Analysis of William Blake’s Poetry: Innocence, Experience, and Social Critique
Introduction to *Piping Down the Valleys Wild* by W. B. Blake
This poem consists of five quatrains, some of which follow the heroic stanza form. The rhyme scheme of the “Introduction” varies depending upon the stanza. Stanzas 1 and 4 follow the traditional ABAB pattern, while stanzas 2, 3, and 5 use an ABCB pattern. The first and fourth stanzas begin with “Piping” and the noun form “Piper,” juxtaposing the musical nature of the speaker with the most musical rhymes of the poem. Blake wrote this poem in a simple duple meter. The resulting rhythm is also simple and would certainly appeal to children and remind adults of the simple nursery rhymes they heard in their childhood. In this way, Blake hopes to bring his readers back in touch with a simple spiritual innocence. The arrangement of the poem is such that every verse is musically rhythmical to which the readers can tap their feet while reading. Blake also uses the repetitions and variation on the words “pipe and piping” consistently, which provides an attractive sound to the reader’s ears and a memorable alliteration for the poem. For example, in the second stanza of this poem Blake uses “pipe and variation on pipe five times. “’Pipe a song about a Lamb.’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again’. So I piped; he wept to hear.” – (lines 5 to 8). These combinations give a sense of quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another to capture the readers, or child’s, attention.
To create an atmosphere of contentedness, W. Blake, with his majestic use of words, settles the mind of the reader in a very cheerful and unconcerned environment. This is reached thanks to the use of a calmed and relaxed tone. Blake makes many references to Greek and Roman mythology in his poetry. This enables him to give deeper significance to the characters and situations in a poem. Myths are more than stories; they are told to suggest some truths about human nature and experiences or to explain how the world has become the way it is. Piping – The presence of a piper, especially in this rural setting, suggests the Greek god Pan, god of rustic music. This reinforces the idea of simple, unsophisticated songs, ‘songs of innocence’. Innocence is symbolized by children.
Oppression and rationalism are symbolized by urban, industrial landscapes. Blake dramatizes the conflict between nature (“piping down the valleys wild”) and social order, between natural innocence and the pressures of social experience.
Contrast: *Introduction* and *London*
On one hand, the “Introduction of Songs of Innocence” shows us a remote time when the scope of the poem was harmony and had the innocence of a child. The child in the poem could be his own internal childhood (referring to the past of the piper) or a reference to Heaven (“On a cloud I saw a child”). To first romantic poets such as William Blake, the idea of a natural and peaceful place could be compared with Eden. On the other hand, “London” gives us an opposite vision of society. It shows us a recent period. The country and the urban environment are present and it gives us the perspective of the chaos, fragmentation, corruption… Blake depicts marginal conditions of life “The chimney sweeper’s cry”, “new-born Infant’s tear”, the youthful Harlot’s curse”… In this poem, child characters suffer. The innocence of childhood is being deteriorated by the experience of the “chimney- sweeper” or by “the new-born infant’s tear”
London (SE) by W. B. Blake
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
The poem has a total of sixteen lines which are split into 4 paragraphs with a rhyming AbAb pattern throughout the poem. The poem consists of four stanzas, with four lines. The rhyme scheme is a cross rhyme. The poem’s general attitude and mood can be described as a very depressive one. In the first stanza, which can be seen as an introduction, the lyrical I focuses the reader at the city of London in general. Repetition is the most striking formal feature of the poem, and it serves to emphasize the prevalence of the horrors the speaker describes. Each stanza offers a glimpse of a different aspect of the city, almost like a series of photos. The poem *London* comes from the *Songs of Experience* section and describes a journey around the capital, showing the terrible conditions faced by the inhabitants of the city. Child labor, restrictive laws of property, and prostitution are all explored.
