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William blake songs of innocence and experience analysis
William blake songs of innocence and experience analysis
Compare and contrast between the songs of innocence and songs of experience
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William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” songs of innocence and songs of experience both give insight into the mind of young chimney sweepers. When it comes to tone, Blake’s poems are similar in terms of word choice and subtle tone shifts. Comparatively, the poems differ in perspective and attitude. In “Songs of Innocence”, and “Songs of Experience” Blake sets a dismal and gloomy tone. This is accomplished by using words such as “Dark”, “Black”, and “Coffins”; these words provoke a dark and ominous feeling when reading. Also, both poems have a depressed to exuberant tone shift, for example, from line one; the words “crying” and “weep” set a dark tone. Then in line nine the words “happy” and “heaven” shift the tone to a much lighter one. Conversely,
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 fact that they feel they can sit about the knee of their mother, in this stereotypical image of a happy family doesn’t suggest that the children in this poem are oppressed... ... middle of paper ... ... y has a negative view of the childish desire for play which clearly has an effect on the children. The fact that they the are whispering shows that they are afraid of the nurse, and that they cannot express their true thoughts and desires freely, which is why they whisper, and therefore shows that Blake feels that children are oppressed. I feel that the two poems from innocence which are ‘The Echoing Green,’ and ‘The Nurses Song,’ display Blake’s ideological view of country life which I referred to in my introduction, and show his desire for childhood to be enjoyed.
In a dream the boy has an “Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, he’d have God for his father, and never want joy” (Blake 19-20). This gives the boy the motivation that he needs to continue his life and so as he awoke, he “was happy and warm; / [and] if [he did his] duty [he] need not fear harm” (Blake 23-24). The young boy decides to suffer through his brutal everyday life so that one day he can go to heaven, where he will be happy. These two polar opposite approaches to dealing with the misfortune of the characters is what shapes both the theme and tone of the poems. Another similarity between these two poems is their extensive use of imagery.
In 1794 William Blake published the poem Infant sorrow. In lines one through four of the poem Williams’s mother groans in sadness and his father weeps in agony. William Blake states the hardships of the dangerous world he was born into (3-1). He was helpless, naked, and crying loud. In lines five through eight Blake begins to struggle in his fathers arms, he is trying to free hiself and get away but no matter how hard he tries he can’t get away. He just gives up and sulks against his mother’s chest (3-2).
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. One of Blake’s most famous works is The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience. In this collection, Blake illuminates the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and follow them into adulthood.... ...
Clearly, William Blake is a great poet for his time and truly makes you question the ways of life. I think I would like to read the rest of the poetry with is within The Songs of Innocence. The poem titled Infant Sorrow makes me question how many people truly are regretful for bringing children into this world. It also shows how much parents can care about their children. The poem also states how cruel and unusual the world around us
These two poems, both entitled “The Chimney Sweeper” and written by William Blake, deal with the same subject in similar yet differing ways. William Blake uses both of these poems to project the beyond luckless lives of those young boys who were forced into the dangerous and unforgiving job of sweeping chimneys. Both the diction and the imagery throughout the two poems have similar trends, but the point of view of both contributes to dramatically different individual tones. Both poems contain childlike diction, using a simple vocabulary and syntactical structure. The child in both of the poems cries “’weep” and praises God (“He’d have God for his father,” “are gone to praise God & his Priest & King”).
Coming from the Songs of Experience, Blake presents 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.
William Blake presents two poems both titled The Chimney Sweeper, but both have a different perspective. The first poem that Blake wrote titled The Chimney Sweeper comes from Blake’s book Songs of Innocence and comes from the perspective of an innocent and ignorant mind. The second poem titled The Chimney Sweeper, was included in Blake’s book Songs of Experience and has a matured perspective. Blake utilizes both versions of The Chimney Sweeper in order to present his social critique of society. I believe that William Blake’s Songs of Experience version of The Chimney Sweeper presents social criticism better than Songs of Innocence version of The Chimney Sweeper because Songs of Experience articulates an outspoken and direct criticism of child labour while Songs of Innocence criticism is more implicit.
Blake wrote two poems with entitled “Chimney Sweeper.” One version was found in his ‘Songs of Innocence’ and the other was found in ‘Songs of Experience.’ Although the first was told with a child almost in mind, and the second was told in a darker, colder point-of-view, they both contain the same concern. This concern is having very young children working as chimney sweepers. Blake talks about how you boys are almost forced into this career
Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence) is a poem about the life of young chimney sweeps. We are presented with two juxtaposed attitudes in this poem and that would be the hope-filled attitude of the speaker pertaining to his lot in life and the attitude of satire that is displayed by the poet himself. In the end the message that conveyed through these conflicting attitudes is one that basically ensures the speaker will not be able to prosper in this life but surly have a chance to in the one after.
“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.
Although both Blake and Wordsworth show childhood as a state of greater innocence and spiritual vision, their view of its relationship with adulthood differs - Blake believes that childhood is crushed by adulthood, whereas Wordsworth sees childhood living on within the adult. In the William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the vision of children and adults is placed in opposition to one another. Blake portrays childhood as a time of optimism and positivity, of heightened connection with the natural world, and where joy is the overpowering emotion. This joyful nature is shown in Infant Joy, where the speaker, a newborn baby, states “’I am happy, Joy is my name.’” (Line 4-5).
In the poem, “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake, the author attempts to educate the reader about the horrors experienced by young children who are forced into labor at an early age cleaning chimneys for the wealthy. The poem begins with a young boy who has lost his mother but has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake uses poetry in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane and dangerous practice of exploiting children and attempts to shine a light on the plight of the children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free the children from their nightmare existence. Right away in the first lines of the poem we learn through the child narrator that his life is about to change dramatically for the worse.