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Blake Fall 2023 Revised

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Blake Fall 2023 Revised

Uploaded by

郭怡文
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Blake

English Literature Since Romanticism


Fall 2023
William Blake (Norton 122)
• Only formal education was in art
• Engraver, painter, and poet
• Veiled his radical religious, moral,
and political opinions with
complicated symbolic and allusive
style
• Unknown in his lifetime
Antiquarianism (Norton 123)
• Affinity with Thomas Percy and James
MacPherson
• Locates the sources of poetic inspiration in
archaic native tradition eclipsed by French
culture after the 17 century
Prophetic Books (Norton 123)
• Follows Spenser and Milton in a lineage
going back to the prophets of the Bible
• Blake is an ironist
• Figurative (imaginative insight), not
literal vision (physical eyesight)
• Deals with the biblical plots of the
creation, the Fall, redemption etc.
• Represents the French Revolution as the
purifying violence that foretells
redemption
Blake’s mythmaking (Norton
124-125)
• Starting point: not God, but the all-
inclusive “Universal Man”
• The Fall: fragmentation of one Primal Man
into separate parts
• The Fall is the creation of man, nature, and
a sky god alienated from humanity
• The fallen world approaches and falls
away from redemption
• The Redeemer is equated with the human
imagination especially in the prophetic
poet
• Culminates in an apocalypse as a return to
the original, undivided condition
Companion poems

• Two poems designed to be read as


complements, opposites, or replies.
• Truly paired poems are not common in
Western poetry.
• Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
include a number of poems set against
each other and understood only by their
contrasts.
• True answer poems abound in Chinese,
Korean, and Japanese poetry.
Illustrations
• His words and images are mutually
enlightening
• Relief etching
• Subtitle: “Shewing the two contrary
states of the human soul” (Norton 127)
• C.f. cheap picture books for children
Frontispiece
and title-page
• Footnote 1: Not
innocence world
but innocent
imagination
• Songs of Innocence:
simple pastoral
language
• Both volumes deal
with injustice, evil, and
suffering
• Vision of the same
world as the one in
Songs of Innocence: a
world of poverty,
disease, prostitution,
war, and repression
• Epitomized in the
representation of
modern London
Introduction to Songs of
Innocence
• Immediate knowledge
• Natural harmony
• The child’s reactions to the piper: free
of self-consciousness
• Lamb: symbol of innocence
• Child and lamb: symbols of Jesus
• Last line: child or anyone innocent
(adult too) is the Piper/Poet’s
audience
Introduction to Songs of
Experience
• Line 1: the Bard’s lineage goes back to
Spenser, Milton, and the prophets of
the Bible (e.g. Jeremiah)
• Line 5: Holy Word is Jesus
• Line 17 and footnote 4: Earth turns
away from rational order to chaos
The Lamb

• Footnote 1: catechism
• Child-like speaker addressing the
Lamb
• Nursery rhyme
• Lamb as children’s friend
• World formed in love c.f. world
formed in fright (“The Tyger”)
The Tyger
• Title: purposefully archaic
• C.f. “The Lamb”: no explicit answers,
clear classification, or symmetry (lamb
being good, tiger being bad)
• Second stanza: mythical beasts (the
Behemoth, the Leviathan)
• Fourth stanza: motifs of fire and forge
• Line 16 God as powerful blacksmith
• Line 20: God creates both good and evil
• Line 24: answer is God
• Line 24: more certain, c.f. line 4: could
(possible)
Holy Thursday

• Speaker: on-looker
• From visual (Thames, flowers) to aural
imagery
• Line 12: poor children are angels in
disguise (note 3): hypocrisy?
Holy Thursday

• Without the ambiguity of tone in “Holy


Thursday” of Songs of Innocence
• Line 4: children are poor despite
abundant resources
• Third stanza: charity children’s lives
The Chimney Sweepers
• Speaker: child
sweeper
• Public
consciousness
about the poor
living conditions of
sweepers
• Line 12: outcast of
society
• Tom Dacre’s dream
of paradise is a
repressive vision
• Line 20 “want”:
lack or desire
The Chimney Sweepers

• Line 4: criticizes parents


• Line 7: destined to an early death
due to poor living and working
conditions
• Line 12: criticizes church and
government
The Little Black Boy
• Heroic stanza (heroic quatrain): abab,
iambic pentameter
• 1780s: abolition
• Speaker: the little black boy
• Mother’s lessons from the missionary:
racism, dualisms (soul vs. body; white
vs. black; pure vs. fallen)
• Line 24: equal spiritually in front of
God
• Line 25: The black is more enduring
• Line 28: be like “him”: father or boy?
The Little Black Boy
London
• No counterpart in Songs of Innocence
• Social conditions and landscape of
London: manmade oppressions
• What he sees (stanzas 1-2) and what
he hears (stanzas 3-4)
• Repetitions: mark, chartered
• Mind-forg’d: oppressive mindsets
• Stanza 3: failed by the nation
• Stanza 4: failed by family
• Line 16: Marriage hearse instead of
marriage coach; oxymoron
Activity 1 on Tronclass
1. Pick an assigned poem and look at its illustrations.
Pay attention to characters, settings, ornaments,
dates (if any), and other pictorial elements. Then
look at the arrangement of those elements.
2. Is there anything that catch your attention?
3. Is there a pattern in the arrangements of pictorial
elements?
4. What is the relation between image and text? Does
the illustration complement or subvert, or do
nothing to the text?
Brainstorming for a brand
story (Tronclass)
1. Pick a writer for whom you want to write a
brand story.
2. What is the author you just picked famous for?
Write down at least a title for his/her work.
3. What is the work that you just wrote down about?
Explain the theme or plot.
4. What genre does the work belong to?
5. What was the family or education background of
the author you picked? Who were the people that
influenced his/her writing?
Homework: Shelley
“Ode to the West Wind”
“England in 1819”
“Ozymandias”
“To a Sky-Lark”
“Mutability”
“To Wordsworth”
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
From “A Defence of Poetry” (Norton pp. 870-883)

Quiz 2 covers weeks 3-6

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