How William Blake Uses Poetry as an Instrument for Social Comment
Living in a world without modern technology and media. William Blake (1757 - 1827) used his poetry as a powerful instrument for social comment. This is particularly evident in 'Laughing Song'; and 'London'; taken from The Portable Blake. The two poems present conflicting views of creation and mankind. In his innocent years, Blake saw the world as a 'joyous meadow, natural and free. However as he grew with experience his naive ideology was tainted with images of war and devastation. Blake's purpose in writing these poems is to position his readers to see the world as it lies before them, unmasked and raw. He is inviting society to take a stand against the degradation of our land and our people, a timeless invitation. To do so Blake exploits the traditional poetic conventions of persona, form, language, tone and atmosphere.
The persona of both 'Laughing Song and 'London'; is Blake himself. However he is writing in two opposing states of mind. 'Laughing Song'; comes from the Songs of Innocence, a collection of celebratory poems, offering a view of the world with the 'voice of joy' though perhaps through rose-coloured glasses. Blake is simply enjoying nature, and through this is therefore praising God. In 'London'; however, the glasses are removed and Blake's images of a once 'merry scene' are lost, replaced by 'charter'd streets'. Coming from the Songs of Experience, Blake is presenting his perceptions of a changed world, moulded and suppressed by human hands.
To structurally support meaning, Blake has exploited the form of both poems. 'Laughing Song'; consists of three, simple, four-lined stanzas. Perhaps representing succinct periods in Blake's childhood. Beneath the apparently simple form however, lies an intricate web of complex meanings. Although ordered, Blake's use of rhyming couplets and longer lines stress the delight in nature and the harmony between nature and man. In 'London';, all harmony is lost, and therefore so is the coupled rhyme pattern. Alternate lines rhyming in five quatrains replace it, emphasising the disjointed city, lacking in society love and unity.
Language, and in particular, imagery plays a vital role in Blake's poetry to convey meaning. Perhaps this is because Blake was also a talented artist and was therefore able to make images come alive on the page. In 'Laughing Song';, Blake uses light and joyous terms to describe the world around him. The 'green woods' provoke images of lush nature, spring and happy times.
Blake's poems of innocence and experience are a reflection of Heaven and Hell. The innocence in Blake's earlier poems represents the people who will get into Heaven. They do not feel the emotions of anger and jealousy Satan wants humans to feel to lure them to Hell. The poems of experience reflect those feelings. This is illustrated by comparing and contrasting A Divine Image to a portion of The Divine Image.
Abstract: William Blake's Songs of Innocence contains a group of poetic works that the artist conceptualized as entering into a dialogue with each other and with the works in his companion work, Songs of Experience. He also saw each of the poems in Innocence as operating as part of an artistic whole creation that was encompassed by the poems and images on the plates he used to print these works. While Blake exercised a fanatical degree of control over his publications during his lifetime, after his death his poems became popular and were encountered without the contextual material that he intended to accompany them.
The poem opens with an introduction of the speaker: “When my mother died I was very young, / And my father sold me while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry ’weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!” (ll. 1-3). The speaker’s pathetic circumstance is stressed here, and he quickly wins the sympathy of the reader; Blake makes this possible by quickly relating some but doubtfully all the previous sorrow that the speaker has endured. First, his mother died when he, and perhaps she, too, was quite young, a common occurrence in Industrial Age England, given the dismal shape of the inner city, which was host to such problems as over-crowding, poor hygienic practices and sub-par means of sanitation—all of which ultimately led to the deaths of thousands. Second, his father apparently sold him, or, more likely, forced him to work to supplement the family’s income. Child Labor laws had yet to be enacted in England in 1789, s...
Before delving any deeper into this poem and its meaning, a few basic questions must be answered first. I believe the speaker to be William Blake himself. I am able to infer this from the repeated use of the pronoun “I.” Thought the course of the poem, the speaker’s temperament changes. At the start of the poem the speaker ...
