. Simplicity often points to innocence and happiness in Blake's work, and in this poem simplicity is suggested by rhyming couplets, while its musicality stems from iambs and anapests. The skies are 'happy' and the 'birds of the bush/ Sing', anthropomorphic elements suggesting that nature is at one with humankind. Of course, in Daffodils the personification of nature is even more apparent, with a 'crowd' of daffodils 'dancing', Not only does the countryside seem alive but the poet seems to be part of the natural world too, the first simile comparing him to a cloud floating over vales and hills. Another similarity between Wordsworth and Blake is their use of the first-person, a typical feature of Romantic poetry, stressing individuality. Yet the plural pronoun - 'our' - is used in The Ecchoing Green to suggest community and harmony between nature and the young and the old. Clearly both poets are celebrating the rural lifestyle, therefore, although in slightly different ways, and even if Wordsworth was the only one with the financial means to live there.

However, the 'immense compression of meaning' (Harding) of Blake's work also suggests a threat to this way of life. When the sports come to an end is it a natural concession to the 'darkening' day, or does the present continuous verb suggest the impending threat of the Industrial Revolution? Is the green 'ecchoing' with the sounds of children's play, or reverberating with the noise of something lost? Blake probably intended both meanings, but part of the answer can perhaps be seen in London, the poem often paired with The Ecchoing Green.

This poem depicts the urban landscape which Blake knew so well. The opposite to Daffodils in many ways, it starts in exactly the same way: 'I wander'. However, it has a totally different meaning. For Wordsworth, the first-person pronoun brings individuality; in London it implies isolation, contrasting with The Ecchoing Green. For Wordsworth, wandering is a symbol of freedom; for Blake it shows that the narrator is not seeking to find injustice. But injustice is all the poet can hear, 'In every' being highlighted by the use of anaphora, while itself highlighting (through hyperbole) the ills of urban life. In contrast to the countryside, the city seems to shackle imagination and what little nature exists. For example, the 'chart'd street' is accompanied by the 'chart'd Thames' - even the river is constrained, perhaps in an allusion to Thomas Paine, Blake's contemporary, who wrote that 'Every chartered town is an aristocratic monopoly in itself'. Wordsworth actually wrote a similar poem - London, 1802 - which also cites Milton, a shared literary influence. 'It is common', G.K. Chesterton wrote, 'to connect Blake and Wordsworth because of their ballads about babies and sheep.'

However, he continued. 'They were utterly opposite. If Wordsworth were the Poet of Nature, Blake was specially the Poet of Anti Nature,' proceeding to argue that Blake set imagination against nature, and by imagination he meant the external images of things. This theory is supported by Blake's own annotations of Wordsworth's poetry, in which he wrote that 'Natural objects always did, and now do, weaken, deaden and obliterate imagination.' This may be hard to reconcile with the same poet claiming that 'nature is imagination itself', but it does demonstrate that Blake's use of landscapes and the natural world is more complex - perhaps also less positive - than it initially seems.

A Poison Tree illustrates a darker side of nature, and how the narrator can project their own feelings onto the environment. The Bard's wrath grows into a tree bearing poison fruit, an inversion of the Tree of Knowledge and the cross (as the illustration depicts).

The titular plant in Ah! Sun-flower, on the other hand, is a metaphor for yearning, 'seeking after that sweet golden clime' with sibilance emphasising the desire. Most importantly, the possessive 'my' shows that the heliotropic sunflower mirrors the narrator's emotions. Nature's ability to represent innocence and experience simultaneously is best seen in My Pretty Rose Tree, in which the author's rose becomes jealous after the poet turns away a flower. Its allegorical meaning is barely veiled, 'her' thorns often interpreted as an autobiographical account of an argument with Catherine Boucher. Whether a true account or not, it shows how the natural world is capable of beauty (in the flowers) and bitterness (symbolised by the thorns).

Blake uses the same flower, with its connotations of love, purity and Englishness, in The Sick Rose. It is corrupted by an 'invisible worm' in a poem full of sexual imagery, with a 'bed/ Of crimson joy.' The use of crimson is perhaps significant as a darker shade of red, demonstrating how its 'dark secret love' is a jealous, possessive type of lust. The same colour is used in Blake's illustration for Infant Joy, and despite Punter calling any attempt to see a dark side to the poem as 'perverse' not even this natural world is completely innocent. Art critic Jennifer Waller suggests that the angular and strained lower leaves suggest a 'hint of impending experience', while Blake's repeated used of 'befall' might also imply that the scene is Edenic in its complete sense - with the threat of the fall of man.

