Romantic midterm - summaries, themes, etc

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - The Little Black Boy - summary

A black boy compares himself to a white English boy, and at first finds himself wanting. He claims his soul is as white as the English boy's, but also sees himself as "black as if bereav'd of light." He then remembers that his loving mother taught him that his black skin is a result of constant exposure to the sun. The mother explains the sun as God's gift to mankind, sharing both His light and his heat, both of which are forms of His love. His color, she explains, is a temporary "cloud" to be borne until he can fully learn to dwell in the presence of God's love. The speaker ends by saying he will tell the English boy this truth and look forward to the day when both of them have put off this cloud and can love one another truly.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - Infant Joy - SUMMARY

Another simple song celebrating happiness, this poem focuses on the gift of life in a newborn baby. Only two days old, the baby is asked, presumably by its mother, what name it wants. The baby names itself Joy, for that is all it knows. The mother then happily blesses the baby Joy, with the hope that joy will indeed be its lot in life.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - Ah! Sun-Flower - analysis

The Sunflower more closely represents human aspirations, with its face always looking toward the sun. That it follows the sun's progress from morning to evening shows that human aspirations must eventually end in death, symbolized by night in many of Blake's poems. The youth and virgin both have unfulfilled desires to which they seek satiation in the sunset, suggesting that their longings may be fulfilled in the next life. Blake's voice becomes tonally complex in this poem, conveying the feeling that he is growing tired of feeling pathos for those who will not break free of social conventions and claim their freedoms. The Youth and the "pale Virgin" both deny themselves physical pleasures in the hope that this asceticism will win them "that sweet golden clime." Like the sunflower, however, they long for yet never actually reach this desired destination.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - Holy Thursday - analysis

"Holy Thursday" consists of four quatrains. The first is a heroic quatrain (ABAB) but the remaining three vary. The second stanza strikes discord by having no rhyme (ABCD, although there may be an intended slant rhyme for "joy" and "poverty" in their spelling). The last two follow the ABCB pattern. This irregularity contributes to the poem's tone of decay and confusion as the subject matter, the exploitation and neglect of children, becomes clear to the reader. The "Holy Thursday" of Innocence was open to two contrasting readings. This version is blunt and may only be read as a harsh critique of the religious hypocrisy inherent in the institutions of Blake's day. The "eternal winter" in which the children live suggests that poverty is a state of death in nature, and that the true order of things is not to have children languishing in squalor and hunger. The children lack the sun and life-giving rain of summer and spring, and are thus doomed to this unnatural state by the machinations of a system that remembers them only to justify its own righteousness.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - Holy Thursday - analysis GOS

"Holy Thursday" has three stanzas, each consisting of two rhyming couplets. The singsong quality of the AABB rhyme, usually a sign of innocence in these poems, belies the thinly veiled subtext of the poem regarding the exploitation of the innocent by those who are, ultimately, their moral and spiritual inferiors. As always, Blake favors the innocent children even as he despises the system which enslaves or abuses them. The "wise guardians of the poor," the children's patrons, are seated "beneath them." Even though the gratitude may be forced upon the children, their innocence, which is stated twice outright in the poem, trumps the self-serving nature of the spectacle. Blake closes with the warning to "cherish pity; lest you drive and angel from your door," a statement that seems out of place on the surface. When compared to the Biblical account of the angels' visit to Lot in the city of Sodom, however, the driving away of an angel at the door becomes a more sobering image. Lot, alone of all the denizens of Sodom, offered the angels, who were disguised as travelers, hospitality in a city full of dangers for the unwary visitor. His pity for his guests results in his own family's rescue from the destruction about to strike the wicked city. Similarly, the reader is encouraged to "cherish pity" even in the midst of a sin-stricken and cynical system that would use a parade of poor children as a show of public virtue.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - Holy Thursday - summary

"Holy Thursday" recounts the annual marching of approximately six thousand poor children to St. Paul's Cathedral. These children hailed from the charity schools of the city and were taken to the Cathedral to demonstrate their reverence for God and their gratitude to their benefactors. This ostensibly admiring poem contains hints of irony, however. The beadles seat the children "in companies" as if they were soldiers rather than children. The compulsory note of their praise is implied in this regimented worship.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - Infant Sorrow - analysis

"Infant Sorrow" follows the Innocence rhyme scheme AABB for its two brief stanzas. The first quatrain and half of the second include words full of energy, such as "groaned," "leapt," "piping," "Struggling," and "Striving," while the last couplet gives up in defeat with the words "Bound," "weary," and "sulked." The lively child has given way to a tired, world-weary infant in mere moments.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - London - analysis

