Analysis Of The Poem The Schoolboy

Rohan Baishya

Due 2/13/14

Block 5

Poem Commentary

The Schoolboy by William Blake

The Schoolboy is a poem which at first, William Blake, the author of the poem, put in his original version of Songs of Innocence but eventually moved it to the other half of his complete work, Songs of Innocence and Experience. His change of mind of the suitable position for The School Boy shows indecision by Blake regarding whether he should divide the works into two divergent sections or keep them together to resemble the crucial eminence of this particular poem. An elucidation of the poem is that Blake knew beforehand and was planning out the larger work when Songs of Innocence was first published, and that he intentionally decided to have dissimilar poems like The Schoolboy to institute at least some tension through the concurrence of them centered on other carefully planned out works. This understanding is further supported because Blake already completed plenty of the poems earlier, and these later became the Songs of Experience when the former work had been published. Therefore, it is straightforward to envisage that Blake was experimenting, which led to a couple divergent poems added momentarily to Songs of Innocence. But beside the point, these distinctive characteristics of the background of The Schoolboy are incorporated to emphasize the poem as something worth evaluating more closely, for there is far more to it than meets the eye.

Another rationale for concentrating on The Schoolboy is its subject matter. The poem is in relation to the results of official schooling on a child’s life. What happens to kids when they are brought into an atmosphere of strict, textbook style of learning? Is anything lost in exchange for the chance to learn in ...

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...ful experiences in school can adversely shape the lives of kids and students. In the second half of The Schoolboy, William Blake gives a passionate call for the insightful handling of juvenile minds.

In the fourth stanza, an additional element from the first stanza is used figuratively to exemplify the negative results of an authoritarian way of learning. The tenor of this allegory is an anxious kid required to go to school and disregard his or her way of thinking. The comparison is to an incarcerated bird that droops its young wings and is forced to forget its joyful urge to fly free. The similarity, which institutes the metaphor, is the incarcerating makeup of both the school and the bird’s cage; the purpose of both are to control and transform the being within at the cost of their innate, free self-expression, oppressing the delicate, youthful tunes within them.