William Blake’s Symbolism
Blake is a highly symbolic poet and his poetry is rich in symbols and allusions. Almost each and every other word in his poems is symbolic. A symbol is an object which stands for something else as dove symbolizes peace. Similarly, Blake’s tiger symbolizes creative energy; Shelley’s wind symbolizes inspiration; Ted Hughes’s Hawk symbolizes terrible destructiveness at the heart of nature. Blake’s symbols usually have a wide range of meaning and more obvious. Few critics would now wish to call Blake a symbolist poet, since his handling of symbols is markedly different from that of the French symbolistes’, but the world inhabited by his mythical figures is defined through quasi-allegorical images of complex significance, and such images are no less important in his lyrical poetry. The use of symbols is one of the most striking features of Blake's poetry.
There is hardly any poem in the "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" which does not possess a symbolic or allegorical meaning, besides its apparent or surface meaning. If these poems are written in the simplest possible language, that fact does not deprive them of a depth of meaning. The language of these poems is like that of the Bible—at once simple and profound as the following lines read:
“O Rose, thou art sick!”
When Blake talks of the sick rose, he is really telling us how mysterious evil attacks the soul. Flower-symbolism is of particular importance in Songs of Innocence and Experience, being connected with the Fall by the motif of the garden; and its traditional links with sexuality inform the text of ‘The Blossom’ and the design for ‘Infant Joy’, which are taken up in Experience by the plate for ‘The Sick Rose’. ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’ is a more symbolic text, and has evoked a greater variety of responses. Declaring this to be one of ‘Blake’s supreme poems’, we can interpret the flower as a man who ‘is bound to the flesh’ but ‘yearns after the liberty of Eternity”. Harper claims that it describes the aspiration of all ‘natural things’ to ‘the sun’s eternality’. Identifying the speaker as ‘Blake himself. Blake travels from flower-symbolism to animal symbols as in the ‘Tyger’:
“Did he smile his work to see
Did he who made the Lamb make thee!”
If the lamb symbolizes innocence and gentleness, the tiger is to Blake a symbol of the violent and terrifying forces within the individual man. The lamb, innocent and pretty, seems the work of a kindly Creator. The splendid but terrifying tiger makes us realize that God's purposes are not so easily understood, and that is why the question arises "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" At the same time, the tiger is symbolic of the Creator's masterly skill which enabled Him to frame the "fearful symmetry" of the tiger. But the lion described in the poem Night (in the "Songs of Innocence") offers an interesting contrary to the tiger of the "Songs of Experience". Both the beasts seem dreadful, but the lion, like the beast of the fairy tale, can be magically transformed into a good and gentle creature: the tiger cannot. In the world of Experience the violent and destructive elements in Creation must be faced and accepted, and even admired. The tiger is also symbolic of the Energy and the Imagination of man, as opposed to the Reason. Blake was a great believer in natural impulses and hated all restraints. Consequently he condemns all those who exercise restraints upon others. He states in Holy Thursday II:
“And their ways are fill’d with thorns
It is eternal winter there”
The eternal winter are symbolic of total destruction of the country and the perpetual devastation and ‘Grey-headed beadles’ in ‘Holy Thursday I’ are symbolic of authority and it is they exploit children for their own material interests. In the poem London, oppression and tyranny are symbolised by the king (who is responsible for the soldier's blood being shed), social institutions like (loveless) marriage, and '"he mind-forged manacles". Even further, personal and social relationships have been symbolised as:
“In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree”
A Poison Tree is another allegory. The tree here represents repressed wrath; the water represents fear; the apple is symbolic of the fruit of the deceit which results from repression. This deceit gives rise to the speaker's action in laying a death-trap for his enemy. The deeper meaning of the poem is that aggressive feelings, if suppressed, almost certainly destroy personal relationships. On the surface, however, the poem is a simple, ordinary story. Thus symbolism is crucial to understanding Blake as poet of earlier romanticism. What can be more symbolic than the following lines from, ‘Auguries of Innocence’?
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour”
Thus, Blake’s poetry is charged with symbols. He has depicted nature and human nature; animals and plants as simple but profound symbols of powerful forces; "contrary states of the human soul" - for example, good and evil, or innocence and experience throughout his poetry. What is different in Blake is that he is not modeling after any symbols but his own. The symbols always have an inner relatedness that leads us from the outer world to the inner man. The symbols live in the ordered existence of his vision; the vision itself is entirely personal, in theme and in the logic that sustains it. Blake is difficult not because he invented symbols of his own; he created his symbols to show that the existence of any natural object and the value man’s mind places on it were one and the same. He was fighting the acceptance of reality in the light of science as much as he was fighting the suppression of human nature by ethical dogmas. He fought on two fronts, and shifted his arms from one to the other without letting us know—more exactly, he did not let himself know. He created for himself a personality, in life and in art, that was the image of the thing he sought.
In short, it is established that William Blake is a highly symbolic and even allegorical poet. His use of symbolism is unique and cinematic. It paints a lively and pulsating picture of dynamic life before us. Especially, the symbolic use of
‘Sun-flower’ gets so much stamped on the mind of the reader that it is difficult to forget it. He mentions a tiger it becomes a symbol of God's power in creation, his lamb turns out to be a symbol of suffering innocence and Jesus Christ and his tree is symbolic of anger and desire to triumph over enemies; the dark side of human nature. Symbolism is the main trait of William Blake as a dramatist as a poet and this has been well-crystallized in his legendary work, ‘The Songs of Innocence and Experience’.
William Blake’s Romanticism
William Blake is a romantic poet. The sparks of romanticism are vividly marked on his poetry. The question arises what is Romanticism? The answer is that it is a phenomenon characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature.
It was Schelling who first defined romanticism as ‘liberalism in literature’. Though romanticism officially started by the Lyrical Ballads jointly penned by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1830, poets like William Blake made cracks to classicism towards the end of the18th century. In Romanticism, a piece of work could become, as Blake described, “an embodiment of the poet’s imagination and vision.” Many of the writers of the Romantic period were highly influenced by the war between England and France and the French Revolution. In the midst of all these changes, Blake too was inspired to write against these ancient ideas. ‘All Religions Are One’, and ‘There is No Natural Religion’ were composed in hopes of bringing change to the public’s spiritual life. Blake felt that, unlike most people, his spiritual life was varied, free and dramatic. Blake’s poetry features many characteristics of the romantic spirit. The romanticism of Blake consists in the importance he attached to imagination, in his mysticism and symbolism, in his love of liberty, in his humanitarian sympathies, in his idealization of childhood, in the pastoral setting of many of his poems, and in his lyricism.
“Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire”
The above lines from, ‘Jerusalem’ amply justifies the point. "Poetry fettered", said Blake, "fetters the human race". In theory as well as practice, the Romantic Movement began with the smashing of fetters. In his enthusiastic rage, Blake condemned the verse-forms which had become traditional. He poured scorn upon all that he associated with classicism in art and in criticism. "We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations", he said. The whole critical vocabulary of neo-classical criticism had evidently disgusted him. He could not endure it. The visions that Blake started seeing in his childhood and which he kept seeing throughout his life were doubtless a product of his ardent imagination. His visions profoundly controlled both his poetry and his painting. Of many of his poems he said that they were dictated to him by spirits. In this most literal sense he held that, inspiration could come to the aid of a poet. In a state of inspiration, the poet made use of his imagination. "Human imagination is the Divine Vision and Fruition", he said. Energy and delight accompany this expression of the Divine Vision. All these views on the subject of poetry spring from the intensely romantic nature of Blake. It is not merely the revolutionary spirit that permeates his poetry. The subject of child is more crucial to his art. We see in Holy Thursday I
“These flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit
with radiance all their own”
The child is here the symbol of the most delicate and courageous intuitions in the human mind. The elements of Romanticism are present in these poems, some of them in the highest degree, such as the sense of wonder, the contemplation of Nature through fresh eyes, an intimate sympathy with the varieties of existence. Other elements of Romanticism are found in a much less degree, such as the obsession with the past, or the absorbing sense of self. Everything that the eyes of the child see is bathed in a halo of mystery and beauty. The words in these poems are perfectly adapted to the thought because they are as simple as possible, and the thought itself is simple. Blake's first style is in a way a juvenile form of Romanticism. The "Songs of Innocence" most completely fulfil the definition of Romanticism as "the renascence of wonder". The world of Nature and man is the world of love and beauty and innocence enjoyed by a happy child, or rather by a poet who miraculously retains an unspoiled and inspired vision. Despite his strong emotions and his unfamiliar ideas, Blake keeps his form wonderfully limpid and melodious. Besides love for children, imagination plays a key role in his poetry as Tyger embodies:
“When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears;
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he Who made the Lamb make thee?”