"London" follows an ABAB rhyme scheme throughout its three stanzas with little deviation from iambic tetrameter. Only "Mind-forg'd manacles" and "How" and "Blasts" in lines 14-15 are irregularly stressed. "Mind-forg'd" is stressed to further its contrast from the preceding three lines, each of which begins "In every" to create a litany of cries throughout London. Lines 14 and 15 give irregular stress to the two words in order to further disturb the reader, leading up to the oxymoron of the "marriage hearse" in line 16. The poet expresses his disdain for the urban sprawl of post-Industrial Revolution London in terms as harsh as his praise for nature and innocence are pleasant. A society of people so tightly packed into artificial structures breeds evil upon evil, culminating with the "Harlot's curse" that harms both the young and the married. It is as if a system has been created specifically to destroy all that is good in humankind, a theme Blake takes up in his later works. The reader is warned off visiting or dwelling in London, and by implication urged to seek refuge from the world's ills in a more rural setting. Blake's critique is not aimed only at society or the system of the world, however. Only the third stanza directly addresses one group's oppression of another. Instead, much of the poem decries man's self-oppression. One reading of the poem suggests that the Harlot of the last stanza is in fact Nature herself, proclaimed a Harlot by a narrow-minded, patriarchal religious system. In this interpretation, Nature turns the marriage coach into a hearse for all marriage everywhere, because marriage is a limiting human institution that leads to the death of love rather than its fulfillment in natural impulses.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - Nurse's Song - analysis GOS

"Nurse's Song" is four stanzas long, twice the length of its counterpart in Songs of Experience. Each stanza is an ABCB quatrain. Blake often uses the ABCB pattern in Songs of Innocence to reflect the tone of an adult speaker, in contrast to the AABB pattern usually associated with children and pure innocents. The first stanza sets the scene, and the remainder of the poem is structure in a call-and-response format, with the Nurse first calling the children in, then the children responding with their counterargument, and finally the nurse accepting the children's terms and letting them play longer.

William Wordsworth - Ode - analysis

"Ode; Intimations of Immortality" is a long and rather complicated poem about Wordsworth's connection to nature and his struggle to understand humanity's failure to recognize the value of the natural world. The poem is elegiac in that it is about the regret of loss. Wordsworth is saddened by the fact that time has stripped away much of nature's glory, depriving him of the wild spontaneity he exhibited as a child. As seen in "The world is too much with us," Wordsworth believes that the loss stems from being too caught up in material possessions. As we grow up, we spend more and more time trying to figure out how to attain wealth, all the while becoming more and more distanced from nature. The poem is characterized by a strange sense of duality. Even though the world around the speaker is beautiful, peaceful, and serene, he is sad and angry because of what he (and humanity) has lost. Because nature is a kind of religion to Wordsworth, he knows that it is wrong to be depressed in nature's midst and pulls himself out of his depression for as long as he can. In the seventh stanza especially, Wordsworth examines the transitory state of childhood. He is pained to see a child's close proximity to nature being replaced by a foolish acting game in which the child pretends to be an adult before he actually is. Instead, Wordsworth wants the child to hold onto the glory of nature that only a person in the flush of youth can appreciate. In the ninth, tenth and eleventh stanzas Wordsworth manages to reconcile the emotions and questions he has explored throughout the poem. He realizes that even though he has lost his awareness of the glory of nature, he had it once, and can still remember it. The memory of nature's glory will have to be enough to sustain him, and he ultimately decides that it is. Anything that we have, for however short a time, can never be taken away completely, because it will forever be held in our memory.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - The Divine Image - analysis

"The Divine Image" is a five-stanza poem of mostly ABCB quatrains. The exceptions to this rhyme scheme are stanza 2, in which "Love" is rhymed with itself; and stanza 4, where "clime" and "divine," a word repeated from stanza 3, rhyme. Even the change in pattern to ABAB, the heroic stanza, complements the overall structure of the poem, as each variation is between two "normal" stanzas. Blake also alludes to his message of "The Divine Image" in "The Little Black Boy" in the final stanza, where he states that "All must love the human form,/In heathen, turk, or jew." Human beings possess the image of the invisible God because we are created in that image; this divine image is accentuated "where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell" because "there God is dwelling too."

