Romanticism William Blake English Poetry II To help

Romanticism: William Blake English Poetry II

To help you answer the questions after the lecture please make as many notes as possible! On the poems, underline any words or expressions you think are important or interesting. Look up any words you don’t understand write their meaning next to the words.

Romanticism (or the Romantic Period) was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that started in Europe at the end of the 18 th century (1789 -1830). It was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution, social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.

‘Romantic’ artists glorified nature, idealised the past and celebrated the divinity of creation and nature. There is an emphasis on the freedom of self -expression, spontaneity and originality. The movement rebelled against the Classicism and scientific rationalization of the 18 th century. Therefore their approach to subjects was emotional rather than logical, intuitive rather than analytical.

This focus on the human being and our emotions was manifested in a fascination with the weird and exotic. Also the effects of guilt, evil, isolation and terror on the human psyche or brain. Romantics were involved in the emotional directness of personal experience and individual imagination. Romanticism was also seen as a revival of the spiritual and fantastic culture of the Middle Ages.

This movement encouraged strong emotion as an authentic source of artistic experience, placing emphasis on emotions like anxiety, terror and awe. In Romanticism, experiencing a sense of awe, usually caused by nature, is often called the Sublime experience.

Its effect on politics was considerable and complex, but at its peak Romanticism was associated with liberalism and radicalism. The 1789 French Revolution and the American War of Independence (1775 -83) had a significant impact upon the politics and spirit of the Romantic Period. What is Romanticism?

In English literature, the poets now considered important figures of the Romantic Period include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and William Blake. They are sometimes called “the Big Six. ” The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often said to have marked ‘the start’ of Romanticism in literature. What is Romanticism?

Romanticism had an emphasis on personal freedom and liberty. Heroes and heroines of Romantic literature often questioned their roles in society and purposes in life. The idea of the individual's imagination as a way of exploring psychology and philosophy also gained popularity during the Romantic period. Features of Romanticism Individuality and the Imagination

Thus a feature of Romanticism is the free expression of the feelings of the artist. To William Wordsworth poetry was "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings". In order to truly express these feelings, the content must come from the imagination of the artist, with as little interference as possible from "artificial" rules. The influence of others’ art was thought to inhibit the creator's own imagination. Features of Romanticism Individuality and the Imagination

There was a strong belief in the importance of nature. Romanticism defended the beauty of nature in an attempt to escape the problems of the city and industrialisation. Romantics distrusted the world of people and urbanity, and tended to believe that a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy. Previously, many poets gained inspiration from conventional, organised religion. However Romantic poets saw Nature as the source of divine inspiration which influenced and inspired their poetry. Features of Romanticism - Nature

William Blake (1757 -1827) was born in Soho, London. He attended school but left at 10, and was educated at home by his mother. The Blake family were Christian Dissenters. The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and remained a source of inspiration throughout his life.

In 1772, Blake was apprenticed to an engraver for 7 years. At 21, he became a professional engraver. In 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy. There, he rebelled against the style of the school and its teachers. Over time, Blake detested the school’s attitude towards art and thought the teachers were hypocrites.

In 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher, but they had no children. In 1783, Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was printed. In 1784 Blake opened a print shop, and worked with radical publisher Joseph Johnson.

In 1789 he published Songs of Innocence and in 1794 he published Songs of Innocence and Experience. He published many more works including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790 -3) and Jerusalem (1804 -20). In 1827 he died from liver disease.

We do not know a lot about William Blake because there is little contemporary material about his life. However, we know that he was a Dissenting Christian and he was politically radical. His poetry and paintings were unknown throughout most of his life, although he achieved small fame in his 60 s.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It was published in 1794 and was illustrated by Blake himself. It aimed to show the "Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, ” - Innocence and Experience. Songs of Innocence and Experience - Introduction

Songs of Innocence was actually published first in 1789. It contains poems which are mostly positive in tone and celebrate innocence, love, childhood and nature. The language in the poems is relatively simple and uncomplicated. Songs of Innocence and Experience - Introduction

The Songs of Experience poems are intended to provide a contrast to Innocence, and illustrate the effects of the Industrial Revolution on people and nature. Dangerous city conditions, child labour, prostitution, sexual disease, religion and poverty are just some of the topics that Blake explores in these poems. Songs of Innocence and Experience - Introduction

This poem literally ‘introduces’ the Songs of Innocence and it also introduces us to a certain kind of ‘innocent’ writing. This ‘innocent’ writing is symbolised by the pipe which is a common symbol for 18 th century pastoral writing. Pastoral writing idealises rural life and criticises modernity and change.

