William Blake's Songs of Innocence, “The Shepherd,” “The Echoing Green,” The Little Black Boy,” “The Blossom,” and “Laughing Song.”
William Blake wrote many poems during his lifetime. He had a set of poems called The Songs of Innocence and also a set called The songs of Experience. This paper is focusing on five poems from the Songs of Innocence, which are: “The Shepherd,” “The Echoing Green,” The Little Black Boy,” “The Blossom,” and “Laughing Song.”
“The Shepherd” is a very short two stanza poem in which Blake tells about a shepherd who stays with his flock morning and night praising them. The second stanza consists of the shepherd hearing the lamb’s innocent call and the ewe’s soft reply. The shepherd watches the lambs in peace and they know that he is not.
“The Echoing Green” is longer than “The Shepherd.” It is a three stanza poem with an AABBCC rhyme scheme. It is about a field or park where there are birds flying and bells ringing. There are young people playing sports, while the old people are sitting under a tree talking about what they used to do on the echoing green in their youth. They stay until the little ones are weary and can no longer be merry. Then the sun goes down and the sports have to end. The sisters and brothers sit on their mothers laps and rest. No more sports are seen on the darkening green.
“The Little Black Boy” is a seven stanza poem with an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme. It is about a ...
From childhood he was unlike those around him. He went to school to study art and found his love of poetry. From his early childhood, Blake spoke of having visions. He spoke of seeing God and the Angels. He married his with Catherine Boucher in 1782. His brother, Robert died, but this is where Blake got a lot of inspiration for his work. In 1789 Blake wrote and illustrated the popular Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in 1794. His poetry was extremely non-conformist and focused on imagination, rather than reason. Both works have many common parallels and themes. His poetry also deals with the common aspect of a romanticism work; it has moments of sin, suffering and salvation. In Songs of Innocence, The Chimney Sweeper, it is a heartbreaking poem about the young children that were forced into doing labor as chimneysweepers. Mostly because they were the only ones small enough to fit in the spaces and they were sold into that work. It was damaging and cruel how they treated these children and Blake writes about it in such a powerful way. In the first stanza alone the reader learns about the difficult life and the suffering this child has had to overcome, “When my mother died when I was young, my father sold me while yet my tongue…so, your Chimney’s I sweep and in soot I sleep.” (Songs of Innocence) This poor child is portrayed so innocently and gentle, yet leads this suffering unfortunate life. People treated
In Blake’s poem “The Lamb” from Songs of Innocence, Blake proves that in order to keep innocence alive, a child must not question. It is in a child’s nature to trust all that has been told. Therefore the lamb represents childhood as well as innocence. The lamb is personified as being a gentle creature without sin, and the poem itself is characterized by pleasant light imagery. This imagery is an indicator that innocence is a desired state of being. In the first stanza of the poem, the narrator asks questions regarding
"The Lamb," "The Little Black Boy," "The Chimney Sweeper," and "The Garden of Love," by William Blake, are unique in their simple structure and simple choice of words but complex concepts on life and life's experiences. His poems continue to twist and turn minds for centuries due to his style of setting up his poems with both questions and unanswered predicaments, and this is what sets William Blake apart from the rest of the other poets in British literature.
In Blake’s work “The Lamb,” he shows innocence through sheep and their nature. Blake describes sheep’s nature by saying that they “Feed/By the stream & o'er the mead/ have thee clothing of delight/ Softest clothing, wooly, bright” (Blake 4-6). This passage shows that sheep are providers to man and show no harm. Blake says that sheep has a, “tender voice/ making all the vales rejoice?” (Blake 7-8). Blake makes sheep seem to have a joyful emotion and wants to share it with others. The sheep has a tender voice which means it is not intimidating. Natoli, who is the author of the novel William Blake, says that,
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.