Symbolically, this poem is an impassioned defense of energy and imagination which occupy a commanding position in Blake's thinking. The tiger is Blake's symbol for the "abundant life", and for regeneration. The poem effectively conveys to us the splendid though terrifying qualities of the tiger. The climax of the poem's lyricism is reached in the lines which, though somewhat cryptic, effectively produce and effect of wonder and amazement. Blake was a great champion of liberty and had strong humanitarian sympathies. This is another aspect of his Romanticism. Blake's humanitarian sympathies are seen in such poems of Experience as Holy Thursday, A Little Boy Lost, The Chimney Sweeper, and above all London as in the following lines:
“In every voice, in every ban.
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear”
In London, Blake attacks social injustice in its various forms, as it shows itself in the chimney sweeper's cry, the hapless soldier's sigh, and the youthful harlot's curse. He appears here as an enemy of what he calls "the-mind-forged manacles". Nor does, Blake show any mercy to the Church. The boy in Blake’s poetry finds the church an inhospitable place, while the ale-house is warm and friendly because the church imposes religious discipline like fasting and prayer. Pastoralism, too is feature of poetry. The little pastoral poem ‘The Shepherd’ has a delicate simplicity. It celebrates the happiness of rural responsibility and trust. Noteworthy also is ‘The Echoing Green’ with its picturesqueness in a warmer hue, its delightful domesticity, and its expressive melody.
Finally, it is established that Blake is a romantic poet. Blake is one of the major Romantic poets, whose verse and artwork became part of the wider movement of Romanticism in late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century European Culture. His writing combines a variety of styles: he is at once an artist, a lyric poet, a mystic and a visionary, and his work has fascinated, intrigued and sometimes bewildered readers ever since. For the nineteenth century reader Blake’s work posed a single question: was he sane or mad? The poet Wordsworth, for example, commented that there “is no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in his madness which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott”. Blake’s use of images, symbols, metaphors and revolutionary spirit combined with simple diction and spontaneous expression of thoughts and emotions make him a typical romantic poet.
William Blake’s Theory of Contrariness
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of short lyric poems accompanied by Blake's original illustrations. The two sections juxtapose the state of innocence and that of experience. Many of the poems in Blake's words they were meant to show "the two contrary states of the human soul"; the illustration of innocence and experience. The tone of the first series is admirably sounded by the introductory "Piping down the valleys wild" and that of second the dark picture of poor babes "fed with cold and usurous hand".
Blake is bitter against those who go "up to the Church to pray" while the misery of the innocent is around them. His theory of Contraries is summarized in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence." The essence of Blake's theory is that, in some paradoxical way, it is possible for the contraries of innocence and experience to co-exist within a human being. The crime of "religion" was its attempt "to destroy existence" by ignoring or minimizing the essential oppositions in human nature. The word ‘contrary’ had a very specific and important meaning for Blake. Like almost all great poets, he was an enemy of dualism. Western thought has been intensely dualistic, seeing everything as composed of warring opposites, head and heart, body and spirit, male and female as though the split between the hemispheres of the human brain were projecting itself on everything perceived. A study of the poems in the two groups shows the emotional tensions between the two Contrary States.
“Piping down the valleys wild”
In the "Songs of Innocence", Blake expresses the happiness of a child's first thoughts about life. To the child, the world is one of happiness, beauty, and love. At that stage of life, the sunshine of love is so radiant that human suffering appears only temporary and fleeting. In the Introduction to the first series, Blake represents a laughing child as his inspiration for his poems. And in the poems that follow in this series, Blake gives us his vision of the world as it appears to the child or as it affects the child. And this world is one of purity, joy, and security. The children are themselves pure, whether their skin is black or white. They are compared to lambs "whose innocent call" they hear. Both "child" and "lamb" serve as symbols for Christ. Joy is everywhere—in the "Joy but two days old"; in the leaping and shouting of the little ones; in the sun, in the bells, in the voices of the birds; in the Laughing Song all Nature rejoices. But, above all, there is security. There is hardly a poem in which a symbol of protection, a guardian figure of some kind, does not occur. In The Echoing Green, the old folk are close by, while the children play. Elsewhere there is the shepherd watching over his sheep; there are the mother, the nurse, the lion', the angels, and, most important of all, God Himself. There is spontaneous happiness and delight in these groups of poems as “The Infant Boy” illustrates, ‘‘I happy am/ Joy is my name’.
“These flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit
with radiance all their own”
In the first Holy Thursday, poor children sit "with radiance of their own"; while in the second Holy Thursday, the poet deplores the fact that there should be so many poor and hungry children depending on charity in a country which is otherwise rich and fruitful. The second poem is very moving, as it was intended to be. We thus have pictures of contrary states. In the "Songs of Innocence", the prevailing symbol is the Iamb, which is an innocent creature of God and which also symbolizes the child Christ. In the "Songs of Experience" the chief symbol is the tiger as expressed by the first stanza:
“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night”
Where ‘forests of the night’ symbolize experience. The tiger burns metaphorically with rage and quickly becomes for some a symbol of anger and passion. The poet asks a crucial question here. Did God Who made the lamb also make the tiger? The lamb, innocent and pretty, seems the work of a kindly, comprehensible Creator. The splendid but terrifying tiger makes us realize that God's purposes are not so easily understood. The tiger represents the created universe in its violent and terrifying aspects. It also symbolizes violent and terrifying forces within the individual man, and these terrifying forces have to be faced and fully recognized. The two poems called The Lamb and The Tiger do, indeed, represent two contrary states of the human soul. No contrast could have been more vivid and more striking. Blake sees exploitation in the songs of experience as exemplified by the following lines from, ‘London’.
“And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe”
The poems in the second group record the wounds and cruelties of the civilized world. Some of them are bitter comments on the restraints forged by custom and law. Here Blake deplores the dominance of reason, religion, law, and morality, and he deplores the suppression of natural impulses, and more especially the suppression of the sexual impulse. Instead of innocence, joy, and security, Blake finds guilt, misery, and tyranny in the world. The protective guardians have disappeared and in their place are the tyrants. The rigors of sexual morality are depicted in A Little Girl Lost, The Sick Rose, The Angel, and Ah, Sunflower. The Sick Rose shows the destructive effects of sexual repression. In The Angel, the maiden realizes too late what she has missed. Ah, Sunflower shows the youth "pining away with desire", and the "pale virgin shrouded in snow", because both of them were denied sexual fulfillment.
The contrasts Blake sets forth in the Songs are echoes of English society's approach to the social and political issues of his era—a time characterized, on the one hand, by increasing desire for personal, political, and economic freedom, and on the other, by anxiety regarding the potential consequences of that freedom for social institutions. Several of the poems directly address contemporary social problems, for example, “The Chimney-Sweeper” deals with child labor and “Holy Thursday” describes the grim lives of charity children. The most fully-realized social protest poem in the Songs is “London,” a critique of urban poverty and misery. Thus contrariness are a must. The language and vision not just of Blake but of poetry itself insists that the contraries are equally important and inseparable. ‘Without contraries is no progression’, wrote Blake. He sought to transform the energies generated by conflict into creative energies, moving towards mutual acceptance and harmony. Thus, by describing innocence and experience as ‘contrary states of the human soul’, Blake is warning us that we are not being invited to choose between them, that no such choice is possible. He is not going to assert that innocent joy is preferable to the sorrows of experience.
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William Blake’s Tyger: Critique and Appraisal
"The Tyger" represents an intense, visionary style with which William Blake confronts a timeless question through the creation of a still-life reverie. To examine "The Tyger's" world, a reader must inspect Blake’s word choice, images, allusions, rhyme scheme, meter, and theme. "The Tyger" seems like a simple poem, yet this simple poem contains all the complexities of the human mystery. The first impression that William Blake gives is that he sees a terrible tiger in the night, and, as a result of his state of panic, the poet exaggerates the description of the animal when he writes:
‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night…’
The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the poem, and each subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror? Immediately after seeing the ‘Tyger’ in the forests, the poet asks it what deity could have created it:
‘What immortal hand and eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’
The word ‘immortal’ gives the reader a clue that the poet refers to God. Then, in the second stanza, the author wonders in what far-away places the tiger was made, maybe, referring that these places cannot be reached by any mortal. In the third stanza, the poet asks again, once the tiger’s heart began to beat, who could make such a frightening and evil animal. Next, in the forth stanza, William Blake asks questions about the tools used by God. And he names the hammer, the chain, the furnace, and anvil. All these elements are used by an ironsmith. The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as the poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and comes to embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake's tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tiger's remarkable nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speaker's questions about its origin must also encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poem's series of questions repeatedly ask what sort of physical creative capacity the "fearful symmetry" of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation.
