When William Blake writes a poem, it seems very simple but looking at each poem, I realized that he always had a deeper meaning. I found it very difficult to understand completely what message Blake was trying to convey in each poem. Blake desired to be an artist as a child, but his father could not afford to send him to school. Instead he became an apprentice at the age of 14 for an engraver. He ended up using this talent to accompany his poems with arts and creativity. He liked to combine images and words together when publishing his works. During his apprenticeship, Blake wrote many poems for his first publication.
Blake had two different publications which went together with one another. His first publication was the Songs of Innocence and the second was the Songs of Experience. Even though it is hard to come up with a constant theme between these works, my first thought was that he wrote the Songs of Innocence when he was happier and more naive himself. Most of these poems were written when he was working as an apprentice and he was a younger child. He did not write the Songs of Experience until he was older and maybe more experienced with the cruelties of the world. I think Blake was trying to show that there are two sides to every story and that each side needs the other in turn. It was said that some of the poems were switched around so this theory is not entirely correct.
When I first read "The Lamb" in the Songs of Innocence, I thought that he was trying to show that all things on this Earth should be equal because everything was made by the same God, therefore everything is blessed. The opposition of this theory is shown in the other poem "The Tyger". Blake is trying to say that if everything was made by the one God then everything should in fact be blessed, but there are evil things on this Earth. This is very contradictory to his previous statement.
As with "The Lamb" and "The Tyger", the other poems called "The Chimney Sweeper" deals with the contradictory issues. The first one shows these children looking at the bright side of the world and they know that God will reward them in the end and the second deals with a more pessimistic child. This child it bitter and wants to blame everyone for his horrible and unfair life.
All of this contradiction by Blake makes it difficult to decipher what his personal opinions and theories actually are. I think that his poems show the emotions of true life where every person has good times and negative times. When I am happy with my life, everything seems to go right and I look at the bright side of everything. I think when he was writing most of his poems for the Songs of Innocence, he must of been in a good time in his life. Then when things are not going well, it is easy to be pessimistic and blame others for everything and it seems like nothing can go right. I think that Blake must have faced a lot of personal hardships in his life because in order to write such negative things, a person needs to have had experienced these emotions.
I had a lot of trouble when I was trying to understand what was happening in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". This poem is from the view point of the devil. I personally think that it is not talking about the devil that we all know as Satan, but the devilish side of the human being. No matter how good a person can be, they will always show a side of them that resembles this devil such as with their individuality, sexuality, and imagination. Since each person displays these kinds of characteristics, there really is a marriage between heaven and hell: good and bad. In order for the world to keep going to survive, they need one another.
1 comment:
Nichole,
Very good job of discussing a very challenging poet! Don't feel bad if you don't fully understand Blake--I am definitely in the same position.
I like the way you focus on a few poems in the readings, and the way you discuss specific parts of these poems. Although it may be tempting to assume the Innocence and Experience poems reflect two separate times in Blake's own life, though, I don't think that is correct. He wrote several of the Experience poems while he was writing the Innocence ones, and even published one in an early version of Songs of Innocence. Also, some of the apparently innocent poems are not very innocent after all, but ironic in their view of that state of mind (like "The Chimney Sweeper," for instance).
I think the only safe assumption to make about the Romantics is that the speaker both is and isn't the same as the author; even when the speaker is "I" or has the same name as the author, the speaker is also always a character who is speaking for effect. These Romantics are pretty tricky!
This posting seems much better than your first one--keep up the improvement, and I look forward to reading your subsequent blog entries.
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