wil akef757 18271

tl is father was a London tradesman His onlyformal

education was in art drawing school At 14 he entered
anapprenticeshipforseven years to a well known
engraneran
began reading widely in hisfree time and trying his
hand at poetry At 24 he married Catherine Boucher
She was then illiterate but Blake her to read and
taught
to help him in his engraving and painting The couple was
childless
After an altercation with a soldier he was charged with
sedition la hanging offense but was later acquitted The
event exacerbated Blake's sense that ominous forces were at
work in the contemporary worldand led him to complicate
the symbolic and allusive style by which he veiled the
radical religious moral and political opinions that he
expressed in his poems
When he was 26 Poeticalsketches was published It was
the only book Blake s to be set in type according to
of
customary methods He later began to experiment with what
he called illuminatedprinting Songs Innocenceand of
of
Experience is an example
of this typeofprinting To read a Blake
poem without
the pictures is to miss something important Blake
places wordsand images in a relationship that is sometimes
mutually enlightening and sometimes turbulent and that
relationship is an aspect of the poemas argument
He worked en propheticbooks on which he continued working
until about 1820 The Four Zoas Milton and Jerusalem
In his sixties Blake gave poetry to devote himself
up
to pictorial art In the course
of his life he produced
hundreds paintings and them
of engravings many of
illustrationsfor the work of other poets including a
representation of Chauceris Canterbury pilgrims a superb
set the Book Job anda series
of designs for of of
illustrations
of Dante on which he was still hard at work
when he died At the time his death Blake was
of
little known as an artist and almost entirely unknown
as a poet
 From Songs of Innocence
1789

Narrator Speaker
Heungchild
Ambivalence
Is it a proper noun theChildis
name synonymouswith
or happiness

Doubleness
Jey refersboth
to an emotion
and the infant s name

The mostunusual or striking linguisticfeature of the

poem is its exaggerated repetitiveness of
lexicon
syllabic
count rhyme

Indeterminacy ambivalence or even ambiguity of

is a central concern
meaning of thepoem conveyedthrough
the repetition above all of the word
joy
The reader is left with unanswered questions what
does mean does it mean at all is the poem
joy joy
about what is the purpose so much
really joy of
repetition
There's definitely a realm outside the poem a realm
which materialises in a refracted self image the companion
work
Infant Sorrow
 Now it s not a Sonyof
Innocencebut a Sony of
Experience
Songs ofInnocenceandExperience
1794
the ambiguity the
It is
of
the
precedingInfantJey
contrast sorrow co exists
and also
alongside
joy
opposes it

This complex paradox is already contained in the tense

the title
oxymoron of
It is ourperception of the worldand thatofthesearound us
that makes the world safe or dangerous innocent or cruel
Here the infantreceives and absorbs the perspectives its parents
of
fromwhich it has little chanceofescaping The child is bound
like Prometheus but it doesnt have the energy or even the
motivation to break its bands through imagination
The
firstquatrain and halfof the second include words full
such groaned leapt piping struggling and
ofenergy as

striving while the last couplet gives

up in defeat with
the words Bound weary and sulked
 THE TYGER
Parallel to the poem The Lamb a symbol innocentmankind
of
What kind Godcreated such creature
of
 µ
FORMANDSTRUCTURE
6 quatrains in rhyming couplets
Trochaia tetrameter stressed unstressed
Series rhetorical questions unansweredquestions
of
complexity of nature
Themetaphoricaltyger
A her and a chain Those
of a blacksmith
rhyme
Is the tygerequivalent to Frankenstein s monster A
creation that threatens to destroy its maker

Is the lamb JesusChrist

Bothcreated God
by
And the Tyger humankind