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - The Ecchoing Green - analysis - GRAIN OF SALT

"The Ecchoing Green" consists of three ten-line stanzas, each in turn composed of five rhyming couplets. The first stanza focuses on the children playing in the morning; the second stanza shifts to the older people recalling their own youthful pleasures and is possibly set in the afternoon; and the third takes place at evening, as the weary children begin their tired journey home. "The Ecchoing Green" is a joyful poem celebrating spring. The green fields, chirping birds, and playing children remind the elderly observers of their own youth and bring them joy as well. That the field is "Ecchoing" indicates that this scene, like the season of spring itself, has played out before and will play out again and again in the future. In the second stanza, time has progressed. The older people remember their youth, as these children will someday be reminded of it by their own descendants. Spring is still here, but it is a spring remembered, not the vibrant, impassioned spring of the children in the first stanza. Already the flowers fade and the possibility of endings, and eventually of death, is present. Nonetheless, the old people "laugh at [the children's] play," suggesting a pleasure taken by the more mature in the sheer innocent joy of youth. Similarly, the tone of the stanza is not intended to be sorrowful, but inspiring. That the older people are still around is a testimony to the persistence of life; the oak of the second stanza stands in the green as a symbol of strength and security to accentuate this feeling. A hint of melancholy affects the poem in the last stanza, where the "Ecchoing" green becomes the "darkening" green. Spring will always come, and with it all the joys and vitality of the season, but it always eventually ends, giving way to the cold and gloom of autumn and winter. Similarly, there will always be young people to celebrate their joy in this world, but every young child eventually matures into an adult like "Old John," who must content himself with secondhand or remembered joy while others dance the dance of life.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Garden of Love - analysis

"The Garden of Love" is a deceptively simple three-stanza poem made up of quatrains. The first two quatrains follow Blake's typical ABCB rhyme scheme, with the final stanza breaking the rhyme to ABCD. The lack of rhyme in the last stanza, which also contains the longest lines, serves to emphasize the death and decay that have overtaken a place that once used to hold such life and beauty for the speaker. Following the specific examples of flowers representing types of love, this poem paints a broader picture of flowers in a garden as the joys and desires of youth. When the speaker returns to the Garden of Love, he finds a chapel built there with the words, "Thou shalt not," written overhead. The implication is that organized religion is intentionally forbidding people from enjoying their natural desires and pleasures. The speaker also finds the garden given over to the graves of his pleasures while a black-clad priest binds his "joys and desires" in thorns. This not-so-subtle critique shows Blake's frustration at a religious system that would deny men the pleasures of nature and their own instinctive desires. He sees religion as an arm of modern society in general, with its demand that human beings reject their created selves to conform to a more mechanistic and materialistic world.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Human Abstract - analysis

"The Human Abstract" keeps to an AABB couplet rhyme scheme throughout, invoking the childhood rhyming of Innocence. The first two stanzas are didactic, offering simple lessons in the unfortunate roots of human virtue. The third stanza begins a narrative starring "He" (a sort of Everyman), whose first act is to sit down and cry. The fourth stanza breaks the strict AABB rhyme pattern, with "shade" and "head" only barely rhyming while "Fly" and "Mystery" only rhyme if read similarly to "eye" and "Symmetry" from "The Tyger." This discord focuses the reader on the "Mystery," which is the only capitalized noun to be repeated in the poem, here even in the same stanza. This Mystery probably referrs to the "mystery religion" aspect of Christianity and in particular to the problem of suffering, and it hangs over the head of the crying man, but is itself devoured by the caterpillar and fly, which are agents of decay and death in Blake's poetry. The fifth stanza returns to the AABB rhyme scheme to finish the narrative, then the sixth stanza ends with a moralizing couplet: the search for the "Tree" of knowledge is found within the human mind. An unnamed "he" grows humility only by watering the ground with tears borne of "holy fears." This tree is the Mystery of Religion, and it grows quite tall and strong until "the Caterpillar and the Fly" eat at it. These two destroyers represent the clergy, a class often the subject of Blake's criticism and scorn for their abuse of religious authority to their own selfish benefit and the harm of others. Once infested, the Mystery Tree bears fruit "of Deceit" and becomes the dwelling place of the raven, a harbinger of death. Blake claims that "The Gods of the earth and sea" sought to find this tree, or create religious experience through nature, but their efforts were in vain: this tree grows "in the human brain." As Bloom notes, the final two stanzas rely upon imagery found in Norse mythology. Odin hanged himself upon the world-tree Yggdrasil in order to gain knowledge of the runes. The fruit of Deceit is therefore not only an allusion to the tempting fruit in the Garden of Eden, but also the runes as a means of discerning the mystery of nature. The "Raven" is not only a death-related image, but also a symbol of Odin. The final stanza includes the gods' search throughout Nature to find "this Tree," a reference to the Norse gods' search for the mistletoe that killed one of their own, Balder. Their search, however, is in vain, since the murderous element is not part of Nature, but is inherent in the human mind.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - The Little Black Boy - analysis

