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Secular and religious nature of the poem the Lamb by William Blake
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William Blake was born on November 28th, 1757 in Soho, London. William's poems reflect his life and the class struggle he experienced in his life. His biography explains how his life impacted his style of poetry through historical, biographical, religious, and romantic ways; in particular, The Chimney Sweeper. He was born in a time where transition from prewar to postwar life; resulting in community change that led to hardships and a battles. A large part of his inspiration, according to his bibliography, was when he began to see the increasing injustices in the world. Some of these injustices are present in The Chimney Sweeper poem when William Blake states, “When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue, …show more content…
He includes marxist, historical, and biographical events throughout this poem. The religious section of The Chimney Sweeper was influenced by the time period William Blake grew up. William states, “Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind. And the Angel told Tom if he'd be a good boy, he'd have God for his father & never want joy.” These feelings reflect into his poems and gives the reader insight towards his religious experiences. He didn’t necessarily believe in religious forces, but he believed in a mystical force; hence the Angels and God. It’s evident in Williams poem that he longed for poverty to end and his hardships to stop. His religious beliefs and philosophies never subsided in his poems nor his life. The society and religious beliefs of Blake’s life have an enormous impact on the way he wrote. Not only were his emotions reflected in his poetry, but his environment as …show more content…
According to The Visionary Company, “Blake’s God is ‘the real man, the imagination which liveth for ever’.” Blake believed that a God’s power could not exceed the most gifted man on earth. This belief is unmistakable in his poetry. He writes of outside forces created by God that a man can change. Some of these poems that have the religious features are The Lamb, The Tyger, London, and Jerusalem. These poems don't only relate to religious criticism, but also to romantic criticism. In both The Lamb and The Tyger William expresses God’s love for each animal; both the tiger and the lamb. He conveys their creator to be soft, kind and loving. In the poem London, William does not use the same tactics he portrays in The Lamb and The Tyger. In this poem, William uses destruction, fear, and blood to depict the London scene. These only desperate factors of the environment that surrounded Blake for almost all of his life. The outside influences of his poetry are reflected throughout many of his poems by using characteristics of
William Blake focused on biblical images in the majority of his poetry and prose. Much of his well-known work comes from the two compilations Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The poems in these compilations reflect Blake's metamorphosis in thought as he grew from innocent to experienced. An example of this metamorphosis is the two poems The Divine Image and A Divine Image. The former preceded the latter by one year.
William Blake is a literature genius. Most of his work speaks volume to the readers. Blake’s poem “The Mental Traveller” features a conflict between a male and female that all readers can relate to because of the lessons learned as you read. The poet William Blake isn’t just known for just writing. He was also a well-known painter and a printmaker. Blake is considered a seminal figure in the history of poetry. His poems are from the Romantic age (The end of the 18th Century). He was born in Soho, London, Great Britain. He was the third of seven children. Even though Blake was such an inspiration as a writer he only went to school just enough to read and write. According to Bloom’s critical views on William Blake; one of Blake’s inspirations was the Bible because he believed and belonged to the Moravian Church.
The theme of authority is possibly the most important theme and the most popular theme concerning William Blake’s poetry. Blake explores authority in a variety of different ways particularly through religion, education and God. Blake was profoundly concerned with the concept of social justice. He was also profoundly a religious man. His dissenting background led him to view the power structures and legalism that surrounded religious establishments with distrust. He saw these as unwarranted controls over the freedom of the individual and contrary to the nature of a God of liberty. Figures such as the school master in the ‘schoolboy’, the parents in the ‘chimney sweeper’ poems, the guardians of the poor in the ‘Holy Thursday’, Ona’s father in ‘A Little girl lost’ and the priestly representatives of organised religion in many of the poems, are for Blake the embodiment of evil restriction.
Blake’s poetry focuses on imagination. When Blake created his work, it gained very little attention. Blake’s artistic and poetic vision is reflected in his creations. Blake was against the Church of England because he thought the doctrines were being misused as a form of social control, it meant the people were taught to be passively obedient and accept oppression, poverty, and inequality. In Blake’s poems “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” and Proverbs of Hell, he shows that good requires evil in order to exist through imagery of animals and man.
Blake had an uncanny ability to use his work to illustrate the unpleasant and often painful realities around him. His poetry consistently embodies an attitude of revolt against the abuse of class and power that appears guided by a unique brand of spirituality. His spiritual beliefs reached outside the boundaries of religious elites loyal to the monarchy. “He was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English Civil War “(E. P. Thompson). Concern with war and the blighting effects of the industrial revolution were displayed in much of his work.
The ideas that are presented in poems are often the same ideas everyone is thinking but are too afraid to speak their mind for fear that they might be judged. Allen Ginsberg explained this predicament when he said “[p]oetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private” (Ginsberg). This quote applies especially to “The Tyger” by William Blake. William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” at the surface is very simplistic; however, with further analysis the story’s theme of religion asks fundamental questions that pertain to one’s worldview with the use of symbolism.