In conclusion, Blake's poetry displays both sides of nature. Drawing heavily on religious symbolism Blake paints scenes full of innocence , but as Ackroyd notices the 'possible deficiencies of Innocence itself' in Blake's oeuvre, so too is nature not without its darkness. Unlike Wordsworth's bright depiction of the natural world, in which the countryside influences the author, Blake's worlds are shaped by their narrators. This heavy use of pathetic fallacy and personification can create the idyllic settings typical of the Romantic poets, but also the jealousy, wrath and lust of Experience.

Documentary

Documentary on the Romantics by Peter Ackroyd

The School Boy Context

We should all appreciate the irony of rote learning Blake's poetry for an exam. He would have hated it!

There is some interesting context around The School Boy. Blake did not actually go to school as a boy, although W. B. Yeats tells of later study at Westminster Abbey:

Blake leant out from a scaffolding where he sat at work and flung a Westminster student from a cornice, whither he had climbed the better to tease him. The boy fell heavily upon the stone floor, and Blake went off and laid a formal complaint before the Dean.

'Under a cruel eye outworn' could also be an allusion to Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. Panopticon, or the Inspection House was published in 1791, around the same time as Blake was writing his Songs of Experience. This was a design for a circular building in which one central watchman could observe everyone in the institution, and could be used for any type of institution: prisons, lazarettos, work-houses, factories and schools.

As it was impossible to tell whether you were being observed, Bentham hoped that every inmate would be forced to behave - that he had discovered 'a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind'. Whether Blake was consciously referring to it or not, it seems a perfect example of the 'mind-forg'd manacles' which he hated so much.

Ackroyd Quote

Is he being ironic or is he being serious? The truth is he was generally both.

Bottrall Quote

What you find in Blake depends largely on what you expect to find.

Essay: Change

Change

The partner poem in this essay is The Temporary Face, by Imtiaz Dharker:

I draw your face on the huge sand
in the early morning, when small crabs
run and hide in the holes
I have provided for your eyes.

I go away. Through the day
people come and go, knowing nothing
but themselves, the sun on shoulders,
salt, fish, net. They scuff

your outlines, walk across your mouth,
they put down footprints in your eyes.
This makes you real, peels back
your absence, lets your image heal

like a temporary skin. I learn to
love the thing that has to be erased,
the thing I may not be allowed to keep,
sand that runs away beneath my running feet.

Explore some of the ways poets present change

Both William Blake's poetry and The Temporary Face explore change, focussing particularly on the transition between innocence and experience. Using a variety of literary devices, the two authors show that change can be unwanted, yearned for, accepted or mourned, but is perhaps always inevitable.

Infant Joy examines the time before change. The newborn child is not branded by name, gender or class by the author, and this seems to be Blake's favourite age, anaphora emphasising the 'Sweet Joy' of the poem. 'It would be perverse', argues Punter, 'to attempt to see a dark side to this poem' - to attempt to see any hint of impending change, in other words. However, the repeated use of 'befall' might suggest an approaching end to the speaker's innocence, with its connotations of the Fall of Man. Art critic Waller claims that the angular, strained lower leaves of the poem's illustration suggest 'a hint of experience', while Paglia even goes so far as to describe the poem as an 'invitation to sadism'. Her interpretation suggests that Infant Joy is so innocent that the reader becomes a voyeur, a reader-response analysis which relies on the reader to actualise the meaning of the poem, and change it entirely. This particular view seems implausible, but there can be no doubt that Infant Joy epitomises the prelapsarian happiness of the Innocence Songs, and it might be suggested that the coming Fall lies just beneath the surface.

The change is not only biblical but highly relevant to Blake's time. In particular, he seems concerned with the Industrial Revolution and its threat to Britain's countryside, to the 'darkening Green.' The use of a present participle here is ominous due to its tense, and is underlined by its position at the end of the poem; it seems far removed from the 'early morning' when Dharker drew on sand (both poets seem to associate innocence with day and light) and the children played on the green. Another poem, The Tyger, might refer to one of the most important changes of Blake's lifetime: the French Revolution. Indeed, it might be that the Terror and tyranny of Robespierre's regime, between the publication of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, influenced Blake's more pessimistic view of human nature in his second collection.