“What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?”
The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine creation of the natural world. The "forging" of the tiger suggests a very physical, laborious, and deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical presence of the tiger and precludes the idea that such a creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced. It also continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations of creation, purification, and destruction. The speaker stands in awe of the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral implications of such a creation; for the poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act. This is a question of creative responsibility and of will, and the poet carefully includes this moral question with the consideration of physical power. Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of "shoulder" and "art," as well as the fact that it is not just the body but also the "heart" of the tiger that is being forged. The repeated use of word the "dare" to replace the "could" of the first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and willfulness into the sheer might of the creative act.
“Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. It also invites a contrast between the perspectives of "experience" and "innocence" represented here and in the poem "The Lamb." "The Tyger" consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God's power, and the inscrutability of divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The open awe of "The Tyger" contrasts with the easy confidence, in "The Lamb," of a child's innocent faith in a benevolent universe. The meekness of Blake’s lamb makes his “fearful” and “deadly” tiger appear all the more horrific, but to conclude that one is decidedly good and the other evil would be incorrect. The innocent portrayal of childhood in “The Lamb,” though attractive, lacks imagination. The tiger, conversely, is repeatedly associated with fire or brightness, providing a sharp contrast against the dark forests from which it emerges — “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night.” While such brightness might symbolize violence, it can also imply insight, energy, and vitality. The tiger’s domain is one of unrestrained self-assertion. Far from evil, Blake’s poem celebrates the tiger and the sublime excessiveness he represents. “Jesus was all virtue,” wrote Blake “and acted from impulse, not from rules.”
William Blake never answers his question about the unknown nature of god. He leaves it up to the reader to decide. By beginning and ending his poem with the same quatrain he asks the question about god creating evil as well as good, again. In conclusion, a reading of "The Tyger" offers different thematic possibilities. The poem seems to change as the reader changes, but the beauty of the words and meter make this poem an astonishing, enjoyable excursion into the humanity of theology. Moreover, the poem is quotable in various situations, and it leaves a permanent impression on the reader. Therefore, "The Tyger" by William Blake emerges from creation's cold, clear stream as a perpetual inspiration - a classic. In my opinion, William Blake wrote the poem with a simple structure and a perfect rhyme to help the reader see the images he wanted to transmit. Above all, the description of the tiger is glaringly graphic due to essentially the contrast between fire and night.
“Kubla Khan” is not a poetic fragment resulting from a dream, but a complex and carefully organized work that illustrates Coleridge’s poetic principles. Discuss the statement!
“Kubla Khan” is an excellent example. Nineteenth-century critics tended to dismiss it as a rather inconsequential or meaningless triviality. In large part, this was due to Coleridge’s own introduction to the poem. When it was first published in 1816, he subtitled it “A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.” Those poets and critics who admired “Kubla Khan,” such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Leigh Hunt, did so for its marvelous melodic quality.
Arthur Symons called “Kubla Khan”: “One of the finest examples of lyric poetry. It has just enough meaning to give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied music.” We can see the music of the poem in the following lines:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea’
The opening lines of “Kubla Khan” immediately thrust us into a strange world where the remarkable is commonplace. Kubla Khan orders a “pleasure-dome” to be built next to a sacred river that erupts from a chasm, flows in “sinuous rills” through gardens, then descends “in tumult” into “caverns measureless to man.” Encircling the centrally placed dome, walls and towers inscribe a defining limit around “forests ancient as the hills.” These elegant and civilized structures actually enclose a “deep romantic chasm ... A savage place” that spurts life-giving waters to the gardens like a spouting heart or a birthing mother. In other words, despite human artifice, nature vivifies the whole and gives it meaning. So Kubla Khan, the prototypical Romantic artist, in order to create his masterpiece, merely defines a limit with his art around the uncontrollable magic of untrammeled nature and allows it to feed and inform his art work. And this, in fact, was the aesthetic Coleridge and other Romantic poets practiced. For them, poetry, as an “imitation of nature,” merely delimits in image and form the divine beauty of raw nature. But in “Kubla Khan,” as Coleridge informs us in the preface to the 1816 edition of the poem, the wild nature of the gardens, the fountain “with ceaseless turmoil seething,” and “Alph, the sacred river,” actually emerge from the poet’s dream consciousness. The Romantics believed that, at its core, the self is one with nature. Childhood and dreams fascinated them thematically in their poetry because both, like nature, were simple, raw, and unrestrainable. They recognized that in all of its forms, nature yearns with omnidirected desire. Just like a “woman wailing for her demon-lover,” nature is, in William Blake’s words, “Energy.” And what Blake says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell of this “Energy” also applies here in “Kubla Khan”: “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.... Energy is Eternal Delight.” The “outward circumference” of the Khan’s towers and walls circumscribes the “Eternal Delight” of untamed nature, which is both “holy and enchanted” and certainly beyond human control.
‘In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid’
Read as the beginning of a longer poem, Coleridge’s poetic “fragment” sets forth a fantastic world, set both in the “mysterious” Orient and in the “magical” Middle Ages. But read as a whole complete unto itself, “Kubla Khan” evokes the fleeting images of a waking dream that speak not in words but in symbols. And although many critics point to the Crewe manuscript version of “Kubla Khan” found in 1934 as proof that Coleridge “consciously” revised the text, the poem as it stands successfully replicates the dream state and unveils a genuine glimpse into an archetypal world, a world Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, called the “collective unconscious.” The first thirty-six lines of the poem imagistically present a symbolic diagram of the “self,” in which consciousness strives to find integration with the incalculably greater depth of the unconscious mind, while the last eighteen lines reflect upon the power of the unconscious mind when Coleridge finally realized that the full recollection of his dream work was impossible. By demarcating a circular space from the “forests ancient as the hills” with protective walls and towers, Kubla Khan creates a kind of “mandala” whose circumference is described by the “stately pleasure-dome” at its center. A Sanskrit technical term from Tantric Buddhism for a circular “cosmogram” used for “centering” and meditation, the mandala is a map of the inner world (the microcosm) that mirrors the outer world (the macrocosm). According to Jung, the mandala serves to define and protect the self as it seeks to integrate with the unruly forces of the unconscious mind. But in “Kubla Khan,” the “sunny spots of greenery” and the bright “sinuous rills” within the conscious world of the self appear tenuous, fragile, and minuscule in comparison to the cavernous deeps of the “sunless sea.” In fact, all of the paired opposites that appear within the poem (sun and moon, light and dark, male and female, movement and rest, and good and evil) struggle without success to find balance within this delicate world fed by the waters of the collective unconscious.
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
As mentioned previously, “Alph, the sacred river,” suffuses consciousness with creative “Energy.” This overwhelming creativity fecundates the conscious mind (“twice five miles of fertile ground”) via the spouting chasm that flings up water and “dancing rocks” from the underworld. This birth-giving chasm, clearly associated with the “woman wailing for her demon-lover,” charges the visionary with almost frenzied inspiration. In the last eighteen lines, the speaker recalls yet another female figure he had once seen in vision, the “damsel with a dulcimer.” Her strange song, if he could but “revive [it] within” himself, would so permeate him with numinous powers that he would be able to recreate the Khan’s dome and the “caves of ice” in the air itself. Such magical powers, the fruit of a kind of possession, would then make the speaker into an object of taboo, both holy and dangerous to the common sort of humanity. Like the chasm, both “holy and enchanted,” the inspired poet becomes an ambivalent figure “beyond good and evil,” for “he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.” Not surprisingly, many critics have commented that this “milk of Paradise” might be nothing more than laudanum, a solution of opium in alcohol, to which Coleridge was addicted most of his life. Unfortunately, Coleridge’s dependence on drugs cut short his poetically most productive period.
This complexity makes it difficult to fully believe that “Kubla Khan” is nothing more than the remnant of a half-remembered dream. The thematic repetition, intricacy of rhyme and metrical schemes, as well as the carefully juxtaposed images beautifully “harmonize and support” the poem’s purpose and theme. In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge has created more than simple lyric poetry. He has fulfilled his poetic ideal of a harmonious blend of meaning and form, which results in a “graceful and intelligent whole.”
Write a note on Blake's vision of childhood as depicted in the "Songs of Innocence".
The world of the "Songs of Innocence" is largely a child's world. It is a world of simplicity, purity, happiness, and security, though touches of the adult world of misery and guilt do occasionally intrude here. The central situation in this world is that of a child or young animal delighting in life. Fear is not necessarily totally absent from this world, but when danger threatens, a parent-figure (father, mother, God, or angel) is at hand to console and to comfort.