William Blake is remembered by his poetry, engravements, printmaking, and paintings. He was born in Soho, London, Great Britain on November 28, 1757. William was the third of seven siblings, which two of them died from infancy. As a kid he didn’t attend school, instead he was homeschooled by his mother. His mother thought him to read and write. As a little boy he was always different. Most kids of his age were going to school, hanging out with friends, or just simply playing. While William was getting visions of unusual things. At the age of four he had a vision of god and when he was nine he had another vision of angles on trees.
He based most of his works in the style of Romanticism - Blake wrote from the heart, he let his thoughts and beliefs take over.
And he never turns his face away (Frye 9). Besides all of these achievements, Blake was a social critic of his own time and considered himself a prophet of times to come. Frye says that "all his poetry was written as though it were about to have the immediate social impact of a new play" (Frye 4). His social criticism is not only representative of his own country and era, but strikes profound chords in our own time as well. As Appelbaum said in the introduction to his anthology English Romantic Poetry, "[Blake] was not fully rediscovered and rehabilitated until a full century after his death" (Appelbaum v).
The two poems of William Blake, The Lamb and The Tyger are two poems that show the different kinds of people in society. To start in the poem The Lamb this shows a person whom is very innocent and caring. It is said in the poem “Little Lamb God bless thee.” Meaning a creature that is so innocent and kind and cute is created by God. This kind of person is also created by God, is innocent, kind, and cute just as well as the lamb. Now on the other hand, you have The Tyger which is also written by William Blake. This poem shows a different type of person in Blake’s society. This person is angry, mean and very dangerous. In this specific poem asks “What the hand, dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, and what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart?” It’s in this statement that Blake asks what kind of person could create such a monster as a tiger. Which he ponders the question of if God could have created something as horrible as a tiger when he had created something as innocent as a lamb. This shows the other type of person in society somebody that is also angry, mean, and very dangerous as a tiger.
However, William Blake, a romantic poet from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had ideas that revolved around God and His impact on his life. Blake wanted a place that established balance, understanding, and wisdom. Blake also wanted an idea of where people were going in life instead of believing in predestination. Blake and Yeats both have ideas for what they want their lives and their own world to be like. Some of their ideas seem to be similar, while others clash and are completely different.
The poems ‘lines composed on Westminster Bridge’ and ‘London’ are created by William Wordsworth and William Blake respectively. Wordsworth’s work originated in the eighteenth century and he himself lived in the countryside, and rarely visited large cities such as London. This is reflected in his poem, making it personal to his experience in London, however William Blake on the other hand had a vast knowledge of London and was actually a London poet, which allowed him to express his views of London from a Londoner’s point of view. I therefore will be examining comparisons in both poems, as well as their contrasting views of London and the poetic devices used to express their opinions. Wordsworth believed in pantheism, the religion of nature, meaning he believed that nature depicted religion as well as the atmosphere of a particular place.
However, this was not the intent of the author when it was written. “The Lamb” is a display of the mindset of an innocent soul who sees God only as loving and caring. “The Tyger”, in contrast, asks the question of why ferociousness and darkness was created and brought into the world by the same creator of the nave lamb. These poems were written in hopes that the audience would read both poems and realize there are multiple facets of God’s deity, which is the message that Blake hoped to communicate to the public. As the Poetry Foundation summed up this very message, “how man understands God depends on man’s view of God’s divinity” (25).
In one of his note books Blake said, "the nature of my work is visionary or imaginative; it is an endeavor to restore what the ancients call the golden age." Not only is the nature of Blake's work visionary, he claimed to have actually seen visions early in childhood. The first time he saw God was when he was only four; God put his head to the windows, and set to screaming. Four years later, he saw a tree filled with angels. Naturally, such things looked fantastic to the people around that when he told of this to his father, he narrowly escaped thrashing. Another occasion he ran home crying that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel under a tree. He saw, too, angels among the hay-makers, and to a traveler who was talking of the splendour of a foreign city, he said, do you call it splendid? "I should call a city splendid in which house were of gold, and pavements of silver, the gates ornamented with precious stones."
“The Chimney Sweeper” is a great title for Blake’s poem. The title is a symbol representing the harsh life of a chimney sweeper and his life as a child. He states, “When my mother died I was very young, and my father sold me while yet my tongue”, (ln 1-2). This is saying that his mother died when he was young and his father gave him up. Blake’s unhappiness resembles being mortal in a sense that his unhappiness is like being dead. Blake has two meanings when he says, “So your chimney’s I sweep, and in soot I sleep”, (ln 4). This line denotes that he is an adult now with the responsibility of being a chimney sweeper. Blake is really saying that his childhood was terrible like the work of a chimney sweeper.