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.