The speaker plays his simple and innocent music, which attracts the attention of a spirit that appears as a child on a cloud. The child encourages him to play a song about a “Lamb, ” and then asks him to drop his pipe and write a book “that all may read”. The narrator makes a reed into a pen and writes down his happy songs for everyone to enjoy.

Blake appears to be present as the narrator or the ‘I’ in the poem. Therefore the child/spirit appears to be asking Blake to share his ideas and inspiration with a wider audience so they may hear songs with ‘merry chear’ (5 -6) or happy songs. The poem’s rhyme and rhythm suggest that it is an example this type of song. It has a simple ‘abab’ rhyme, so the rhythm is simple and appeals to children and reminds us of the simple childhood nursery rhymes.

Blake also uses repetition and variation on the words “pipe and piping”, which provides a memorable alliteration. For example, there is variation on ‘pipe’ 5 times (lines 5 to 8). This captures the reader’s attention.

The poem also introduces the image of ‘the Lamb’ (L 5) as both a symbol of innocent happiness and as a religious image. ‘The Lamb’ is a symbol for Jesus i. e. the Lamb of God. Thus, it hints towards the complicated religious arguments that appear later in the volume of poems.

However, the most interesting part of the poem is the reaction of the child in the 2 nd stanza. When the song about a lamb is first piped the piper has ‘merry chear. ’ But when he pipes again, the child ‘wept…to hear’ (L 12). Why is the child crying? Later we are told they are tears of “joy, ” (L 12) but this may not be the only answer. Perhaps the child is crying about the fragility of the lamb, suggesting that the world of innocence may be more complicated than we think and we need to be prepared to look at a different understanding of the world.

Also, in this apparently innocent song there is one word which sounds strange. In line 18, Blake says “And I stained the water clear” which can refer to the act of ink or paint being placed into water so he can write. However, this could also refer to the fact that by talking or writing about innocence it inevitably taints or stains the subject matter itself. Innocence inevitably will be lost.

William Blake and Politics

The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his observations. He sees despair in the faces of the people he meets and hears fear and repression in their voices. The woeful cry of the chimneysweeper is a criticsm to the Church, and the blood of a soldier stains the outer walls of the King’s palace. At night the cursing of a prostitute (Harlot) corrupts an infant and dirties the “Marriage hearse. ”

The poem has four quatrains (a four line stanza), with alternate lines rhyming. There is a strict ‘abab’ rhyme scheme in the four stanzas. Repetition is the most striking feature of the poem, and it serves to emphasize the prevalence of the horrors the speaker describes.

The image of wandering, the focus on sound and the images of stains in this poem’s first lines recall The Introduction to Songs of Innocence, but with a difference. We are now far from the pastoral ideal of the earlier poem - we are in the city. Unlike many of the other poems in the collection, this poem’s title denotes a specific geographic space.

The tone of the poem is Biblical, reflecting Blake's strong interest in religion. It is as if the speaker is offering a prophesy of the terrible consequences unless changes are made in the city. In the first stanza, Blake uses repetition twice, firstly using the word "charter'd". This is a reference to the charters that allocated property ownership to specific people. Many, including Blake, saw this as robbing ordinary people of their rights and freedoms.

The poem suggests the rapid urbanization in Britain at the time was a dangerous force. Children are no longer free to enjoy childhood, instead they work in dangerous conditions. Charters restrict freedoms which ultimately results in the restriction of thinking. In stanza two, the speaker says that every sound he hears is evidence of the "mind-forg'd manacles". Manacles are like handcuffs. The speaker suggests that people's minds are restricted and confined – their minds are literally being handcuffed – by the city and institutions like government and the Church.

Curiously, all the speaker’s subjects, - infants, chimney-sweeper, soldier, harlots, are known only through the traces they leave behind: the cries, the stains and the blood. They never appear as bodies. In the 3 rd stanza the cry of the chimney-sweep and the sigh of the soldier change into soot and blood on palace and church walls. Likewise, institutions of power—the clergy, the government—are expressed only through the symbolism of their residences (Palace/Church).

Why does Blake do this? This device suggests that Blake does not simply blame a set of institutions or a system for people’s and the city’s problems. Instead, it is people/victims that help to make their own “mind-forg’d manacles. ” People have willlingly accepted these restraints and restrictions, and have become victims of their own exploitation.