The keynote of the world of the "Songs of Innocence" is struck in the very opening poem called Introduction which is a little pastoral but which is also an appropriate preface to the poems that follow. Blake here thinks of himself as a shepherd with a pipe, playing songs of joy in the open country, when he sees a "child" on a cloud. At the bidding of the child, he pipes first a song about a lamb; and under its inspiration he writes "happy songs" which "every child may joy to hear". The child in this poem seems to carry suggestions of (1) the Christ child speaking from Heaven (a "cloud"); (2) an angel symbolizing innocence; and (3) the spirit of pastoral poetry. It is possible therefore to treat the poem as an allegory, its subject being divine inspiration. The poem brings divinity effortlessly to earth. The fact that the poem deals with divine inspiration in such simple and natural terms makes it a highly appropriate introduction to the Songs of Innocence. The poet shows himself setting out happily to record the joys of childhood which are pure and secure.
The Echoing Green is the record of a happy day. It is a little idyll of a village green on a warm afternoon in late spring. But it is also a symbolic presentation of the days of innocence from sunrise to sunset. Children, young folk, and the old people—all participate in an "unfallen" enjoyment of life in a beautiful natural environment. The poem reminds us of the Biblical picture of Adam and Eve before they sinned and were expelled from Paradise. Even the reminiscences of the old people seem not to contain any regret. The end of the day brings rest and refreshment, not fear of darkness.
The Lamb suggests the Lamb of God that "taketh away the sin of the world". What is vital in this poem is the nature of the innocent creature of God. Innocence has a divine source. The innocent lamb symbolises Christ, the incarnation of love and tenderness. The child who speaks in the poem is also identified with Christ because Christ became a child and particularly praised the innocence of children. The child-like qualities of this poem lie particularly in the little speaker's unselfconscious and serious address to the lamb as to another little child, and on his delight in repetition.
The Shepherd is a tiny pastoral which celebrates the happiness of rural responsibility and trust. The Christian imagery of the Good Shepherd underlies the poem, but it is noteworthy that the shepherd derives undoubted human pleasure from his job. Not only the shepherd but the ewes and the lambs seem to have achieved a sense of fulfilment. An important idea here is that the shepherd in no way restricts the freedom of the sheep: he follows them, and they are given confidence by his presence. The sheep's security is the security of the child's world too.
It is better to regard Infant Joy as an imaginary dialogue between a parent (father or mother) and an infant, than as a dialogue between a fairy and an infant. The poem is a tiny drama in which the parent supplies, in the first stanza, fanciful words for the child to express its feelings, and in the second stanza goes on to express his or her own feelings about the baby. According to another interpretation the child who speaks is as yet unborn, and thus has no name; it has been conceived two days within its mother's womb. If that is so, Blake seems to say that the life of children, born and unborn, is joyful and brings joy to the parents.
The central idea of The Little Black Boy is expressed in the following two lines:
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
This idea may be derived from the Puritan tradition of life as a trial deliberately imposed by God, but Blake has considerably refined it. The little black boy has the same human soul, and is just as much one of God's lambs as the little white boy, says Blake.
Laughing Song admirably blends the world of humanity and the world of non-human Nature. The green woods laugh joyfully, as do the stream, the air, the green hill, the meadows, and the grasshopper. Mary, Susan, and Emily, with their "sweet round mouths" are hardly distinguishable from the birds, and it is not certain whether the table is spread with cherries and nuts for the birds or the small girls. The poem has aptly been called "a little rhapsody for a rural picnic".
Spring is a true child's poem in the way it shows a child's selective delight in Nature. The child speaks of birds, the nightingale and the lark and the cock, and he speaks to a little lamb, besides speaking to a little boy and a little girl. But the poem is also an example of Blake's ability to use natural symbols without removing them from the child's world of direct sensation. Symbolically the poem shows the joyful unity of Nature and innocent man.
The nurse in Nurse's Song provides a background of love and security for the children because she herself is quite confident and secure: "My heart is at rest within my breast". The nurse is not weak, but benevolent; and she agrees without anxiety to the children's request for more time to play in the evening. The natural background is tranquil and harmless. Night is simply a time for rest. In subject this poem is a companion to The Echoing Green.
A Cradle Song is a lullaby sung by a mother over her child. The poem is a "miracle of motherly tenderness". Among the "Songs of Innocence" this poem occupies a central position because happiness is here complete. The child is here shown as being always in the presence of love—the angel of sleep, the mother, or Christ.
In The Divine Image we are given a picture of human nature as a child would see it. Blake is here saying: "This is life as seen through innocent eyes". The child's eyes see God truly, and see that God and man share the same good qualities—mercy, pity, peace, and love. (These eyes do not yet see that these virtues are corrupted in the adult world of the senses).
In Holy Thursday Blake speaks of the innocent faces of the children. They are children of charity schools and Blake describes them as "these flowers of London town". "They sit with radiance all their own". They are "multitudes of lambs". Thus the emphasis is on innocence, purity, meekness, and radiance. Such is the world of children. The poem ends with a moral which could have occurred only in the "Songs of Innocence". Cherish pity, says the poet to us, lest in hardening your hearts, you drive a child away from your door.
The Blossom is a child's expression of delight in the birds like the sparrow and the robin. The speaker seems to be a little girl whose motherly feeling for the birds is conveyed partly by the word "bosom". The blossom, as well as the child, sees and hears the birds, giving an additional impression of natural innocence and uniting the human child, the birds, and the plants in simple harmony.
In The Chimney Sweeper, the little slaves, black with soot, become clean, free, and happy in a green plain by a river in the sun:
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.
In spite of the obvious misery of their lives, the boys retain a vision of eternal happiness and are sustained by it. Like Holy Thursday, this poem closes with a moral: "So if all do their duty they need not fear harm". Whatever the poetic objections to this didactic statement, it strikes an optimistic note.
Night contains pleasing pictures of angels watching over all creatures, animal and human. If any sheep are killed by beasts of prey, the angels receive their spirits "in new worlds". In those new worlds even the beasts of prey will be transformed: the lion will lie down with the lamb and meditate upon Christ. Swinburne said that nothing like this poem was ever written on that text of the lion and the lamb; no such heaven of sinless animal life was ever conceived so intensely and sweetly.
In A Dream the speaker's own bed is guarded by angels, and the lost mother ant is helped to return to her children by a glow-worm and a beetle. No creature, human or otherwise, is in serious danger; fear will be dispelled by love.
On Another's Sorrow expresses the view that pity is both human and divine. No mother or father can endure a child's suffering. Likewise God cannot witness the suffering of his creatures without being moved to tears. God smiles on all and
He doth give his joy to all;
He becomes an infant small;
He becomes a man of woe;
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Indeed, this poem appears to be a summary of the central doctrine of the "Songs of Innocence".
In the two poems which tell us of a boy lost and found, God appears to the boy in the shape of his father and leads him home to his mother. The boy's father has somehow failed to protect the boy, but help is at hand; the cry for love is answered by God who is "ever nigh". The boy returns contentedly to his mother.
It is clear, then, that the world depicted in the "Songs of Innocence" is free from fear, anxiety, care, guilt, repressive influences, and suffering. That is why we call it a child's world. Such is the world a child inhabits. The poems of this group give us an insight into the psychology of a child, but it is not the entire psychology of children that is revealed. We are given only the bright aspects of child-psychology.
As has been hinted above, suggestions of cruelty, ugliness, injustice, and suffering are not totally absent from the "Songs of Innocence". Here and there we get anticipations or adumbrations of the world that is depicted in the later group (the "Songs of Experience"). The little black boy's sense of inferiority to the white boy, for instance, clings to him even in paradise. Even in paradise, the black boy must attend upon the white boy and serve him in order to win his love. In A Cradle Song there is a reference to the "sweet moans" and "dove-like sighs" of the infant; the mother weeps over the infant as he sleeps; Christ is pictured as weeping "for me, for thee, for all". In Holy Thursday the fact that we are reading an account of children who depended on charity cannot remain hidden, and we do experience a pang to think of them just as we experience a pang when we read about little Tom Dacre in The Chimney Sweeper. In Night suffering and death do exist and cannot be evaded. When wolves and tigers howl for prey, the angels stand helplessly and weep to see the sheep being killed and eaten. The Little Boy Lost, if read apart from its sequel, is really a tragic poem:
The night was dark, no father was there; The child was wet with dew.
Apart from the poem's poignancy, "dew" is used by Blake to symbolize materialism, and the "vapour" in the same poem symbolizes perhaps man's reasoning power.
However, the predominant impression which the "Songs of Innocence" produce on us is, as already stated, that of joy, gentleness, and purity.