In conclusion these two poems by William Blake are both deep and have hidden meanings, they both use imagery, repetition, alliteration and ryming couplets as well as biblical references to create a vivid pictures in the readers head. But these poems do differ in many ways such as the structure, theme and way it is written. The Tyger appeals to me most as it has more hidden meanings than the Lamb and the Lamb is boring and as if written by a child (for effect). In this essay I have analysed, contrasted and compared the two poems The Tyger and The Lamb to the best of my ability detailing the poetic devices used and the underlying meanings.
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.
Within Blake's work The Lamb starts off by asking a little lamb who had made thee. Asking how gave you life, and how had fed you. By asking these questions to the lamb the boy questions how a lamb came into existence in this realm. "Then the boy tells the lamb that he is called by thys name since he calls himself a lamb"(Foundation). Then after that the boy realizes that the lamb was created by God. As this is read a sense of a childlike innocence that the creator is a source of gentleness, selflessness, and love. This idea is expressed by the symbol of a lamb, for being the most gentle creation.
It is relatively easy to see the repression of blacks by whites in the way in which the little black boy speaks and conveys his thoughts. These racial thoughts almost immediately begin the poem, with the little black boy expressing that he is black as if bereaved of light, and the little English child is as white as an angel. The wonderful part of these verses is the fact that the little black boy knows that his soul is white, illustrating that he knows about God and His love.
'The School Boy' is a typical example of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in it's themes and imagery. Like many of the other poems in this work it deals with childhood and the subjugation of it's spirit and uses imagery from the natural world. While first published in 1789 as one of the Songs of Innocence there are strong reasons why Blake moved it to the Experience1 section of the 1794 edition. If we compare it to other poems in the collection it sits better with others in Experience than those in Innocence.
In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake differentiates between being experienced and being innocent. In the poem "Spring," the speaker focuses on the coming of spring and the excitement surrounding it which is emphasized by the trochaic meter of the poem. Everyone, including the animals and children, is joyful and getting ready for the new season, a season of rebirth and a new arrival of nature’s gifts.
The most significant underlying ideology of William Blake’s poetry is his essential psychomachia - the "contrary states", as Blake himself calls them. The work in which "The Tyger" and "The Lamb" appear distinctly states Blake’s purpose in a preface: "Shewing the two contrary states of the human soul." In "The Lamb", a basic question and an answer are given. The poem is a catechism (Miner 62). The simplistic and comfortable resolution purposely has no doubt or ambiguity surrounding its initial message of love, tranquility, Jesus Christ, and above all, innocence. The speaker sees God in terms he can understand - gentle and kind and very much like us (Reinhart 25). A tremendous void is clearly apparent. The poem’s straightforwardness leaves the reader with a discomforting feeling of the need for a more sophisticated perspective on the relationship between maker and humanity. This instinctual need for a contrary state gives birth to the tiger.
William Blake was an influential English poet during the mid 18th and mid 19th centuries. He is still known as a prominent figure of the Romantic Period. In Blake’s early years as a teenager he began writing poetry, and in 1794 he published Songs of Experience. Songs of Experience is a collection of twenty-six poems, and it formed the second part of Songs of Innocence. One of these twenty-six poems in Songs of Experience is “The Angel”. In this poem, Blake used the maiden queen, the angel, and the dream as symbolic figures in order to portray this poem as a tragic love story. My interpretation of “The Angel” is how a person’s view of love can evolve over time.
The poem begins with the question, "Little Lamb, who made thee?" The speaker, a child, asks the lamb about its origins: how it came into being, how it acquired its particular manner of feeding, its "clothing" of wool, its "tender voice." In the next stanza, the speaker attempts a riddling answer to his own question: the lamb was made by one who "calls himself a Lamb," one who resembles in his gentleness both the child and the lamb. The poem ends with the child bestowing a blessing on the lamb.
In the William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the vision of children and adults are placed in opposition of 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 happy am,/ Joy is my name.’” (Line 4-5) The speaker in this poem is portrayed as being immediately joyful, which represents Blake’s larger view of childhood as a state of joy that is untouched by humanity, and is untarnished by the experience of the real world. In contrast, Blake’s portrayal of adulthood is one of negativity and pessimism. Blake’s child saw the most cheerful aspects of the natural wo...