The poem starts with a criticism of laws relating to ownership. The ‘charter’d Thames’ is a bitter reference to the way in which every aspect of life in London is owned, even the river, so often in other poems a symbol of life, freedom, and the power of nature. Blake’s poem also criticizes religion and its failures. The speaker draws attention to the cry of the chimney sweeper and the blackening of church walls, implying that the church as an institution is inactive, unwilling to help those in need. It ends with a vision of the terrible consequences to be faced as a result of sexually transmitted disease. The opening image of wandering, the focus on sound, and the images of stains in this poem’s first lines recall the *Introduction to Songs of Innocence*, but with a twist; we are now quite far from the piping, pastoral bard of the earlier poem: we are in the city. The poem’s title denotes a specific geographic space, not the archetypal locales in which many of the other *Songs* are set. Blake’s speaker has a very negative view of the city: the conditions faced by people caused them to decay physically, morally, and spiritually. For Blake, buildings, especially churches, symbolized confinement and restriction. The lines “the Chimney-sweeper’s cry / Every blackening church appalls” provide an association which reveals the speaker’s attitude. Money is spent on church buildings while children live in poverty, forced to clean chimneys – the soot from which blackens the church walls. This makes a mockery of the love and care that should characterize the Christian religion. The “blackening” church walls are also linked to the running of “blood down Palace walls” – a clear allusion to the French Revolution. The speaker is perhaps arguing that, unless conditions change, the people will be forced to revolt. The poem as a whole suggests Blake sees the rapid urbanization in Britain as a dangerous force. Children are no longer free to enjoy childhood; instead they must work in dangerous conditions. Charters restrict freedoms, ultimately resulting in the restriction of thinking.
Blake paints a nightmare vision of social and urban decay, where anguished sounds reverberate, darkness prevails (‘black’ning Church’, ‘midnight streets’) and death stalks the streets (the ‘blood’ of the ‘hapless Soldier’, the ‘hearse’ that contains those stricken with ‘plagues’). The poem is pessimistic. It is without hope for the future. The tone of the poem is sometimes biblical, reflecting Blake’s strong interest in religion. It is as if the speaker is offering a prophesy of the terrible consequences unless changes are made in the city. In the first stanza, Blake uses repetition twice, firstly using the word “charter’d”. This is a reference to the charters that allocated ownership and rights to specific people. Many, including Blake, saw this as robbing ordinary people of their rights and freedoms. The second use of repetition is with the word “marks”. This has a dual meaning: it refers to the physical marks carried by people as a result of the conditions they endure, and is also suggestive of the speaker recording evidence during his walk through the city streets. In the first three lines of stanza two, the speaker makes it clear that “every” sound he hears is evidence of the “mind-forg’d manacles”. This suggests that people’s minds are restricted and confined – that the city has robbed them of the ability to think. The poem is full of negative words: “weakness”, “woe”, “cry”, “fear”, “appals”, “blood”, “blights”, “plagues” and “hearse” are some of them. The last stanza ends with a startling contrast: “marriage hearse”. Marriage should be a celebration of love and the beginning of new life but here it is combined with the word “hearse” – a vehicle associated with funerals. To the speaker of the poem, the future brings nothing but death and decay. If this poem is compared to William Wordsworth, the differences are striking. Blake’s poem is very negative about city life and focuses closely on the inhabitants. Wordsworth’s, on the other hand, is about the speaker’s emotions when seeing a deserted city.
The Lamb (SI) by W. B. Blake
Little Lamb who made thee
The poem begins with the question, “Little Lamb, who made thee?” The speaker, a child, asks the lamb about its origins: how it came into being, how it acquired its particular manner of feeding, its “clothing” of wool, its “tender voice.” In the next stanza, the speaker attempts a riddling answer to his own question: the lamb was made by one who “calls himself a Lamb,” one who resembles in his gentleness both the child and the lamb. The poem ends with the child bestowing a blessing on the lamb. *The Lamb* is in rhymed couplets in a basic trochaic meter.
This meter is often found in children’s verse and so enhances the impression of simplicity. The opening and closing couplets of each stanza change by employing a spondee ‘made thee’, which makes them more emphatic and slows the reader down. The patterning of repetition, with difference in the opening and closing couplets, frames the questions and answers. They emphasize the idea that this is a catechism or, alternatively, a child’s riddle. Think how often riddles and jokes use a similar patterning of repetition. The flowing *l*’s and soft vowel sounds contribute to this effect, and also suggest the bleating of a lamb or the lisping character of a child’s chant. The rhymes in “The Lamb” are outrageously simple. Blake rhymes “thee” with itself four times and mostly sticks to single syllables, like “feed” and “mead,” “mild” and “child.” The poem has two stanzas with ten lines each. The first two and last two lines of each stanza are repeated like the chorus or refrain of the song. These lines have six beats, and they serve as bookends to the middle six lines, most of which have seven beats. In the first stanza, Blake mentions little details that can be related to God and the Bible. For example, in the third line Blake mentions “gave the life” relates to God because God gives life to all living things on earth. An example of how the poem is related to something religious is that mead is a form of alcohol. The blood of God in church is presented by red wine which is another form of alcohol. Finally, in the last couple of lines, Blake says “God bless thee”. Another reaction, I had to the poem is that the word choice throughout the poem was soft and light. The softness of the poems kind of reminded me of a lamb itself. After further analyzing the poem by Blake, the readers can have a better understanding of what the theme of the poem is. The theme of the poem is innocence. Innocence is the theme because little lambs are innocent. Also the Lamb of God is innocent.