Blake is a highly symbolic poet and his poetry is rich in symbols and allusions. Almost each and every other word in his poems is symbolic. A symbol is an object which stands for something else as dove symbolizes peace. Similarly, Blake’s tiger symbolizes creative energy; Shelley’s wind symbolizes inspiration; Ted Hughes’s Hawk symbolizes terrible destructiveness at the heart of nature. Blake’s symbols usually have a wide range of meaning and more obvious. Few critics would now wish to call Blake a symbolist poet, since his handling of symbols is markedly different from that of the French symbolistes’, but the world inhabited by his mythical figures is defined through quasi-allegorical images of complex significance, and such images are no less important in his lyrical poetry. The use of symbols is one of the most striking features of Blake's poetry.
There is hardly any poem in the "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" which does not possess a symbolic or allegorical meaning, besides its apparent or surface meaning. If these poems are written in the simplest possible language, that fact does not deprive them of a depth of meaning. The language of these poems is like that of the Bible—at once simple and profound as the following lines read:
“O Rose, thou art sick!”
When Blake talks of the sick rose, he is really telling us how mysterious evil attacks the soul. Flower-symbolism is of particular importance in Songs of Innocence and Experience, being connected with the Fall by the motif of the garden; and its traditional links with sexuality inform the text of ‘The Blossom’ and the design for ‘Infant Joy’, which are taken up in Experience by the plate for ‘The Sick Rose’. ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’ is a more symbolic text, and has evoked a greater variety of responses. Declaring this to be one of ‘Blake’s supreme poems’, we can interpret the flower as a man who ‘is bound to the flesh’ but ‘yearns after the liberty of Eternity”. Harper claims that it describes the aspiration of all ‘natural things’ to ‘the sun’s eternality’. Identifying the speaker as ‘Blake himself. Blake travels from flower-symbolism to animal symbols as in the ‘Tyger’:
“Did he smile his work to see
Did he who made the Lamb make thee!”
If the lamb symbolizes innocence and gentleness, the tiger is to Blake a symbol of the violent and terrifying forces within the individual man. The lamb, innocent and pretty, seems the work of a kindly Creator. The splendid but terrifying tiger makes us realize that God's purposes are not so easily understood, and that is why the question arises "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" At the same time, the tiger is symbolic of the Creator's masterly skill which enabled Him to frame the "fearful symmetry" of the tiger. But the lion described in the poem Night (in the "Songs of Innocence") offers an interesting contrary to the tiger of the "Songs of Experience". Both the beasts seem dreadful, but the lion, like the beast of the fairy tale, can be magically transformed into a good and gentle creature: the tiger cannot. In the world of Experience the violent and destructive elements in Creation must be faced and accepted, and even admired. The tiger is also symbolic of the Energy and the Imagination of man, as opposed to the Reason. Blake was a great believer in natural impulses and hated all restraints. Consequently he condemns all those who exercise restraints upon others. He states in Holy Thursday II:
“And their ways are fill’d with thorns
It is eternal winter there”
The eternal winter are symbolic of total destruction of the country and the perpetual devastation and ‘Grey-headed beadles’ in ‘Holy Thursday I’ are symbolic of authority and it is they exploit children for their own material interests. In the poem London, oppression and tyranny are symbolised by the king (who is responsible for the soldier's blood being shed), social institutions like (loveless) marriage, and '"he mind-forged manacles". Even further, personal and social relationships have been symbolised as:
“In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree”
A Poison Tree is another allegory. The tree here represents repressed wrath; the water represents fear; the apple is symbolic of the fruit of the deceit which results from repression. This deceit gives rise to the speaker's action in laying a death-trap for his enemy. The deeper meaning of the poem is that aggressive feelings, if suppressed, almost certainly destroy personal relationships. On the surface, however, the poem is a simple, ordinary story. Thus symbolism is crucial to understanding Blake as poet of earlier romanticism. What can be more symbolic than the following lines from, ‘Auguries of Innocence’?
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour”
Thus, Blake’s poetry is charged with symbols. He has depicted nature and human nature; animals and plants as simple but profound symbols of powerful forces; "contrary states of the human soul" - for example, good and evil, or innocence and experience throughout his poetry. What is different in Blake is that he is not modeling after any symbols but his own. The symbols always have an inner relatedness that leads us from the outer world to the inner man. The symbols live in the ordered existence of his vision; the vision itself is entirely personal, in theme and in the logic that sustains it. Blake is difficult not because he invented symbols of his own; he created his symbols to show that the existence of any natural object and the value man’s mind places on it were one and the same. He was fighting the acceptance of reality in the light of science as much as he was fighting the suppression of human nature by ethical dogmas. He fought on two fronts, and shifted his arms from one to the other without letting us know—more exactly, he did not let himself know. He created for himself a personality, in life and in art, that was the image of the thing he sought.
In short, it is established that William Blake is a highly symbolic and even allegorical poet. His use of symbolism is unique and cinematic. It paints a lively and pulsating picture of dynamic life before us. Especially, the symbolic use of
‘Sun-flower’ gets so much stamped on the mind of the reader that it is difficult to forget it. He mentions a tiger it becomes a symbol of God's power in creation, his lamb turns out to be a symbol of suffering innocence and Jesus Christ and his tree is symbolic of anger and desire to triumph over enemies; the dark side of human nature. Symbolism is the main trait of William Blake as a dramatist as a poet and this has been well-crystallized in his legendary work, ‘The Songs of Innocence and Experience’.
William Blake’s Romanticism
William Blake is a romantic poet. The sparks of romanticism are vividly marked on his poetry. The question arises what is Romanticism? The answer is that it is a phenomenon characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature.
It was Schelling who first defined romanticism as ‘liberalism in literature’. Though romanticism officially started by the Lyrical Ballads jointly penned by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1830, poets like William Blake made cracks to classicism towards the end of the18th century. In Romanticism, a piece of work could become, as Blake described, “an embodiment of the poet’s imagination and vision.” Many of the writers of the Romantic period were highly influenced by the war between England and France and the French Revolution. In the midst of all these changes, Blake too was inspired to write against these ancient ideas. ‘All Religions Are One’, and ‘There is No Natural Religion’ were composed in hopes of bringing change to the public’s spiritual life. Blake felt that, unlike most people, his spiritual life was varied, free and dramatic. Blake’s poetry features many characteristics of the romantic spirit. The romanticism of Blake consists in the importance he attached to imagination, in his mysticism and symbolism, in his love of liberty, in his humanitarian sympathies, in his idealization of childhood, in the pastoral setting of many of his poems, and in his lyricism.
“Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire”
The above lines from, ‘Jerusalem’ amply justifies the point. "Poetry fettered", said Blake, "fetters the human race". In theory as well as practice, the Romantic Movement began with the smashing of fetters. In his enthusiastic rage, Blake condemned the verse-forms which had become traditional. He poured scorn upon all that he associated with classicism in art and in criticism. "We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations", he said. The whole critical vocabulary of neo-classical criticism had evidently disgusted him. He could not endure it. The visions that Blake started seeing in his childhood and which he kept seeing throughout his life were doubtless a product of his ardent imagination. His visions profoundly controlled both his poetry and his painting. Of many of his poems he said that they were dictated to him by spirits. In this most literal sense he held that, inspiration could come to the aid of a poet. In a state of inspiration, the poet made use of his imagination. "Human imagination is the Divine Vision and Fruition", he said. Energy and delight accompany this expression of the Divine Vision. All these views on the subject of poetry spring from the intensely romantic nature of Blake. It is not merely the revolutionary spirit that permeates his poetry. The subject of child is more crucial to his art. We see in Holy Thursday I
“These flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit
with radiance all their own”
The child is here the symbol of the most delicate and courageous intuitions in the human mind. The elements of Romanticism are present in these poems, some of them in the highest degree, such as the sense of wonder, the contemplation of Nature through fresh eyes, an intimate sympathy with the varieties of existence. Other elements of Romanticism are found in a much less degree, such as the obsession with the past, or the absorbing sense of self. Everything that the eyes of the child see is bathed in a halo of mystery and beauty. The words in these poems are perfectly adapted to the thought because they are as simple as possible, and the thought itself is simple. Blake's first style is in a way a juvenile form of Romanticism. The "Songs of Innocence" most completely fulfil the definition of Romanticism as "the renascence of wonder". The world of Nature and man is the world of love and beauty and innocence enjoyed by a happy child, or rather by a poet who miraculously retains an unspoiled and inspired vision. Despite his strong emotions and his unfamiliar ideas, Blake keeps his form wonderfully limpid and melodious. Besides love for children, imagination plays a key role in his poetry as Tyger embodies:
“When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears;
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he Who made the Lamb make thee?”