Closer to Blake's home, two churches were built on greens near his London home. This may have been the inspiration for The Garden of Love, where the Arcadian imagery of childhood and innocence is replaced by 'tombstones where flowers should be'. The juxtaposition of death and life emphasises the horror Blake felt at this change, his sadness perhaps even seen in the metre of the last stanza, where the doubling of stresses in the last two lines lends weariness to the rhythm. The lines are lengthened too, tetrameter lines instead of trimeter lines, which has the same effect. Finally, the internal rhyme and alliteration of 'binding with briars, my joys and desires' underlines a process which has not necessarily stopped, judging by the use of the past progressive tense. Similarly, Dharker uses alliteration and continuous verbs in his last last line, in which sand 'runs away beneath my running feet.' Both poets also use motifs effectively - sand, for instance, is always shifting, used to signal the passage of time in sand timers. Blake, meanwhile, uses the archetype of the Garden of Eden to suggest innocence and and the threat of the Fall.

Both poets also explore the role of the senses in experience, and in examining change. Empiricism was highly influential in Blake's time, after Locke, Newton and the Age of Enlightenment, but the Londoner often portrays the senses very negatively. In London, for example, horrors are conveyed with aural imagery, while his vision '[marks] in every face I meet/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe.' The alliteration in this passage creates a very strong image, one with a clear parallel to the 'footprints in your eyes' of Dharker's poem. This imagery, of senses having witnessed and experienced much, clearly comes after the change hinted at in Blake's earlier poetry, and for him the change is usually negative.

It is also inevitable in some of his work. In The Angel, the 'maiden Queen' of the first stanza ages so quickly that she says that 'grey hairs were on my head' by the final line, the colour 'grey' contrasting vividly with the morn 'blush'd rosy red'. The image of youth also hides change within it, with some critics suggesting that the colour red suggests menstruation . The ephemeral nature of life is hinted at with just the title of The Temporary Face, while the passage of time is also represented by enjambment (between both lines and stanzas) and the imagery of sand. Dharker's narrator learns to embrace this aspect of life, and there is evidence that Blake did too. He saw death as 'passing into another room', while The Fly implies a short existence with its form alone (the smallness of its lines). The insect itself lives a very short existence, and through  rhetorical questions Blake intends to blur the lines between him and it. But in answer to our temporary lives and the inevitability of ageing, he simply says that he is 'A happy fly', drawing comfort from the fact that 'thought is life'. This phrase, reminiscent of 'Cogito ergo sum', is a solipsistic truism not far removed from the people 'knowing nothing/But themselves' in The Temporary Face. For Blake, it seems, contentment is the remarkably simple response to unwanted change.

In conclusion, change is portrayed as inevitable and (initially) unwelcome for both poets. Writing at a time of historic upheaval, the progression of Songs of Experience is suitably cynical, yet Blake's poetry also suggests that change is what we make of it. As Dharker '[learns] to/ Love the thing that has to be erased', it is equally true that we can make change 'much worse than it needs to be', as Punter wrote of the Songs. Blake creates this impression with just one phrase. The 'mind-forg'd manacles' of London imply that we are bound by fake ('forg'd') chains, chains imposed upon ourselves through internalisation ('mind'). Despite his preoccupation with innocence turning into experience, the countryside becoming industrialised or youth giving way to maturity, there is a sense throughout Blake's poetry that he never gave upon the spirit of change and revolution which dominated the late eighteenth century.

Swinburne Quote

"[Blake] was born and baptized into the Church of rebels; we can hardly imagine a time or scheme of things in which he could have lived and worked without some interval of revolt."

The Tyger

It's worth remembering that Blake was not just a poet. His illuminations are best seen with words and illustrations combined as one. The Tyger, his most famous poem, shows how we can find extra meaning when we look beyond the words: why does the animal, so fearful in Blake's language, seem so innocuous in illustrated form?  

Essay: Social Commentary

Social Commentary

The partner poem in this essay is In a London Drawingroom, by George Eliot:

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke.