The tone of the poem is pure. There is a pure tone to the poem for plenty of reasons. The first reason is that the poem is about a little lamb. The majority of the time when an individual thinks of a little lamb they think of something that is pure. The second way is the tone is pure is when some individuals they of lamb, they think of the Lamb of God. The poem is associated with religious instruction. At the same time, it can be associated with the innocent pleasure of children asking riddles. In this way, it manages to use the device of repeated rhetorical questions without appearing to use adult art. Throughout the poem Blake uses imagery to describe the lamb and nature. The image of “softest clothing, woolly, bright” describes both the lamb and nature because the readers can picture the lamb being soft and woolly while being outside in the bright sun. Traditionally, lambs represent innocence. In the Christian Gospels, Jesus Christ is compared to a lamb because he goes meekly to be sacrificed on behalf of humanity. Many of the poems in the *Songs of Innocence*, including “The Lamb,” contain pastoral imagery. “Pastoral” refers to the idealized lives of merry shepherds and shepherdesses who traipse through the countryside alongside their flocks. Sometimes a lamb is just a lamb. That is, unless it’s the “Lamb of God.” Or unless it’s the human lambs being shepherded by Jesus Christ. Christianity turns everyone in this poem into a lamb. The poem’s symbolic, religious meaning comes through in the second stanza, where the lamb’s creator is revealed to be Jesus Christ. The poem is about the Lamb of God. The true meaning of the poem compares the little lamb to the Lamb of God.
The Tyger SE by W. B. Blake
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
“The Tyger” has two repeating stanzas, the beginning and last. This is Blake’s way to place emphasize on what he believes to be most important in his poem. The middle stanzas are used to describe the beautiful animal. The poem comprises six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The trochaic meter is regular and rhythmic, its hammering beat suggestive of the blacksmith that is the poem’s central image. The simplicity and neat proportions of the form are perfectly adapted to its structure, in which a series of questions all contribute to the articulation of one central idea. The theme of the poem is that it is the opposite of the lamb, even though they had the same creator. One theme central to Blake’s “The Tyger” is the identity of God or the Creator. The speaker asks what kind of creator would create a tiger? What kind of creator would form such a powerful and destructive creature? When read in contrast with “The Lamb,” which is the partner poem of “The Tyger,” the poem suggests that no dichotomy or separation exists between good and evil, between gentle and fierce. The Creator is a mixture of the two, as are natural creatures and human beings. The same Creator that made the lamb made the tiger. The answer is a Creator or Immortal who is a mixture of all. He creates the tiger the same as he creates the lamb. Evil is not evil, as we normally think of it. It is just another side of good. That idea is certainly “universal.”
Readers can conclude that the tone of the poem is danger. There is a danger tone to the poem for plenty of reasons. The first reason is that the poem is about a tiger who hunts at night. Therefore, if an individual runs into a tiger during the night they are died. Second reason why the tone of the poem is danger is because it is the opposite of the lamb. The lamb is innocent, while the tiger is dangerous. Throughout the poem Blake uses imagery to describe the tiger and nature. The image of dark glowing eyes surrounded by dark forest describes both the tiger and nature because the readers can picture the tiger staring at them through the tree branches. They can also picture seeing only darkness and two bright eyes staring back at them. The imagery of fire evokes the fierceness and potential danger of the tiger, which itself represents what is evil or dreaded. “Tyger Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night,” Blake begins, conjuring the image of a tiger’s eyes burning in the darkness. Blake’s images evoke the celestial sphere where the Christian creation began; the universe comes to life, and the hand of God creates the lamb — a symbol of Christian sacrifice. Using this image, he asks whether this same hand could create the innocent lamb and the menacing the tiger. The poem is about a dangerous. Blake wrote about a tiger because he wanted to contradiction his own poem about the Lamb of God.