Symbolically, this poem is an impassioned defense of energy and imagination which occupy a commanding position in Blake's thinking. The tiger is Blake's symbol for the "abundant life", and for regeneration. The poem effectively conveys to us the splendid though terrifying qualities of the tiger. The climax of the poem's lyricism is reached in the lines which, though somewhat cryptic, effectively produce and effect of wonder and amazement. Blake was a great champion of liberty and had strong humanitarian sympathies. This is another aspect of his Romanticism. Blake's humanitarian sympathies are seen in such poems of Experience as Holy Thursday, A Little Boy Lost, The Chimney Sweeper, and above all London as in the following lines:
“In every voice, in every ban.
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear”
In London, Blake attacks social injustice in its various forms, as it shows itself in the chimney sweeper's cry, the hapless soldier's sigh, and the youthful harlot's curse. He appears here as an enemy of what he calls "the-mind-forged manacles". Nor does, Blake show any mercy to the Church. The boy in Blake’s poetry finds the church an inhospitable place, while the ale-house is warm and friendly because the church imposes religious discipline like fasting and prayer. Pastoralism, too is feature of poetry. The little pastoral poem ‘The Shepherd’ has a delicate simplicity. It celebrates the happiness of rural responsibility and trust. Noteworthy also is ‘The Echoing Green’ with its picturesqueness in a warmer hue, its delightful domesticity, and its expressive melody.
Finally, it is established that Blake is a romantic poet. Blake is one of the major Romantic poets, whose verse and artwork became part of the wider movement of Romanticism in late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century European Culture. His writing combines a variety of styles: he is at once an artist, a lyric poet, a mystic and a visionary, and his work has fascinated, intrigued and sometimes bewildered readers ever since. For the nineteenth century reader Blake’s work posed a single question: was he sane or mad? The poet Wordsworth, for example, commented that there “is no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in his madness which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott”. Blake’s use of images, symbols, metaphors and revolutionary spirit combined with simple diction and spontaneous expression of thoughts and emotions make him a typical romantic poet.
William Blake’s Theory of Contrariness
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of short lyric poems accompanied by Blake's original illustrations. The two sections juxtapose the state of innocence and that of experience. Many of the poems in Blake's words they were meant to show "the two contrary states of the human soul"; the illustration of innocence and experience. The tone of the first series is admirably sounded by the introductory "Piping down the valleys wild" and that of second the dark picture of poor babes "fed with cold and usurous hand".
Blake is bitter against those who go "up to the Church to pray" while the misery of the innocent is around them. His theory of Contraries is summarized in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence." The essence of Blake's theory is that, in some paradoxical way, it is possible for the contraries of innocence and experience to co-exist within a human being. The crime of "religion" was its attempt "to destroy existence" by ignoring or minimizing the essential oppositions in human nature. The word ‘contrary’ had a very specific and important meaning for Blake. Like almost all great poets, he was an enemy of dualism. Western thought has been intensely dualistic, seeing everything as composed of warring opposites, head and heart, body and spirit, male and female as though the split between the hemispheres of the human brain were projecting itself on everything perceived. A study of the poems in the two groups shows the emotional tensions between the two Contrary States.
“Piping down the valleys wild”
In the "Songs of Innocence", Blake expresses the happiness of a child's first thoughts about life. To the child, the world is one of happiness, beauty, and love. At that stage of life, the sunshine of love is so radiant that human suffering appears only temporary and fleeting. In the Introduction to the first series, Blake represents a laughing child as his inspiration for his poems. And in the poems that follow in this series, Blake gives us his vision of the world as it appears to the child or as it affects the child. And this world is one of purity, joy, and security. The children are themselves pure, whether their skin is black or white. They are compared to lambs "whose innocent call" they hear. Both "child" and "lamb" serve as symbols for Christ. Joy is everywhere—in the "Joy but two days old"; in the leaping and shouting of the little ones; in the sun, in the bells, in the voices of the birds; in the Laughing Song all Nature rejoices. But, above all, there is security. There is hardly a poem in which a symbol of protection, a guardian figure of some kind, does not occur. In The Echoing Green, the old folk are close by, while the children play. Elsewhere there is the shepherd watching over his sheep; there are the mother, the nurse, the lion', the angels, and, most important of all, God Himself. There is spontaneous happiness and delight in these groups of poems as “The Infant Boy” illustrates, ‘‘I happy am/ Joy is my name’.
“These flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit
with radiance all their own”
In the first Holy Thursday, poor children sit "with radiance of their own"; while in the second Holy Thursday, the poet deplores the fact that there should be so many poor and hungry children depending on charity in a country which is otherwise rich and fruitful. The second poem is very moving, as it was intended to be. We thus have pictures of contrary states. In the "Songs of Innocence", the prevailing symbol is the Iamb, which is an innocent creature of God and which also symbolizes the child Christ. In the "Songs of Experience" the chief symbol is the tiger as expressed by the first stanza:
“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night”
Where ‘forests of the night’ symbolize experience. The tiger burns metaphorically with rage and quickly becomes for some a symbol of anger and passion. The poet asks a crucial question here. Did God Who made the lamb also make the tiger? The lamb, innocent and pretty, seems the work of a kindly, comprehensible Creator. The splendid but terrifying tiger makes us realize that God's purposes are not so easily understood. The tiger represents the created universe in its violent and terrifying aspects. It also symbolizes violent and terrifying forces within the individual man, and these terrifying forces have to be faced and fully recognized. The two poems called The Lamb and The Tiger do, indeed, represent two contrary states of the human soul. No contrast could have been more vivid and more striking. Blake sees exploitation in the songs of experience as exemplified by the following lines from, ‘London’.
“And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe”
The poems in the second group record the wounds and cruelties of the civilized world. Some of them are bitter comments on the restraints forged by custom and law. Here Blake deplores the dominance of reason, religion, law, and morality, and he deplores the suppression of natural impulses, and more especially the suppression of the sexual impulse. Instead of innocence, joy, and security, Blake finds guilt, misery, and tyranny in the world. The protective guardians have disappeared and in their place are the tyrants. The rigors of sexual morality are depicted in A Little Girl Lost, The Sick Rose, The Angel, and Ah, Sunflower. The Sick Rose shows the destructive effects of sexual repression. In The Angel, the maiden realizes too late what she has missed. Ah, Sunflower shows the youth "pining away with desire", and the "pale virgin shrouded in snow", because both of them were denied sexual fulfillment.
The contrasts Blake sets forth in the Songs are echoes of English society's approach to the social and political issues of his era—a time characterized, on the one hand, by increasing desire for personal, political, and economic freedom, and on the other, by anxiety regarding the potential consequences of that freedom for social institutions. Several of the poems directly address contemporary social problems, for example, “The Chimney-Sweeper” deals with child labor and “Holy Thursday” describes the grim lives of charity children. The most fully-realized social protest poem in the Songs is “London,” a critique of urban poverty and misery. Thus contrariness are a must. The language and vision not just of Blake but of poetry itself insists that the contraries are equally important and inseparable. ‘Without contraries is no progression’, wrote Blake. He sought to transform the energies generated by conflict into creative energies, moving towards mutual acceptance and harmony. Thus, by describing innocence and experience as ‘contrary states of the human soul’, Blake is warning us that we are not being invited to choose between them, that no such choice is possible. He is not going to assert that innocent joy is preferable to the sorrows of experience.
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William Blake’s Tyger: Critique and Appraisal
"The Tyger" represents an intense, visionary style with which William Blake confronts a timeless question through the creation of a still-life reverie. To examine "The Tyger's" world, a reader must inspect Blake’s word choice, images, allusions, rhyme scheme, meter, and theme. "The Tyger" seems like a simple poem, yet this simple poem contains all the complexities of the human mystery. The first impression that William Blake gives is that he sees a terrible tiger in the night, and, as a result of his state of panic, the poet exaggerates the description of the animal when he writes:
‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night…’
The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the poem, and each subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror? Immediately after seeing the ‘Tyger’ in the forests, the poet asks it what deity could have created it:
‘What immortal hand and eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’
The word ‘immortal’ gives the reader a clue that the poet refers to God. Then, in the second stanza, the author wonders in what far-away places the tiger was made, maybe, referring that these places cannot be reached by any mortal. In the third stanza, the poet asks again, once the tiger’s heart began to beat, who could make such a frightening and evil animal. Next, in the forth stanza, William Blake asks questions about the tools used by God. And he names the hammer, the chain, the furnace, and anvil. All these elements are used by an ironsmith. The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as the poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and comes to embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake's tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tiger's remarkable nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speaker's questions about its origin must also encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poem's series of questions repeatedly ask what sort of physical creative capacity the "fearful symmetry" of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation.