For view there are the houses opposite

Cutting the sky with one long line of wall

Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch

Monotony of surface & of form

Without a break to hang a guess upon.

No bird can make a shadow as it flies,

For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung

By thickest canvass, where the golden rays

Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering

Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye

Or rest a little on the lap of life.

All hurry on & look upon the ground,

Or glance unmarking at the passers by

The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages

All closed, in multiplied identity.

The world seems one huge prison-house & court

Where men are punished at the slightest cost,

With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy.

Explore some of the ways poetry can be used as social commentary

While critics such as Northrop Frye have explored William Blake's poetry from a mythopoeic perspective, others - like Erdman - have presented him as an astute social commentator, critical of the Industrial Revolution, marriage, school, child exploitation, slavery and the Church. George Eliot, like Blake, rejected many aspects of organised religion, but In a London Drawingroom is more concerned with urban life and its monotony. Her realism might be seen as totally different from Blake's imagination, but both authors provided highly relevant critiques of their society. 

William Blake explores the Industrial Revolution in detail through London and its possible partner poem, The Ecchoing Green. He contrasts the urban monotony of the former with the pastoral bliss of the latter: melodic rhyming couplets in The Ecchoing Green compare with a more disjointed ABAB rhyme scheme in London; collective pronouns such as 'Our'' also contrast with the isolated, first-person pronouns of city life. And at the end of The Ecchoing Green, the present participle 'darkening' might imply ongoing urbanisation and its threat to country life. The repetition of 'chart'd' brings with it connotations of constraint, even for the Thames, which should be natural. Blake might have been alluding to his contemporary Thomas Paine, who wrote that 'Every chartered town is an aristocratic monopoly in itself'.

There are several parallels between London and In a London Drawingroom, not least a threat to individuality. Anaphora emphasises 'In every' in Blake's poem, while people are defined by their jobs as chimney-sweepers or soldiers, named in the plural as opposed to the individual 'John' of The Ecchoing Green. Eliot also describes the anonymous 'passers by' in the plural, 'in multiplied identity'. So too do both poets suggest monotony in urban life, repetition and iambic tetrameter evoking this feeling in London while Eliot uses iambic pentameter very strictly for the same effect. She perhaps even includes a reference to this use of metre in the poem's language, her landscape dominated by 'Monotony of surface & of form'. The Industrial Revolution was hugely important for both writers: Blake was writing just after Watt had perfected his steam engine and Arkwright revolutionised the textile industry, while he moved into a house surrounded by fields in Lamberth only to find the area fast becoming an urban slum a decade later. Eliot was obviously writing at an even more advanced stage of industrialisation and mechanisation. Their poetry shows that neither poet supported this change, by expressing all the weariness of city life.

London also contains a biting social critique of marriage. Of course, Blake himself was happily married, but this has not stopped critics suggesting that 'every ban' could be a homophonic pun on marriage 'banns', a theory supported by the final stanza. In this Blake rhymes 'Harlots curse' with 'Marriage hearse', entwining the seemingly opposite worlds of prostitution and marriage. With the arranged marriages and dowries of Blake's time this comparison was perhaps less surprising, and it is underscored by the oxymoronic 'Marriage hearse' (equating marriage to death) and the polysemy of plagues, which could be emotional or venereal. This scathing satire again reveals Blake as a social commentator.

Arguably the main 'target' of his work, however, was the institution behind the institution of marriage. Blake's irreverence towards the Church is seen in poems such as The Garden of Love, in which a prelapsarian Eden falls due to the construction of a chapel, again linking back to the destruction of nature and industrialisation. In the past tense, immediately suggesting something lost, the narrator despairs over the building's unnatural structure imposing itself upon the green. The final two lines show the outcome:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys and desires .

Here Blake lengthens and slows the poem to convey his sadness. The use of the bacchius foot (unstressed, stressed, stressed) is rare for Blake and poetry as a whole, and suggests a dull clumsiness to the priests' rounds. Caesurae, internal rhyme, elongated vowel sounds and an extra two syllables each line (compared with the rest of the poem) all slow the pace, while a switch to the past progressive tense implies that they did not stop. Voltaire wrote that 'Religion, morality put a curb on the power of nature; they cannot destroy it.' The bucolic poetry of the Innocence poems might suggest that Blake agreed with his contemporary, with their simplicity and boundless energy, but The Garden of Love ends with a much more pessimistic commentary.