Contrast with *The Lamb*
These two poems are examples of the two different perceptions upon a similar subject that we can find in the books “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience” of William Blake. “The Lamb” is the harmony, the happiness… in the meantime “The Tiger” is the fragmentation, the chaos, the pain and the oppression. They are not two opposing situations but two different perceptions of a situation. Both of them are related with the topic of religion and how “the lamb” represents the harmony and innocence, “the tiger” breaks this situation and introduces a fragmentation.
The Chimney Sweeper – SI by W. B. Blake
When my mother died I was very young,
“The Chimney Sweeper” comprises six quatrains, each following the AABB rhyme scheme, with two rhyming couplets per quatrain. The first stanza introduces the speaker, a young boy who has been forced by circumstances into the hazardous occupation of chimney sweeper. The second stanza introduces Tom Dacre, a fellow chimney sweep who acts as a foil to the speaker. Tom is upset about his lot in life, so the speaker comforts him until he falls asleep. The next three stanzas recount Tom Dacre’s somewhat apocalyptic dream of the chimney sweepers’ “heaven.” However, the final stanza finds Tom waking up the following morning, with him and the speaker still trapped in their dangerous line of work. This particular song is all about the absence of innocence. The kids in this poem have no childhood whatsoever. They get up before dawn and clean chimneys. In that sense, their innocence has been stolen from them. They’re forced to live a “black” life, covered in soot and facing a premature death. They frolic and play only in dreams. As with the (E) version of *The Chimney Sweeper*, Blake consciously employs the irony of ‘’weep’ as: The sweep’s professional advertisement of his labor (‘[S]weep! [S]weep!’) The portrayal of the misery of his position (‘[I] weep! [I] weep!). The statements on happiness “Because I was happy …” This is heightened by the matter-of-fact tone adopted by the sweep. He is introduced as crying, ‘weep’ but his account makes no attempt to pull heart strings. The tone is one of bitterness rather than pathos. It is ironic that the child is rather ‘adult’ in his acceptance of his parents’ behavior, compared to the ‘innocent’ surprise of the poem’s speaker. In *The Chimney Sweeper*, Blake uses several images and refers to related biblical ideas with which his contemporaries would be familiar with. Blake develops his own symbols in these poems as well as using established ones. He also refers to a Platonic belief that had become common among some Christians.
A lamb is often associated with innocence and playfulness, whilst a child sweep has been exposed to cruel treatment. However, lambs are also associated with vulnerable sacrifices for human evil. White is the color associated with innocence and purity, which increases sympathy for a young life being defiled by its squalid conditions. Blake here critiques not just the deplorable conditions of the children sold into chimney sweeping, but also the society, and particularly its religious aspect, that would offer these children palliatives rather than aid.
The Chimney Sweeper – SE by W. B. Blake
A little black thing among the snow
When compared structurally to the companion piece from *Songs of Innocence*, it is obvious that this poem is half as long as its counterpart is. In addition, many lines are much shorter by one or two syllables. The voice of the young chimney sweeper is similar to that of *Innocence*, but he clearly has little time for the questions put to him (hence the shorter lines). This poem starts with the AABB rhyme scheme characteristic of innocence and childhood, but as it delves deeper into the experience of the Chimney Sweeper, it switches to CDCD EFEF for the last two stanzas. The final stanza, in fact, has only a near rhyme between “injury” (line 10) and “misery” (line 12), suggesting an increasing breakdown in the chimney sweeper’s world, or the social order in general. The entire system, God included, colludes to build its own vision of paradise upon the labors of children who are unlikely to live to see adulthood. Blake castigates the government (the “King”) and religious leaders (God’s “Priest”) in similar fashion to his two “Holy Thursday” poems, decrying the use of otherwise innocent children to prop up the moral consciences of adults both rich and poor. The use of the phrase “make up a Heaven” carries the double meaning of creating a Heaven and lying about the existence of Heaven, casting even more disparagement in the direction of the Priest and King. This version of *The Chimney Sweeper*, Blake consciously employs the irony of ‘’weep’ as: The sweep’s professional advertisement of his labor (‘[S]weep! [S]weep!’) The portrayal of the misery of his position (‘[I] weep! [I] weep!).
