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Blake

Blake portrays childhood in Songs of Innocence as naive but not detached from societal evils, ending hopefully. In poems like "The Lamb" and "The Little Black Boy", children are shown as easily influenced by social beliefs like racism, depicted as sacrificial or desiring whiteness for love. "Holy Thursday" and "The Chimney Sweeper" portray children manipulated for financial gain through church ceremonies or child labor, though ending on heavenly notes with promised future rewards. Overall, Blake's vision shows childhood aware of surrounding harms but maintaining innocent hope through religion or awakening.

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Fahim Alam
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20 views2 pages

Blake

Blake portrays childhood in Songs of Innocence as naive but not detached from societal evils, ending hopefully. In poems like "The Lamb" and "The Little Black Boy", children are shown as easily influenced by social beliefs like racism, depicted as sacrificial or desiring whiteness for love. "Holy Thursday" and "The Chimney Sweeper" portray children manipulated for financial gain through church ceremonies or child labor, though ending on heavenly notes with promised future rewards. Overall, Blake's vision shows childhood aware of surrounding harms but maintaining innocent hope through religion or awakening.

Uploaded by

Fahim Alam
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Q: What vision of childhood do you find in Blake’s Songs of innocence?

Ans:

After reading Blake’s songs of innocence I found him lyrically portraying


his vision of childhood which is not exclusively detached from the evil practices of
society but is in the section of innocence because it ends either in heaven or on a
heavenly note. In this section Blake creates an ignorant and naive image of
children who are brainwashed by the society into working for their betterment on
the promises of future rewards.

In the poem “The Lamb” Blake wrote “I a child, and thou a lamb,/ we are
called by His name”. Here ‘He’ refers to Jesus and Blake also wrote in the poem,
“He is meek, and He is mild; He became a little child.” So Blake associated the
child with the Lamb and Jesus implying the mild, meek and innocent nature of the
child. The poem further connotes the sacrificing of the children for the betterment
of the society in the final two lines- “” Little Lamb, God bless thee,/ Little Lamb,
God bless thee.” Here the dark connotation arises from the practice of praying to
God for the sacrificial animal while sacrificing it and the fact that Blake previously
formed a trinity of Child, Lamb and God. However the poem has no direct mention
of any malpractice or imminent dangers on the child and thus it is in the section of
innocence.

The poem “The Little Black Boy” further enhances Blake’s imagery of
children by pointing out their naivety and how easily they are influenced by the
thoughts of the society. In this poem the speaker is a little black boy who is told by
her mother that God’s love has two aspects: heat and light and the black boys
receive his heat whereas the white boys receive the light. The interesting part of the
poem is when in the last stanza the speaker says, “I’ll shade him from the heat, till
he can bear/ To lean in joy upon our father’s knee:/ And then I’ll stand and stroke
his silver hair,/ And be like him, and he will then love me.”. Here the black boy
says he will shade the white boy from the heat till he can bear it but at the same
time he does not want a shade to be protected from the light. He wants to be like
the white boy to be loved by him. So Blake here shows how the society mentally
crippled its children with racism that all they can think about is how to be white.
This poem also shows how the children are easily manipulated by the common
beliefs of their surroundings thus making it easier to manipulate them.

“Holy Thursday” is another poem where we can see the same theme of
happy imageries connoting dark facts. In this poem Blake brings in a contrast of
life and death between the children and their beadles by dressing the children in
‘red and blue and green’ whereas the beadles are ‘grey-headed’ who had ‘wands as
white as snow’ to force them to walk in ‘lines of two and two’ and to beat anyone
who breaks the line. Though the children are seen singing in this poem which is a
beautiful image, the actual purpose of this ceremony is to use the children as an
excuse to get funds from the St Paul’s cathedral.

“The chimney Sweeper” again shows the same thing. Here Blake shows how
children are sold by their own fathers to earn them some money before they could
even learn to speak properly. The most important part of the poem is when a
sweeper named Tom Dacre dreams how they are trapped in ‘coffins of black’ and
an angel comes to save them and takes them to river to bath and play under the
sun. Later the angel tells him that, “if he’d be a good boy/ He’d have God for his
father and never want joy.” So the very next day the wakes up and though it was
cold, he feels warm and goes to his work happily. Here Blake masterfully shows
how the society continues to manipulate the naive children for their benefit by
promising them some futuristic reward like God’s love and heaven.

Now, based on the above discoveries in Blake’s songs of innocence, I found


his vision of childhood to be one which is not ignorant of the evils surrounding it
but still ends with hopefulness.

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