Like Eliot, Blake mostly confined his criticism of religion to the organised kind. However, The Chimney Sweeper poems might be said to criticise God - if only the Old Testament God which Blake christened Urizen. In the 'Experience' version, a 'little black boy' (again not deigned worthy of a name) is abandoned, its parents 'gone to praise God & his Priest & King/ Who make up a heaven of our misery.' Emphasised by its position at the end of the poem, the genius of this phrase lies in its polysemy, demonstrating what Harding calls the 'immense compression of meaning' in his poetry: 'make up' could simply mean 'comprise', but it could also  be interpreted as 'lie' or 'manufacture', as in the establishment creating a physical heaven for itself by exploiting the working classes. A Marxist interpretation could equally be applied to the ending of the Innocence poem: 'Tho the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm' is not unlike Marx's view of religion as the 'opiate of the people', which dulled the exploitation of the proletariat and prevented them from revolution. Blake's ending could, of course, be interpreted positively, in that Tom feels happy, but after the suffering of the earlier stanzas the ending seems like a parody of didactic nursery rhyme endings. These often ended in rhyming couplets, and the fact that The Chimney Sweeper (innocence) concludes with an eye rhyme ('warm' and 'harm') also suggests disappointment, perhaps saying that Tom's hardships have only been solved superficially - that the problem remains beneath the surface of the page.

Blake was similarly critical of school. His father, seeing his headstrong attitude from an early age, decided not to send his son to school. The School Boy possibly demonstrates why, with Blake's argument that the 'little ones' spend the day 'under a cruel eye outworn'. Mentioning their small size creates pathos, while also highlighting the ridiculousness of such totalitarian methods being used to control mere children. A 'cruel eye outworn' is an Orwellian metaphor, perhaps an allusion to Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, invented the decade before Blake wrote the poem. This was a type of circular building in which a central guard could watch over all inmates without them knowing if they were being watched. It was designed, he said, for prisons, factories - and schools. Whether Blake was referring to it or not, Bentham's panopticon seems emblematic of everything he hated, yet another example of 'mind-forg'd manacles'. This metaphor is doubly effective  because of its multiple meanings, with 'forg'd' implying shaped out of metal (another allusion to the Industrial Revolution?) and counterfeit material simultaneously. 

The manacles of slavery were the most serious. The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was only formed in 1787, but Blake was typically at the forefront of social change. Exactly like In a London Drawingroom but unlike most of the Songs, The Little Black Boy is written in iambic pentameter, arguably immediately conveying the seriousness of the topic. Although it does not contain the outright second-person accusations of The Chimney Sweeper, Blake still implicates the reader by addressing them from the child's point of view. Interestingly, the two stanzas from the child are symmetrically placed at the start and end of the poem. It is as if Blake is using structure to suggest that there is symmetry in the content too - there is little difference between the two children. If there is a difference, it is that the English boy needs to be shaded from the heat until he can bear to stand God's power, perhaps implying that he is further from God. In any case, the white and black of the poem's first half have been transmuted into silver and gold by the end: does this alchemy allude to God's spiritual riches? Or does it in act, as a cynic might ask, refer instead to to the slave trade and the exploitation of innocence?

It would not be a new theme for Blake, Bronowski wrote that his political beliefs 'ripple under the surface' of his poetry and in many cases they do, with, for example, the trochaic metre and burning eyes of The Tyger often linked to the revolutionary march and incendiary spirit of the French Revolution. But in many cases his beliefs are not hidden as extended metaphors, 'under the surface', but are extraordinarily clear. Whether it was his bleak description of London, which George Eliot later mirrored, or little Tom Dacre evoking pathos with his hair, Blake knew that his poetry was a tool for social commentary, and he did not hesitate to attack the industrialisation, organised religion or the horrific child exploitation of the late eighteenth century.

Introduction

Hi! This blog will cover revision for William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, specifically for WJEC A level students. However, it should come in handy for every examining board, or anybody interested in the following:

• Exam technique: essays on Songs of Innocence and Experience, usually with comparative reference to another poem
• Context: useful information about the life and times of William Blake
• Literary criticism: quotes about Blake from the experts
• Anything related to our favourite Romantic poet
  
  

I hope it helps, and good luck in your exams!