The statements on happiness “Because I was happy …” This is heightened by the matter-of-fact tone adopted by the sweep. He is introduced as crying, ‘weep’ but his account makes no attempt to pull heart strings. In both of the first two verses Blake employs basic color imagery to contrast the ‘little black thing’ with the white of the snow, which represents the purity of the childhood that the sweep has had taken away from him. The sweep’s clothes are ‘clothes of death’ not just because the soot has turned them black, the color of mourning, but also because the soot will soon kill the child. The greatest shock of the poem comes in the second verse, where the boy says it was ‘Because I was happy’ that his parents condemned him to this early death. Blake has deliberately given us a sentence which doesn’t make sense in order to show us how totally wrong it is to violate the purity of the child. The rhythm of the last verse becomes quicker and lighter as the sweep describes how his parents ‘praise God’ that everything is fine, but slows right down as the biting last line exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of state religion. The poet’s anger at society’s indifference blazes out as never before.
Comparison: The first poem is from the perspective of a child. The children were seen as completely innocent (why the collection of poems is called *Songs of Innocence*) and relatively relied on hope to portray a certain image. The children believed that if they did their work and followed orders (according to the final lines of the poem) they would be safe from harm, and God would become their new father. This is ironic because doing their work and following orders ultimately killed many of the chimney sweepers. The second poem is from the perspective of a more experienced person. They see the true meaning of the work they do: cheap labor.
The Sick Rose – SE by W. B. Blake
O Rose thou art sick.
This short poem is “one of Blake’s gnomic triumphs.” The speaker addresses a rose, which he claims is sick because an “invisible worm” has “found out thy bed/Of crimson joy.” The rose symbolizes earthly, as opposed to spiritual, love, which becomes ill when infected with the materialism of the world. The rose’s bed of “crimson joy” may also be a sexual image, with the admittedly phallic worm representing either lust or jealousy. The worm has a “dark secret love” that destroys the rose’s life, suggesting something sinful or unmentionable. The two quatrains of this poem rhyme ABCB. The ominous rhythm of these short, two-beat lines contributes to the poem’s sense of foreboding or dread and complements the unflinching directness with which the speaker tells the rose she is dying. “The Sick Rose” uses a strange meter called anapestic dimeter, meaning that, theoretically, each line should have two (“di”) anapests. An anapest is a three syllable foot that has two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. The tone of *The Sick Rose* is one of sadness and regret. The gardener watches his once beautiful rose destroyed by a deadly worm. The gentleman who has observed the once fair and innocent young woman loses her life to an illicit affair. Both the gardener and the gentlemen mourn the loss of the once lovely rose.
William Blake’s *The Sick Rose* uses a mixture of personification, symbolism, and tone to illustrate the high price of passion. Although it is a short poem, it has a powerful message. For everything there is a price. For every sin there is a judgment. While the rose exists as a beautiful natural object that has become infected by a worm, it also exists as a literary rose, the conventional symbol of love. The image of the worm resonates with the Biblical serpent and also suggests a phallus. Worms are quintessentially earthbound, and symbolize death and decay. The “bed” into which the worm creeps denotes both the natural flowerbed and also the lovers’ bed. The rose is sick, and the poem implies that love is sick as well. Yet the rose is unaware of its sickness. Of course, an actual rose could not know anything about its own condition, and so the emphasis falls on the allegorical suggestion that it is love that does not recognize its own ailing state. This results partly from the insidious secrecy with which the “worm” performs its work of corruption—not only is it invisible, it enters the bed at night. This secrecy indeed constitutes part of the infection itself. The “crimson joy” of the rose connotes both sexual pleasure and shame, thus joining the two concepts in a way that Blake thought was perverted and unhealthy. The rose’s joyful attitude toward love is tainted by the aura of shame and secrecy that our culture attaches to love.