"The Little Black Boy" consists of seven heroic stanzas, which are quatrains following the ABAB rhyme scheme. The first two stanzas describe the boy's mother and the influence she has had on his life. The third, fourth, and fifth stanzas recall the mother's exact words in her lessons to her son. The final two stanzas describe how the black boy communicates his lesson to the white English boy for whom he has a great affection. Stanzas one and two describe the past; stanzas three, four, and five recall the mother's words as if they were being spoken in the present; the sixth and seventh stanzas include the black boy's words, which he "will say" to the English boy in the future. Thus, the poem itself progresses in time from a past (learning), to the present (the lesson itself) and to the future (the implementation or practical outworking of the lesson). Hints of anti-slavery sentiment and an opposition to racism occur in this poem, but they are not the main message. The equality of human beings is, however, emphasized by the poem in its depiction of God creating the world as an act of divine mercy, giving the sun to shine upon and warm all people everywhere as a preparation for the light and heat of His love. The black boy at first sees his blackness negatively, since he seems to be at odds with his own soul, while the English boy is white on both the inside and the outside. The boy's mother sets him straight, however; the outward appearance is but "a cloud" to dim the sun's light and heat until each person is ready to endure it directly. The black boy accepts this explanation, and even envisions himself as having come through the world's testing stronger than the white English boy; he strokes the boy's hair as a mother would her child. While the two boys will one day be equal in love, the poem suggests that the black boy's trials in this life will result in his being spiritually superior to the untried white boy. No matter their relative positions in this life or the next, the theme of equality of men before God is strongly prevalent in this poem. The black boy and his mother have voices whereas the white English boy is silent, and both black and white will one day be recognized as pure souls before God. This concept of a future society, usually a heavenly one, in which inequities are resolved is a recurring one in Blake's Songs of Innocence, most notably in the later "The Chimney Sweeper." In this instance, Blake is not criticizing a mentality that offers platitudes to control the oppressed. Instead, he claims that the very life the boy leads is part of his future perfection.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - A Poison Tree - analysis

"The Poison Tree" consists of four sets of rhyming couplets. Each stanza continues into the next, giving the poem a hurried, almost furtive tone that matches the secretive deeds done in darkness of the poem's content. The obvious moral of this poem is that hidden wrath becomes more dangerous behind the deceit that hides it from its object. Possibly, the "Friend" mentioned in the first stanza is a friend simply because the speaker respects him enough to voice his anger face to face, whereas the "enemy" may be a potential friend who remains an enemy because the speaker keeps his wrath secret and nurtures it. There is a touch of irony, however, in that the poem ends with the speaker's gladness over his foe's death by poison. No final line refutes the secret nurturing of wrath, and in fact, the poem may be read as a guide for taking vengeance upon one's enemies. Some critics suggest that the apple symbolizes Blake's creative work, which another of his contemporaries may have stolen and used as his own. If so, it appears the theft of Blake's intellectual property ended badly for the thief (or at least Blake hopes it will).

William Wordsworth - The world is too much with us

"The world is too much with us" is a sonnet with an abbaabbacdcdcd rhyme scheme. The poem is written from a place of angst and frustration. All around him, Wordsworth sees people who are obsessed with money and with manmade objects. These people are losing their powers of divinity, and can no longer identify with the natural world. This idea is encapsulated in the famous lines: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; / Little we see in Nature that is ours." Wordsworth believes that we have given our hearts (the center of ourselves) away in exchange for money and material wealth. He is disgusted at this especially because nature is so readily available; it almost calls to humanity. In the end, Wordsworth decides that he would rather be a pagan in a complete state of disillusionment than be out of touch with nature. The final image of the poem is of Wordsworth standing on a lea (or a tract of open land) overlooking the ocean where he sees Proteus and Triton. He is happy, but this happiness is not what the reader is meant to feel. In actuality, the reader should feel saddened by the scene, because Wordsworth has given up on humanity, choosing instead to slip out of reality.