“What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?”
The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine creation of the natural world. The "forging" of the tiger suggests a very physical, laborious, and deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical presence of the tiger and precludes the idea that such a creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced. It also continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations of creation, purification, and destruction. The speaker stands in awe of the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral implications of such a creation; for the poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act. This is a question of creative responsibility and of will, and the poet carefully includes this moral question with the consideration of physical power. Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of "shoulder" and "art," as well as the fact that it is not just the body but also the "heart" of the tiger that is being forged. The repeated use of word the "dare" to replace the "could" of the first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and willfulness into the sheer might of the creative act.
“Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. It also invites a contrast between the perspectives of "experience" and "innocence" represented here and in the poem "The Lamb." "The Tyger" consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God's power, and the inscrutability of divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The open awe of "The Tyger" contrasts with the easy confidence, in "The Lamb," of a child's innocent faith in a benevolent universe. The meekness of Blake’s lamb makes his “fearful” and “deadly” tiger appear all the more horrific, but to conclude that one is decidedly good and the other evil would be incorrect. The innocent portrayal of childhood in “The Lamb,” though attractive, lacks imagination. The tiger, conversely, is repeatedly associated with fire or brightness, providing a sharp contrast against the dark forests from which it emerges — “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night.” While such brightness might symbolize violence, it can also imply insight, energy, and vitality. The tiger’s domain is one of unrestrained self-assertion. Far from evil, Blake’s poem celebrates the tiger and the sublime excessiveness he represents. “Jesus was all virtue,” wrote Blake “and acted from impulse, not from rules.”
William Blake never answers his question about the unknown nature of god. He leaves it up to the reader to decide. By beginning and ending his poem with the same quatrain he asks the question about god creating evil as well as good, again. In conclusion, a reading of "The Tyger" offers different thematic possibilities. The poem seems to change as the reader changes, but the beauty of the words and meter make this poem an astonishing, enjoyable excursion into the humanity of theology. Moreover, the poem is quotable in various situations, and it leaves a permanent impression on the reader. Therefore, "The Tyger" by William Blake emerges from creation's cold, clear stream as a perpetual inspiration - a classic. In my opinion, William Blake wrote the poem with a simple structure and a perfect rhyme to help the reader see the images he wanted to transmit. Above all, the description of the tiger is glaringly graphic due to essentially the contrast between fire and night.
“Kubla Khan” is not a poetic fragment resulting from a dream, but a complex and carefully organized work that illustrates Coleridge’s poetic principles. Discuss the statement!
“Kubla Khan” is an excellent example. Nineteenth-century critics tended to dismiss it as a rather inconsequential or meaningless triviality. In large part, this was due to Coleridge’s own introduction to the poem. When it was first published in 1816, he subtitled it “A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.” Those poets and critics who admired “Kubla Khan,” such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Leigh Hunt, did so for its marvelous melodic quality.
Arthur Symons called “Kubla Khan”: “One of the finest examples of lyric poetry. It has just enough meaning to give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied music.” We can see the music of the poem in the following lines:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea’
The opening lines of “Kubla Khan” immediately thrust us into a strange world where the remarkable is commonplace. Kubla Khan orders a “pleasure-dome” to be built next to a sacred river that erupts from a chasm, flows in “sinuous rills” through gardens, then descends “in tumult” into “caverns measureless to man.” Encircling the centrally placed dome, walls and towers inscribe a defining limit around “forests ancient as the hills.” These elegant and civilized structures actually enclose a “deep romantic chasm ... A savage place” that spurts life-giving waters to the gardens like a spouting heart or a birthing mother. In other words, despite human artifice, nature vivifies the whole and gives it meaning. So Kubla Khan, the prototypical Romantic artist, in order to create his masterpiece, merely defines a limit with his art around the uncontrollable magic of untrammeled nature and allows it to feed and inform his art work. And this, in fact, was the aesthetic Coleridge and other Romantic poets practiced. For them, poetry, as an “imitation of nature,” merely delimits in image and form the divine beauty of raw nature. But in “Kubla Khan,” as Coleridge informs us in the preface to the 1816 edition of the poem, the wild nature of the gardens, the fountain “with ceaseless turmoil seething,” and “Alph, the sacred river,” actually emerge from the poet’s dream consciousness. The Romantics believed that, at its core, the self is one with nature. Childhood and dreams fascinated them thematically in their poetry because both, like nature, were simple, raw, and unrestrainable. They recognized that in all of its forms, nature yearns with omnidirected desire. Just like a “woman wailing for her demon-lover,” nature is, in William Blake’s words, “Energy.” And what Blake says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell of this “Energy” also applies here in “Kubla Khan”: “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.... Energy is Eternal Delight.” The “outward circumference” of the Khan’s towers and walls circumscribes the “Eternal Delight” of untamed nature, which is both “holy and enchanted” and certainly beyond human control.
‘In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid’
Read as the beginning of a longer poem, Coleridge’s poetic “fragment” sets forth a fantastic world, set both in the “mysterious” Orient and in the “magical” Middle Ages. But read as a whole complete unto itself, “Kubla Khan” evokes the fleeting images of a waking dream that speak not in words but in symbols. And although many critics point to the Crewe manuscript version of “Kubla Khan” found in 1934 as proof that Coleridge “consciously” revised the text, the poem as it stands successfully replicates the dream state and unveils a genuine glimpse into an archetypal world, a world Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, called the “collective unconscious.” The first thirty-six lines of the poem imagistically present a symbolic diagram of the “self,” in which consciousness strives to find integration with the incalculably greater depth of the unconscious mind, while the last eighteen lines reflect upon the power of the unconscious mind when Coleridge finally realized that the full recollection of his dream work was impossible. By demarcating a circular space from the “forests ancient as the hills” with protective walls and towers, Kubla Khan creates a kind of “mandala” whose circumference is described by the “stately pleasure-dome” at its center. A Sanskrit technical term from Tantric Buddhism for a circular “cosmogram” used for “centering” and meditation, the mandala is a map of the inner world (the microcosm) that mirrors the outer world (the macrocosm). According to Jung, the mandala serves to define and protect the self as it seeks to integrate with the unruly forces of the unconscious mind. But in “Kubla Khan,” the “sunny spots of greenery” and the bright “sinuous rills” within the conscious world of the self appear tenuous, fragile, and minuscule in comparison to the cavernous deeps of the “sunless sea.” In fact, all of the paired opposites that appear within the poem (sun and moon, light and dark, male and female, movement and rest, and good and evil) struggle without success to find balance within this delicate world fed by the waters of the collective unconscious.
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
As mentioned previously, “Alph, the sacred river,” suffuses consciousness with creative “Energy.” This overwhelming creativity fecundates the conscious mind (“twice five miles of fertile ground”) via the spouting chasm that flings up water and “dancing rocks” from the underworld. This birth-giving chasm, clearly associated with the “woman wailing for her demon-lover,” charges the visionary with almost frenzied inspiration. In the last eighteen lines, the speaker recalls yet another female figure he had once seen in vision, the “damsel with a dulcimer.” Her strange song, if he could but “revive [it] within” himself, would so permeate him with numinous powers that he would be able to recreate the Khan’s dome and the “caves of ice” in the air itself. Such magical powers, the fruit of a kind of possession, would then make the speaker into an object of taboo, both holy and dangerous to the common sort of humanity. Like the chasm, both “holy and enchanted,” the inspired poet becomes an ambivalent figure “beyond good and evil,” for “he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.” Not surprisingly, many critics have commented that this “milk of Paradise” might be nothing more than laudanum, a solution of opium in alcohol, to which Coleridge was addicted most of his life. Unfortunately, Coleridge’s dependence on drugs cut short his poetically most productive period.
This complexity makes it difficult to fully believe that “Kubla Khan” is nothing more than the remnant of a half-remembered dream. The thematic repetition, intricacy of rhyme and metrical schemes, as well as the carefully juxtaposed images beautifully “harmonize and support” the poem’s purpose and theme. In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge has created more than simple lyric poetry. He has fulfilled his poetic ideal of a harmonious blend of meaning and form, which results in a “graceful and intelligent whole.”
Write a note on Blake's vision of childhood as depicted in the "Songs of Innocence".
The world of the "Songs of Innocence" is largely a child's world. It is a world of simplicity, purity, happiness, and security, though touches of the adult world of misery and guilt do occasionally intrude here. The central situation in this world is that of a child or young animal delighting in life. Fear is not necessarily totally absent from this world, but when danger threatens, a parent-figure (father, mother, God, or angel) is at hand to console and to comfort.