The Solitary Reaper by W. Wordsworth
Behold her, single in the field,
“The Solitary Reaper” was written on November 5, 1805 and published in 1807. The poem is broken into four eight-line stanzas (32 lines total). Most of the poem is in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme for the stanzas is either abcbddee or ababccdd. (In the first and last stanzas the first and third lines don’t rhyme, while in the other two stanzas they do.) In the first stanza the speaker comes across a beautiful girl working alone in the fields of Scotland (the Highland). She is “Reaping and singing by herself.” He tells the reader not to interrupt her, and then mentions that the valley is full of song. The second stanza is a list of things that cannot equal the beauty of the girl’s singing. In the third stanza the reader learns that the speaker cannot understand the words being sung. He can only guess at what she might be singing about. In the fourth and final stanza the speaker tells the reader that even though he did not know what she was singing about, the music stayed in his heart as he continued up the hill. This poem is more a vision than a piece of meditation as a Wordsworthian lyric is apt to become. The reaper sings in Gaelic, the language that the poet doesn’t know, thus he is unable to understand the meaning of the song. However the enchanting melody makes Wordsworth’s imagination set to work. The poem is simple yet romantic, pure yet serene. There is no art in the poem but imaginary and magical musical tone is sufficient enough to make the readers go into depths of Wordsworth poetry. One of the themes presented is sorrow. According to Wordsworth, the maiden presumably sings of “some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be again” (23, 24). Perhaps the most important theme, however, is the power of poetry (or song, in this case) as an artistic form. Wordsworth cannot understand the song, but he recognizes the song’s beauty and is captivated by the song.
The tone of “The Solitary Reaper” is admiration and awe. Although Wordsworth cannot understand the maiden’s song, he is dumbfounded by the beauty of the poetic tune. “[He] listened, motionless and still” (29). Readers can conclude that the tone of the poem is alluring. There is an alluring tone about the poem for plenty of reasons. First reason is that the woman is the charming travelers to stop and listen to her sing. Environment surrounding him. He notices how the still water reflect the night time sky. Second reason is that travelers are fascinated by her singing nothing they have ever heard sounds like her voice. “The Solitary Reaper” produces an image of a young Scottish woman, harvesting crops in the field and singing a sorrowful song. Lines 7 and 8 imply that the field is among mountainous terrain, and there is a valley nearby. Wordsworth uses visual imagery to have the reader’s picture what he is discussing. For example, in the beginning stanza, Wordsworth mentions a woman working in a field by herself singing. With this image the readers can picture cutting and harvesting grains in a field while singing. This is significant to the poem because the readers can better visualize the woman and the environment in which the poem takes place in. Another image that is in the poem, is the picture of somebody walking over a hill listening to the songs the woman is singing. This is significant to the poem because according to Wordsworth, everybody stops to listen to the woman sing. This image supports the statement of travelers stopping to listen and watch her harvest the grains on her field. The true purpose for writing the poem is to depict a sad woman. The woman could be sad because of past events that occurred in her life or because of current events occurring in her life. Throughout the poem, the ability to sing is being compared to being sad. Readers can conclude that Wordsworth’s opinion about being able to sing comes from the individual feeling some kind of sorrow. If an individual tries to sing and does feel some kind of sorrow, they are truly not singing. Therefore, an individual who is dealing with depression is singing to express his or her pain.
To the Cuckoo by W. Wordsworth
O blithe New-comer! I have heard,
The poem is broken into eight four-lines stanzas (32 lines total). The rhyme scheme for the stanzas is either abab with an 8-6-8-6 pattern syllable count. The Poem “To the Cuckoo”, written by William Wordsworth is a poem that is addressed to a Cuckoo bird.
Wordsworth is lying on the grass, immersing himself in nature when he hears the sound of a Cuckoo bird crying. The Cuckoo birds cry strikes emotions in him that he has not visited since his childhood. He takes the birds cry to have a story behind it and true significance rather than disregarding the cry as most others would in this case. The cry makes Wordsworth recollect his childhood days when he first heard the bird. Its “wandering voice” leads him through the woods and valleys trying to find its origin, but he never finds the bird. The poem then brings us back to present day where Wordsworth can appreciate how the bird affects his memory. The poem ends with Wordsworth commenting that the bird is blessed and deserves to be in a mythical earth, where it resides. In the first stanza, Wordsworth seems excited for spring and seeks to find the voice of the cuckoo. He says, “from hill to hill it seems to pass, at once far off, and near” (7-8). Here, Wordsworth is able to hear the wandering voice of the cuckoo bird both up close and far away. Wordsworth was also able to hear the voice when he was a child “The same whom in my school boy days I listened to: that cry” (17-18). Wordsworth was able to listen to the bird in his past and is able to listen to it in the present. This represents the immortality of the bird in voice and in its significance to wordsworth’s joy. His tone is merrisome and light. Wordsworth also uses imagery and other literary devices to convey the immortality and visionary gleam he feels when he hears the cuckoo. Wordsworth is overwhelmed with feelings of happiness and comfort when he hears the cuckoo bird’s voice. He welcomes the audience to spring on multiple occasions. Spring represents youth, happiness and freedom. So in conclusion, the main theme is nature and the subject is a man looking back at his childhood using a happiness and wistful tone.