The poem climaxes in the form of a new human being starting life: a baby is born into poverty, to a cursing, prostitute mother. Sexual and marital union (the place of possible regeneration and rebirth) are tainted by disease. Thus Blake’s final image of the “Marriage hearse, ” is shocking. Marriage should be a celebration of love and the beginning of new life. But a hearse is a vehicle associated with funerals/death. Therefore here it is combined with "hearse“ to show love and desire can combine with death and destruction.

"The Chimney Sweeper" was published in Songs of Innocence and there is another version of the poem in Songs of Experience. It is set against the background of child labour in England 18 th and 19 th century. At the age of 7, boys were sold like slaves to clean chimneys due to their small size. In this poem a young chimney sweeper recounts a dream by one of his fellow chimney sweepers Tom Dacre. The Chimney Sweeper – Introduction

Chimney sweepers were sold to their masters because their families were too poor to look after them. They endured terrible conditions. They were not fed, clothed and washed properly. While sweeping there was danger of suffocation, burning and cancer from the soot. When they became too big, they were left on the street. The Chimney Sweeper

In the first stanza, the sweeper tells how he became a chimney sweeper. His mother died and he was sold as an apprentice by his father. He was so young that all he could do was cry and weep in protest. His present life includes working and sleeping in soot, a realistic detail since the boys did sleep on bags of the soot they had swept from chimneys. The Chimney Sweeper - Content

The second stanza introduces Tom Dacre, who joins the workers and is introduced to his new life by a haircut. Note Tom’s hair is like the innocent lamb’s. Tom cries when his head is shaved, but the speaker comforts him with the thought that if his hair is cut it cannot be spoiled by the soot. The consolation is totally inadequate, but for Tom it is effective. He falls asleep and dreams happily. The Chimney Sweeper - Content

The next three stanzas tell us about the dream. Tom dreams that thousands of chimney sweepers locked in coffins are released by an angel. They find themselves in a pastoral/rural landscape, where they are free and bathe in a river and rise up to the clouds. The angel tells Tom, “if he’d be a good boy, / He’d have God for his father & never want joy. ” So if you a good you will have God and never need anything else to be happy. The Chimney Sweeper - Content

The last stanza opens with a brutal contrast. Having dreamed of playing in the sun, Tom awakes and the sweepers begin their day’s work - a day to be spent in the total darkness of the cramped chimneys. Yet, restored by his dream, Tom is happy and the poem ends with the pious moral, similar to the angel’s speech, “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm. ” The Chimney Sweeper - Content

So Blake presents us with this terrible scene and we must think about our response as readers. One unavoidable response is pity because we pity the child’s awful situation and job. But what do we think about the narrator’s advice to Tom Dacre? He says we should simply do what we are told (do our duty) and everything will be fine. Do we agree with this idea? The Chimney Sweeper - Analysis

Or does the poem say we must look through this ideology of repression and see the narrator as a victim. Is the narrator a victim of innocence who needs to be enlightened about the issues of exploitation? Blake does not appear to answer this question. Indeed the poem itself is a question. Is innocence a valuable perspective on the world, or is it just at the service of manipulation and greed? The Chimney Sweeper - Analysis

This question continues into Tom Dacre’s dream. For example, can naïve, simple religious belief compensate us for our sufferings in life? Or are we meant to see “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm” ironically? It this highlighting how religion offers us false forms of pleasure which serve to ensure that we do not challenge our masters? The Chimney Sweeper - Analysis

William Blake grew up in the Dissenter tradition instead of traditional Anglican Christianity. This means that he was a Christian but he was strongly opposed to the hierarchical structure of the Church and the financial ties between it and the English government. William Blake rejected established religion for various reasons. But one of the main reasons was the failure of the established Church to help children and the poor in London. He thought they had hypocritical attitudes towards wealth and sexuality.

The poem begins with the question, “Little Lamb, who made thee? ” The speaker is a child who asks the lamb about its origins: How it came be alive, how it acquired its way of feeding, its “clothing” of wool and its “tender voice. ”

In the next stanza, the speaker creates a riddle to answer his own question: the lamb was made by the one who “calls himself a Lamb. ” Someone who resembles the gentleness of the child and the lamb. This is Jesus. The poem ends with the child giving a blessing to the lamb.

‘The Lamb’ has two stanzas, each containing five rhymed couplets. The repetition in the first and last couplet of each stanza helps to give the poem a song -like quality. The flowing l’s and soft vowel sounds contribute to this effect and also suggest the bleating of a lamb.

