Bad Apples
"A Poison Tree" by William Blake is a short poem about life in general. The poem teaches its readers a valuable lesson about anger. Anger has power over ones’ mind and actions.
If a person holds in their feelings, especially anger, it can pull that person down emotionally as evident in the poem "A Poison Tree". This poem written by William Blake describes the darker emotions such as anger, hatred and Schadenfreude. The poem refers to "apple bright" in the garden which may lead readers to infer a Biblical reference to the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Man, inflicting death upon his foe, is more cruel than the God of Genesis who banished the sinners from paradise.
Paradise is a place that God created for Adam and Eve at the beginning of time. The fruit mentioned in the Bible is that of a forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe.
The poem mainly deals with anger. The beginning of the poem begins by depicting a scenario in which a man told his friend he was angry with him, yet they were able to work out their differences and resolve the issue. His anger dissipated shortly afterwards, and the friendship continued to grow like a seedling soon becomes a tree with strong roots. Blake was also angry at his enemy, but Blake could not do the same as he did with his friend. He keeps his anger secret from his enemy. Blake made a mistake by not allowing his anger to escape. His anger grew both day and night. H...
Atticus also shows empathy when he visits the African Americans and later comes home and finds his kitchen littered with food in appreciation for his defense of Tom Robinson and he responds that he is grateful and also asks them not to do it again because times are too hard.
Over time I have learned that there is truth to Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences. In reference to the Ahanbor and Sadighi (2014) “The Relationship Between Multiple Intelligences, Learning Styles and Gender” (p.177) Gardner theorized that the human population has seven intelligences, which include: Logical-Mathematical, Linguistic, Spatial, Musical, Bodily Kinesthetic and Personal Intelligences. (Ahanbor & Sadighi, 2014, p.177-178) After reading the article it is with understanding that individuals may hold the same qualities but no individual is truly the same. For example, in a school system you are exposed to all sorts of students. Many have a multitude of abilities, some have athletic ability, musical ability and in the diverseness of language. As a teacher it is my job to learn the abilities of my students to help them reach varies levels of mastery. “The growing interest in learning styles is in recognition of the fact that learners differ in ways that need to be taken into account when teachers make decisions about course content and teaching methodology.” (Ahanbor & Sadighi, 2014,
It describes how the conservative farmer follows traditions blindly and the isolated life followed by him. It reflects how people overcome physical barriers and that later in life come to their social life too. Where a neighbor with a pine tree, believes that this separation is needed as it is essential for their privacy and personal life. The poem explores a paradox in human nature. The first few lines reflect demolition of the wall,?Something there is that doesn?t reflect love a wall?
"London" by William Blake is a short poem packed with meaning. The poem has two related themes. The first explores the spiritual decay and slavery of the people of London. The second examines the oppression of certain disadvantaged groups and the implied apathy of the oppressors. Blake crafts a skillful poem with masterful use of layered word meaning, irony, repetition, and visual and audible images.
Blake was an idealist who strongly upheld his political and religious views in criticizing the conditions of London at that time. His poem reflected his perspective of London from his firsthand experience of the horrific conditions in which people live and worked.
The first piece of evidence by Blake that identifies the pressure of society placed upon the children is Blake’s particular use of rhyme scheme. Starting with the last two lines of the first stanza of the poem, Blake immediately jumps in to depict his disparaging opinion of society by enforcing the lack of parental protection present for these chimney-sweeping children. The rhyming lines, “I was very young/ … yet my tongue” (3-4) introduce the idea that this individual (the speaker of the poem) was so young and innocent that he could not only say the word “sweep,” but more importantly, that he also could not stand up for himself even against his own father, and oppose the job that he was forcefully sold in to. This particular example demonstrates how vulnerable these children were to society and how they could be easily abused and oppressed. While the first stanza may seem to directly coincide ...
In 1983, Howard Gardner came up with the theory of multiple intelligences. According to Gardner, intelligence is: the ability to solve problems that one encounters in real life; the ability to generate new problems to solve; and the ability to make something or offer a service that is valued with one’s culture (Hine). Initially, he came up with seven different intelligences that children develop, and they are verbal linguistic, logical/mathematical, musical, visual/spatial, body/kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Today, education focuses mainly on reading and writing, the verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical intelligences. While both of these are indubitably important to the curriculum, they should not be considered any more important than the other intelligences. Gardner’s theory says that everyone is smart in each intelligence; the difference from one individual to another is what intelligence(s) they are strongest in and which one(s) could be developed more. Gardner believes that by teaching to all intelligences, students are exp...
