William Blake's The Tyger, London, and the Little Girl Lost

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William Blake's The Tyger, London, and the Little Girl Lost

William Blake's the Tyger is a reminiscent of when God questions Job rhetorically about his creations. The Tyger also uses a significant amount of imagery and symbolism, which contributes to its spiritual aspects. In the poem London, Blake is trying to dispel the myth of grandeur and glory. This associated with London and to show how 'real' people of London felt. London was seen and portrayed as a powerful city where the wealthy lived and socialized. However, Blake knew that London was really a dirty, depressing and poverty-stricken city filled with slums and the homeless and chronically sicks. To reveal the truth, Blake combines descriptions of people and places with the thoughts and emotions of the people. The poem "A Little Girl Lost," from Songs of Experience is the story of a naturalistic love between the sexes told as a tragedy. Blake addresses this poem to an idealistic future age. Apparently, Blake felt animosity towards how people viewed love during his own time (Langridge).

In the Tyger, there is a wealth of imagery in the first of two lines alone. The poem begins: "Tyger : Tyger: burning bright In the forest of the night," The reader conceives in their mind the image of a tiger with a coat blazing like fire in the bowels of a dark forest. This creates a negative impression of the tiger, so some might say that the tiger is symbolic of evil. Some people may even go farther to conclude that the tiger is a symbol of Satan. The same type of imagery and symbolism is used in the first two lines of the second stanza. The image of fire in connection with the tiger is conceived again, this time within the eyes. The fire in a tigers eyes can be seen as a symbol of ferocity, and it takes no stretch of imagination to look upon Satan in the same way as well (Vine).

In the poem London, Blake starts by combining the descriptions of the crying baby and man with the observation that people oppress their hopes and dreams, because they know that they will never be able to achieve their dreams. Another is in the third stanza when Blake describes the crying chimney sweep and then the "blackening church," but is it really saying that the church does not want to dirty its hands by helping the soot-covered chimney sweep.

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