Natoli, Joseph. "William Blake." Critical Survey Of Poetry, Second Revised Edition (2002): 1-12. Literary Reference Center. Web. 17 Jan. 2014.
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.
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 so eloquently mentions the ‘mark in every face’ connoting the similarities of those individuals around him, followed by ‘marks of weakness...woe’ portraying the depressing situation the character is surrounded with (the people around him are deeply scarred by the despair). Blake purposely uses imagery to clearly justify the feelings of the civilians around him which mirrors his own dismay, again the cold harsh reality around him. Blake takes the reader on a sensuous journey that describes the dangers of what the plutocracy has created, how it seeps through the people around him. He constantly repeats the term ‘I hear’ to emphasise the repetitiveness that surrounds him and how he is tired of it all. Overall this poem explains the poison that has befallen on him and those around him. Furthermore, this poem portrays his sickness of the streets of London and the sickness of
Blake was angered by what he saw in his homeland as other countries started fighting for their independence and equality whilst his country stayed dormant, even though he felt that there was a serious need for serious action. Even though Blake wasn't a typical romantic writer, he too possessed the same. beliefs of fighting for what one believes in, and the urge to be. liberated from the oppression of society. So, by being a writer of the romantic period, watching a controlled and restricted society not showing an intent to break free and fight against the monarchy.
Blake also uses sound to deliver the meaning to the poem. The poem starts off with "My mother groaned! my father wept." You can hear the sounds that the parents make when their child has entered this world. Instead of joyful sounds like cheer or cries of joy, Blake chooses words that give a meaning that it is not such a good thing that this baby was brought into this world. The mother may groan because of the pain of delivery, but she also groans because she knows about horrible things in this world that the child will have to go through. The father also weeps for the same reason, he knows that the child is no longer in the safety of the womb, but now is in the world to face many trials and tribulations.
The point of view in which Blake employs to London is significant to the understanding of the poem. Blake chooses to give the poem a persona, a person who appears to have extensive knowledge of the city and helps give credibility to the poem. (Foster, 1924) The use of first person in all three stanzas allows the poem to be more opinionated and less objective, drawing the reader's attention by making it more personal. Blake's London is to be the reader's London as well. In addition to point of view, Blake further sophisticates his piece by presenting specific tone to each section of the poem. Blake sets the tone early in the poem by using the word charter?d which shows the condition of London as repressive. The speaker refers to the people or ?faces? he meets with ?Marks of weakness, marks of woe.? This diction advocates the probability of the city being controlled by a higher authority. The faces of the people, or the face of society reveals the feelings of entrapment and misery in the population. This in itself could propose, "humanity itself is being commercialized" (Damon, 1965). One of the interesting aspects of Blake's poetry is the layers of meaning his words connote.
... Blake’s poem differs in this way as it does not contain an iambic pentameter however, it does contain rhyming couplets, which are a very simple way to allow a poem to flow easily and make it enjoyable for the reader such as the lines. In every cry of every man. In every voice, in every ban’. To conclude, I believe that Blake presents a more real viewpoint of London from his perspective, as it is more believable than Wordsworth’s view.
In "London", William Blake brings to light a city overrun by poverty and hardship. Blake discards the common, glorifying view of London and replaces it with his idea of truth. London is nothing more but a city strapped by harsh economic times where Royalty and other venues of power have allowed morality and goodness to deteriorate so that suffering and poverty are all that exist. It is with the use of three distinct metaphors; "mind-forg'd manacles", "blackning Church", and "Marriage hearse", that Blake conveys the idea of a city that suffers from physical and psychological imprisonment, social oppression, and an unraveling moral society.
William Blake uses repetition, rhyming and imagery in his poem to help promote the idea that London, England is not the city that people dream that it is, the city itself can be a
LaGuardia, Cheryl. "WILLIAM BLAKE: SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE." Library Journal 128.9 (2003): 140. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 13 July 2011.