The keynote of the world of the "Songs of Innocence" is struck in the very opening poem called Introduction which is a little pastoral but which is also an appropriate preface to the poems that follow. Blake here thinks of himself as a shepherd with a pipe, playing songs of joy in the open country, when he sees a "child" on a cloud. At the bidding of the child, he pipes first a song about a lamb; and under its inspiration he writes "happy songs" which "every child may joy to hear". The child in this poem seems to carry suggestions of (1) the Christ child speaking from Heaven (a "cloud"); (2) an angel symbolizing innocence; and (3) the spirit of pastoral poetry. It is possible therefore to treat the poem as an allegory, its subject being divine inspiration. The poem brings divinity effortlessly to earth. The fact that the poem deals with divine inspiration in such simple and natural terms makes it a highly appropriate introduction to the Songs of Innocence. The poet shows himself setting out happily to record the joys of childhood which are pure and secure.
The Echoing Green is the record of a happy day. It is a little idyll of a village green on a warm afternoon in late spring. But it is also a symbolic presentation of the days of innocence from sunrise to sunset. Children, young folk, and the old people—all participate in an "unfallen" enjoyment of life in a beautiful natural environment. The poem reminds us of the Biblical picture of Adam and Eve before they sinned and were expelled from Paradise. Even the reminiscences of the old people seem not to contain any regret. The end of the day brings rest and refreshment, not fear of darkness.
The Lamb suggests the Lamb of God that "taketh away the sin of the world". What is vital in this poem is the nature of the innocent creature of God. Innocence has a divine source. The innocent lamb symbolises Christ, the incarnation of love and tenderness. The child who speaks in the poem is also identified with Christ because Christ became a child and particularly praised the innocence of children. The child-like qualities of this poem lie particularly in the little speaker's unselfconscious and serious address to the lamb as to another little child, and on his delight in repetition.
The Shepherd is a tiny pastoral which celebrates the happiness of rural responsibility and trust. The Christian imagery of the Good Shepherd underlies the poem, but it is noteworthy that the shepherd derives undoubted human pleasure from his job. Not only the shepherd but the ewes and the lambs seem to have achieved a sense of fulfilment. An important idea here is that the shepherd in no way restricts the freedom of the sheep: he follows them, and they are given confidence by his presence. The sheep's security is the security of the child's world too.
It is better to regard Infant Joy as an imaginary dialogue between a parent (father or mother) and an infant, than as a dialogue between a fairy and an infant. The poem is a tiny drama in which the parent supplies, in the first stanza, fanciful words for the child to express its feelings, and in the second stanza goes on to express his or her own feelings about the baby. According to another interpretation the child who speaks is as yet unborn, and thus has no name; it has been conceived two days within its mother's womb. If that is so, Blake seems to say that the life of children, born and unborn, is joyful and brings joy to the parents.
The central idea of The Little Black Boy is expressed in the following two lines:
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
This idea may be derived from the Puritan tradition of life as a trial deliberately imposed by God, but Blake has considerably refined it. The little black boy has the same human soul, and is just as much one of God's lambs as the little white boy, says Blake.
Laughing Song admirably blends the world of humanity and the world of non-human Nature. The green woods laugh joyfully, as do the stream, the air, the green hill, the meadows, and the grasshopper. Mary, Susan, and Emily, with their "sweet round mouths" are hardly distinguishable from the birds, and it is not certain whether the table is spread with cherries and nuts for the birds or the small girls. The poem has aptly been called "a little rhapsody for a rural picnic".
Spring is a true child's poem in the way it shows a child's selective delight in Nature. The child speaks of birds, the nightingale and the lark and the cock, and he speaks to a little lamb, besides speaking to a little boy and a little girl. But the poem is also an example of Blake's ability to use natural symbols without removing them from the child's world of direct sensation. Symbolically the poem shows the joyful unity of Nature and innocent man.
The nurse in Nurse's Song provides a background of love and security for the children because she herself is quite confident and secure: "My heart is at rest within my breast". The nurse is not weak, but benevolent; and she agrees without anxiety to the children's request for more time to play in the evening. The natural background is tranquil and harmless. Night is simply a time for rest. In subject this poem is a companion to The Echoing Green.
A Cradle Song is a lullaby sung by a mother over her child. The poem is a "miracle of motherly tenderness". Among the "Songs of Innocence" this poem occupies a central position because happiness is here complete. The child is here shown as being always in the presence of love—the angel of sleep, the mother, or Christ.
In The Divine Image we are given a picture of human nature as a child would see it. Blake is here saying: "This is life as seen through innocent eyes". The child's eyes see God truly, and see that God and man share the same good qualities—mercy, pity, peace, and love. (These eyes do not yet see that these virtues are corrupted in the adult world of the senses).
In Holy Thursday Blake speaks of the innocent faces of the children. They are children of charity schools and Blake describes them as "these flowers of London town". "They sit with radiance all their own". They are "multitudes of lambs". Thus the emphasis is on innocence, purity, meekness, and radiance. Such is the world of children. The poem ends with a moral which could have occurred only in the "Songs of Innocence". Cherish pity, says the poet to us, lest in hardening your hearts, you drive a child away from your door.
The Blossom is a child's expression of delight in the birds like the sparrow and the robin. The speaker seems to be a little girl whose motherly feeling for the birds is conveyed partly by the word "bosom". The blossom, as well as the child, sees and hears the birds, giving an additional impression of natural innocence and uniting the human child, the birds, and the plants in simple harmony.
In The Chimney Sweeper, the little slaves, black with soot, become clean, free, and happy in a green plain by a river in the sun:
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.
In spite of the obvious misery of their lives, the boys retain a vision of eternal happiness and are sustained by it. Like Holy Thursday, this poem closes with a moral: "So if all do their duty they need not fear harm". Whatever the poetic objections to this didactic statement, it strikes an optimistic note.
Night contains pleasing pictures of angels watching over all creatures, animal and human. If any sheep are killed by beasts of prey, the angels receive their spirits "in new worlds". In those new worlds even the beasts of prey will be transformed: the lion will lie down with the lamb and meditate upon Christ. Swinburne said that nothing like this poem was ever written on that text of the lion and the lamb; no such heaven of sinless animal life was ever conceived so intensely and sweetly.
In A Dream the speaker's own bed is guarded by angels, and the lost mother ant is helped to return to her children by a glow-worm and a beetle. No creature, human or otherwise, is in serious danger; fear will be dispelled by love.
On Another's Sorrow expresses the view that pity is both human and divine. No mother or father can endure a child's suffering. Likewise God cannot witness the suffering of his creatures without being moved to tears. God smiles on all and
He doth give his joy to all;
He becomes an infant small;
He becomes a man of woe;
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Indeed, this poem appears to be a summary of the central doctrine of the "Songs of Innocence".
In the two poems which tell us of a boy lost and found, God appears to the boy in the shape of his father and leads him home to his mother. The boy's father has somehow failed to protect the boy, but help is at hand; the cry for love is answered by God who is "ever nigh". The boy returns contentedly to his mother.
It is clear, then, that the world depicted in the "Songs of Innocence" is free from fear, anxiety, care, guilt, repressive influences, and suffering. That is why we call it a child's world. Such is the world a child inhabits. The poems of this group give us an insight into the psychology of a child, but it is not the entire psychology of children that is revealed. We are given only the bright aspects of child-psychology.
As has been hinted above, suggestions of cruelty, ugliness, injustice, and suffering are not totally absent from the "Songs of Innocence". Here and there we get anticipations or adumbrations of the world that is depicted in the later group (the "Songs of Experience"). The little black boy's sense of inferiority to the white boy, for instance, clings to him even in paradise. Even in paradise, the black boy must attend upon the white boy and serve him in order to win his love. In A Cradle Song there is a reference to the "sweet moans" and "dove-like sighs" of the infant; the mother weeps over the infant as he sleeps; Christ is pictured as weeping "for me, for thee, for all". In Holy Thursday the fact that we are reading an account of children who depended on charity cannot remain hidden, and we do experience a pang to think of them just as we experience a pang when we read about little Tom Dacre in The Chimney Sweeper. In Night suffering and death do exist and cannot be evaded. When wolves and tigers howl for prey, the angels stand helplessly and weep to see the sheep being killed and eaten. The Little Boy Lost, if read apart from its sequel, is really a tragic poem:
The night was dark, no father was there; The child was wet with dew.
Apart from the poem's poignancy, "dew" is used by Blake to symbolize materialism, and the "vapour" in the same poem symbolizes perhaps man's reasoning power.
However, the predominant impression which the "Songs of Innocence" produce on us is, as already stated, that of joy, gentleness, and purity.
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