Ode to a Nightingale by J. Keats
My Heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
Like most of the other odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line stanzas. However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable—though not so much as “Ode to Psyche.” The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five. “Nightingale” also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except “To Psyche,” which has the loosest structure of all the odes). Each stanza in “Nightingale” is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats’s most basic scheme throughout the odes. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats’s earlier poems and explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly personal to Keats. The tone in “Ode to a Nightingale” is agony and regret. But on the otherside hedoes turn the tone around at the end of the poem to a more joyful one. The nightingale described within the poem experiences a type of death but does not actually die. Instead, the songbird is capable of living through its song, which is a fate that humans cannot expect. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and that death is an inevitable part of life. In the poem, Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—as a “sod” over which the nightingale sings. The contrast between the immortal nightingale and mortal man, sitting in his garden, is made all the more acute by an effort of the imagination. As the song of the nightingale soothes the speaker like a drug, he begins to ponder death and yearns to “fade away into the forest dim” (line 20) and forget “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” (line 23) that are part of everyday life.
Contrast with *To the Cuckoo*: William Wordsworth’s ‘To the Cuckoo’ and John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ are comparable in many different aspects. The two poems have striking similarities and appear akin to one another. Both poems are likely to be written in related styles; both Wordsworth and Keats wrote in the same era, and were both Romantic Poets. The nucleus of both poems is a bird, Keats writes of a nightingale and Wordsworth of a Cuckoo. Birds are very modest and insignificant creatures, yet both poets have used them to extensively express emotion.
The Rise of the Novel
Summary: The literary form of novel appeared in the 18th century among a group of writers who had very little in common- Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. However there must have been something prevalent in that era which led them to create this new form. The novel differs from previous work in that it is characterized by realism. Realism isn’t to be defined as the opposite of idealism. Realism is the attempt at portrayal of all aspects of human experience. Realism lies in the manner in which life is represented. The novel is marked by the attempt to view life scientifically. The modern idea of realism is that which we perceive via our senses.
Daniel Defoe’s *Moll Flanders* as a Picaresque Novel
Daniel Defoe published *Moll Flanders*, as well as two other novels, in 1722. When it first came out, *Moll Flanders* was criticized by some critics who thought it was too racy and contained subjects that were not appropriate to discuss or write about. Nevertheless, it quickly became a popular novel, helping Defoe’s reputation as a novelist. Daniel Defoe’s *Moll Flanders* is widely accepted as a picaresque novel that deals with the morality of a woman born into poverty who takes on a life of crime and prostitution. Is considered an example of a picaresque novel. These novels usually employ a first-person narrator recounting the adventures of a scoundrel or low-class adventurer who moves from place to place and from one social environment to another in an effort to survive. The construction of these novels, like that of *Moll Flanders*, is typically episodic, and the hero or heroine is a cynical and amoral rascal who lives by his or her wits. There is also repentance and contriction marks the end of the picaro’s life, a position from which the picaro writes. The main differences with traditional picaresque novels are the verisimilitude and the realism, the ordinary experience. The traditional picaro is an outcast striving to survive and Moll if often a respected member in society, she just strives to be rich. Other differences are also the relevance of trade and commerce and the individualism and reflection of bourgeois values.
of bourgeois values.