The poem is a child’s song, in the form of a question and answer. The first stanza is rural and descriptive, while the second focuses on abstract spiritual issues. The child’s question is both naïve and profound. The question (“who made thee? ”) is a simple one, yet the child is also asking the timeless question that all humans have - about their origins and the nature of creation.

However, the child answers his own question making it a rhetorical question, thus ending the initial naïve feeling of the poem. The answer is presented as a riddle, and this contributes to an underlying sense of ironic knowingness or pretense in the poem. The child’s answer reveals his confidence in his simple Christian faith and his innocent acceptance of its teachings.

The lamb symbolizes Jesus. The image of Jesus as a lamb is meant to represent the Christian values of gentleness and meekness. The image of the child is also associated with Jesus: Jesus shows special concern for children and in Jesus’ childhood he was shown to be naïve and vulnerable. This innocence and naivety is how the child approaches the ideas of nature and God. This poem appears to be a celebration of the more positive aspects of conventional Christian belief.

However, this does not provide an adequate religious doctrine, because it fails to account for the presence of suffering and evil in nature and creation. ‘The Lamb’s’ companion poem is ‘The Tyger’ and the 2 poems give a perspective on religion that includes the good as well as ‘the bad. ’ Thus these poems work together to produce a fuller account of religion and spirituality that neither offers independently.

Stanza 1: The poem begins with the speaker asking a scary tiger what kind of divine being/God could have created it: “What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful symmetry? ” Each subsequent stanza contains further questions, all of which expand on this first one.

Stanza 3: From what part of the universe could the tiger’s eyes come from and who would have dared to make them? What kind of physical presence and expertise would have been required to “twist the sinews” of the tiger’s heart? The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart “began to beat, ” its creator would have had the courage to continue the job.

Stanza 4: Comparing this creator to a blacksmith, he ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the person who used them. Stanza 5: It begins by suggesting that the ‘stars’ threw down their weapons and cried when the tiger was created.

Stanza 5: The speaker wonders, how would the creator have felt when it made the tiger? “Did he smile his work to see? ” Could this possibly be the same being who made the mild lamb? Stanza 6: This stanza repeats the first stanzas question: Who made the tiger and its fearful symmetry?

The poem is comprised of six quatrains (4 lines in a stanza) in rhymed couplets. The metre is regular and rhythmic, its hammering beat suggests the smithy (the blacksmith’s workshop) that is the poem’s central image. The simplicity of the poem’s form perfectly suit its regular structure, in which a lot of questions all contribute to the expression of one central idea.

The poem asks a question about creation: How can we understand a God who is capable of creating the innocence of the lamb and the fury of the tiger? Let’s remember that Blake was from a time when Darwin’s theory of evolution did not exist so he sees creation in spiritual terms. However, as modern readers we can still appreciate the philosophical questions about the nature of good and evil.

The opening question represents the whole idea of the poem and each stanza elaborates on this concept. Blake is using the idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is beautiful, yet also capable of terrible violence. So what kind of a God could or would make such a terrifying, dangerous beast? Or what does the existence of evil and violence tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where something can contain both beauty and horror?

The tiger becomes a symbolic character and embodies the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores. Blake’s tiger becomes a way to investigate the presence of evil in the world. The speaker’s questions about the tiger’s origins includes both physical and moral aspects. The poem’s series of questions ask what type of being has the creative capacity to make a tiger - surely only a very strong and powerful being could make such a creation?

The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation and Blake applies it to the divine creation of the natural world. The “forging” of the tiger suggests a very physical and deliberate kind of creation. It emphasizes the huge physical presence of the tiger and suggests that such a creation could not have been accidentally produced. In the smithy there is also the imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations of creation, purification and destruction.

The image of the smithy also suggests a connection between divine creation and the human creation of the artist/poet. Blake, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, believed there was no difference: The activity of the human creator is a version of divine creativity. Thus the artist must be daring and take risks in order to produce images of supreme importance to humanity.

The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same being and raises questions about the implications of this creation. 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 wonder at the complexity of creation and the mystery of divine will. The poem acknowledges that things are sometimes unexplainable in the universe. For example, evil is something that is real, but cannot be easily explained. Again ‘The Tyger’ contrasts with ‘The Lamb’ which shows a child’s innocent faith in a compassionate universe.

1. Please answer all the questions. Remember this is practice for the exam!!! 2. Please ask if you don’t understand a word or if you do not understand any spellings.