William Blake's "A Poison Tree" (1794) stands as one of his most intriguing poems, memorable for its vengeful feel and sinister act of deceit. This poem appears in his famous work Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794), placed significantly in the "Songs of Experience" section. As with many of his poems, Blake wants to impart a moral lesson here, pointing of course to the experience we gain in our human existence at the cost of our innocence. With this poem, he suggests that holding a grudge (suppressed anger left unchecked) can be fatal to the self as well as the object of wrath. Through images, punctuation, and word choice, Blake warns that remaining silent about our anger only hinders personal and spiritual growth, making us bitter, and that a grudge left unchecked becomes dangerous, even murderous.
Most importantly, the final line of the second stanza of the poem displays Marxist views as it portrays the imprisonment of the proletariat in the suffocating capitalist system and it also supports the famous quote of Karl Marx that states that “No mind is free, they only perceived to be”. This is evident when the narrator of the poem says “the mind forg’d manacles I hear”. It can be suggested that Blake compares the working class to prisoners in Newgate prison suffering from the conditions of their environment, but, significantly, Blake uses the potent image of “mind forg’d manacles” to indicate the mental chains instilled in the minds of the proletariat through physical force by the bourgeoisie who want to maintain the status quo. Perhaps, it could be suggested the use of the irregular stressed words “mind forg’d manacles” which portrays Blake...
Howard Gardner introduced the theory of multiple intelligences in 1983, in his book Frames of Mind (Giles, Pitre, & Womack, 2003). This book became the centerpiece to understand and teach human intelligence and the different types of learning styles. During this discovery he found seven unique intelligences. A decade later Gardner discovered two additional intelligences which were published in Gardner’s Intelligence Reframed. Gardner states that all intelligences can be measured by an IQ test. He defines intelligence as the “human ability to solve problems or to make something that is valued in one or more cultures” (Checkley, 1997, p. 8). There are eight criteria’s that each intelligence needs to meet in order to be identified as an intelligence they (Armstrong, 2009, p. 8) are: potential of isolation by brain damage; existence of savants, prodigies, and other exceptional individuals; an identifiable core operation or set of operations; support from experimental psychological tasks; support from psychometric findings; a distinctive developmental history with a definable set of expert “end-state” performances; evolutionary plausibility; susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system.
The structure of the first stanza helps us understand the relationships between the four aspects of human nature presented, cruelty, jealousy, terror and secrecy. The first and third lines start with the main word, while in the second and fourth ones the words come preceded by the word "And". This makes the reader connect cruelty with terror and jealousy with secrecy automatically. We can notice that the stress of the lines in this first stanza falls onto the main word, giving an emphasizing effect. Unlike many other Blake poems, such as "The Tyger" or "The Lamb" we cannot find rhyming couplets in this stanza, but the rhyming and stressing effect is enough for the reader to tie the ideas together. This effect is strengthened by the repetition of the word "human" in every line and the repetition of the "y" ending sounds in lines one, two and four.
“The Garden of Love” is, quite obviously, a poem about life and the pursuit of happiness. It is also about the effects that negativity can have on love. Blake uses religion to convey the idea that negativity “…pervades and corrupts all life”(51 n.9), further supporting it with his use of rhyme scheme and imagery. In searching for love people often times emerge scarred and hostile from their fruitless efforts. Some continue to have faith in the idea of love and its possibilities, others do not. These folk sometimes seek refuge from their pain in a variety of houses. It is just as often that these refugees project their negative attitudes onto others that search for love and happiness. People who fear love can prevent others from finding it, because they change the positive surroundings to suit their negative world.
“Intelligence is conventionally defined by a single number-an IQ-representing a cohort specific index comparing the performance of a group of individuals of the same age on a battery of sub-tests designed to assess different intellectual skills” (Brody, 1999). In other words, individuals are born with a comparatively intellectual potential (I.Q.) which is thought to be profoundly influenced by the heredity of the individual and reasonably difficult to change.
This poem shows that all people feel empathy for other people, and we receive this emotion from God, who shares in the suffering of every single living creature, no matter how small. God does not give preference to the sorrow one person, but rather in there say and night through every struggle of every creature. Blake uses rhetorical questions to call into light questions people know the answer too, but are sometime to blind to see.
The poem, drenched in wistfulness, tells the tale of a sunflower very near to the speaker’s heart (demonstrated with the use of “my” in the eighth line) that he observes as being “weary of time,” (Blake 1) and following “the steps of the sun,” (Blake 2) as all sunflowers do to stay alive. However, this particular plant goes one step farther than natural instincts as Blake personifies the flower early on in the poem. He creates an ancient traveller nearing the end of a great journey, “seeking