JONATHAN SWIFT GULLIVER TRAVEL SATIRE Jonathan Swift used different mediums of satire, different types of logic, and different targets of ridicule in order to shine a light on separate aspects of British society, providing much-needed criticism of the profuse moral corruption of a society that sometimes seemed to forget the true ideals of its age. Swift was a prolific author and a frequent visitor at the printing house, and he wrote as critic and satirist about the nature of text. Swift came late to satire. Gulliver’s Travels is arguably his greatest satiric attempt to “shame men out of their vices” (Ibid., 14) by constantly distinguishing between how man behaves and how he thinks about or justifies his behavior in a variety of situations. This satire works on so many levels that a paper such as this allows me to deal with only three elements, and in a necessarily superficial way: the ways in which the structure and choice of metaphor serve Swift’s purpose, a discussion of some of his most salient attacks on politics, religion, and other elements of society, and his critique on the essence and flaws of human nature. Swift’s purpose was to stir his readers to view themselves as he viewed humankind, as creatures who were not fulfilling their potential to be truly great but were simply flaunting the trappings of greatness. Gulliver’s Travels succeeds in this goal brilliantly. The main object of the satire in Gulliver’s Travels is human nature itself, specifically Man’s pride as it manifests in “pettiness, grossness, rational absurdity, and animality,” (Tuveson, 57). Gulliver’s character, as a satirical device, serves Swift’s ends by being both a mouthpiece for some of Swift’s ideals and criticisms and as an illustration of them (Ewald, 138-9); Thus, critiques on human nature are made through Gulliver’s observations as well as through Gulliver’s own transformation from a “naive individual…into a wise and skeptical misanthrope,” For many critics, Gulliver’s Travels “is in a sense, a tragic work…in that it is the picture of man’s collapse before his corrupt nature, and of his defiance in face of the collapse”
MARY SHELLEY FRANKESTEIN GOTHIC Frankenstein is by no means the first Gothic novel. Instead, this novel is a compilation of Romantic and Gothic elements combined into a singular work with an unforgettable story . One of the most important aspects of any gothic novel is setting. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is an innovative and disturbing work that weaves a tale of passion, misery, dread, and remorse. Shelley employs the supernatural elements of raising the dead and macabre research into unexplored fields of science unknown by most readers. She also causes us to question our views on Victor’s use of the dead for scientific experimentation. Gothic novels also take place in gloomy places like old buildings (particularly castles or rooms with secret passageways), dungeons, or towers that serve as a backdrop for the mysterious circumstances. A familiar type of Gothic story is, of course, the ghost story. Also, far away places that seem mysterious to the readers function as part of the Gothic novel’s setting. Frankenstein is set in continental Europe, specifically Switzerland and Germany, where many of Shelley’s readers had not been. Further, the incorporation of the chase scenes through the Arctic regions takes us even further from England into regions unexplored by most readers. Just the thought of raising the dead is gruesome enough. Shelley takes full advantage of this literary device to enhance the strange feelings that Frankenstein generates in its readers. The thought of raising the dead would have made the average reader wince in disbelief and terror. In the Gothic novel, the characters seem to bridge the mortal world and the supernatural world. Dracula lives as both a normal person and as the undead, moving easily between both worlds to accomplish his aims. Likewise, the Frankenstein monster seems to have some sort of communication between himself and his creator, because the monster appears wherever Victor goes. The monster also moves with amazing superhuman speed with Victor matching him in the chase towards the North Pole. Thus, Mary Shelley combines several ingredients to create a memorable novel in the Gothic tradition. Prometheus: a figuration of humankind’s rebelliousness against tyrannical power, or the status quo => Romantic fascination + Frankenstein is an exploration of the limits/consequences of rebelliousness and ambition Modern Prometheus: Frankenstein is “modern” in the sense that there is no metaphysical or G/godly intervention involved: as Prometheus with fire, Victor uses modern technology (electricity) to supplant God.
limits/consequences of rebelliousness and ambition Modern Prometheus: Frankenstein is “modern” in the sense that there is no metaphysical or G/godly intervention involved: as Prometheus with fire, Victor uses modern technology (electricity) to supplant God.
Jane austen Emma “Domestic novel”: empowerment of middle class and emergence of a new domestic woman Value: resides in personal virtue rather than in social position Hartfield: values of commerce and property, the country house and inherited state. Social class and difference A study of self-importance and egotism derived from upper class economy (courtship and marriage included) as well as of the mitigation of these traits in the heroine
Emma: rank and social relevance (39). Natural leader of the community Highbury: small organic community alien to social and economic changes in England Emma: a novel of education. Ignorance to self-knowledge and knowledge of others Emma as a character: crippling faults. Austen: “A heroine whom no one but myself will much like” (37; chapter 1)
Who tells? Who sees? Narrator/Focalisation. Alternation of neutral (ch.1) vs selective omniscience (predominates in the novel) 3rd person narrator through Emma’s eyes: selective omniscience Understanding of Emma’s actions and faults→sympathy . Narrator introduces Emma (37): warning to readers. Values against which she must be judged. Match-making (38-9 Mrs Weston; 44 Mr Elton). Spinsterhood (109)
Emma’s knowledge of the world: deffective. So is the reader’s (initially).
Emma’s vision (Elton & Harriet 113); (Frank & Emma 265). Ironic effect
Free indirect discourse (268): illusion of accessing Emma’s mind