William Wordsworth - We Are Seven - analysis

"We Are Seven" was written in 1798, when Wordsworth was 28 years old. The poem is composed of sixteen four-line stanzas, and ends with one five-line stanza. Each stanza has an abab rhyming pattern. Wordsworth has noted that he wrote the last line of this poem first, and that his good friend Samuel Coleridge wrote the first few stanzas. The poem is an interesting conversation between a man and a young girl. It is especially intriguing because the conversation could have been less than five lines, and yet it is 69 lines long. The reason for this is that the man cannot accept that the young girl still feels she is one of seven siblings even after two of her siblings have died, and even though she now lives at home alone with her mother. The speaker begins the poem with the question of what a child should know of death. Near the beginning it seems as if the little girl understands very little. She seems almost to be in denial about the deaths of her siblings, especially because she continues to spend time with them and sing to them. By the end of the poem, however, the reader is left with the feeling that perhaps the little girl understands more about life and death than the man to whom she is speaking. She refuses to become incapacitated by grief, or to cast the deceased out of her life. Instead she accepts that things change, and continues living as happily as she can.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Frost at Midnight - summary

As the frost "performs its secret ministry" in the windless night, an owlet's cry twice pierces the silence. The "inmates" of the speaker's cottage are all asleep, and the speaker sits alone, solitary except for the "cradled infant" sleeping by his side. The calm is so total that the silence becomes distracting, and all the world of "sea, hill, and wood, / This populous village!" seems "inaudible as dreams." The thin blue flame of the fire burns without flickering; only the film on the grate flutters, which makes it seem "companionable" to the speaker, almost alive—stirred by "the idling Spirit." "But O!" the speaker declares; as a child he often watched "that fluttering stranger" on the bars of his school window and daydreamed about his birthplace and the church tower whose bells rang so sweetly on Fair-day. These things lured him to sleep in his childhood, and he brooded on them at school, only pretending to look at his books—unless, of course, the door opened, in which case he looked up eagerly, hoping to see "Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, / My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!" Addressing the "Dear Babe, that sleep[s] cradled" by his side, whose breath fills the silences in his thought, the speaker says that it thrills his heart to look at his beautiful child. He enjoys the thought that although he himself was raised in the "great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim," his child will wander in the rural countryside, by lakes and shores and mountains, and his spirit shall be molded by God, who will "by giving make it [the child] ask." All seasons, the speaker proclaims, shall be sweet to his child, whether the summer makes the earth green or the robin redbreast sings between tufts of snow on the branch; whether the storm makes "the eave-drops fall" or the frost's "secret ministry" hangs icicles silently, "quietly shining to the quiet Moon."

William Blake - Songs of Experience - London - summary

Blake's London is a dismal place, populated by crying infants, poor chimney sweepers, violent soldiers, and brazen prostitutes. Here the prophetic voice of the Bard returns to decry the existence of such a place. Everywhere he sees "Marks of weakness, marks of woe." Like and Amos or Jonah of old, the Bard calls London to repent of its wickedness, its oppression of the poor, and its cultivation of vice, or be destroyed.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Sick Rose - summary

Critic Harold Bloom refers to this short poem as "one of Blake's gnomic triumphs." The speaker addresses a rose, which he claims is sick because an "invisible worm" has "found out thy bed/Of crimson joy." The rose symbolizes earthly, as opposed to spiritual, love, which becomes ill when infected with the materialism of the world. The rose's bed of "crimson joy" may also be a sexual image, with the admittedly phallic worm representing either lust or jealousy. The worm has a "dark secret love" that destroys the rose's life, suggesting something sinful or unmentionable.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - The Lamb - analysis GOS

Each stanza of "The Lamb" has five couplets, typifying the AABB rhyme scheme common to Blake's Innocence poems. By keeping the rhymes simple and close-knit, Blake conveys the tone of childlike wonder and the singsong voice of innocent boys and girls. The soft vowel sounds and repetition of the "l" sound may also convey the soft bleating of a lamb. One of Blake's most strongly religious poems, "The Lamb" takes the pastoral life of the lamb and fuses it with the Biblical symbolism of Jesus Christ as the "Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." By using poetic rhetorical questions, the speaker, who is probably childlike rather than actually a child, creates a sort of lyric catechism in which the existence of both a young boy and a tender lamb stand as proof of a loving, compassionate Creator. The lamb stands in relation to the boy as the boy stands in relation to his elders; each must learn the truth of his existence by questioning the origin of his life and inferring a Creator who possesses the same characteristics of gentleness, innocence, and loving kindness as both the lamb and the child. Then the direct revelation of the Scripture comes into play. The Creator, here identified specifically as Jesus Christ by his title of "Lamb of God," displays these characteristics in his design of the natural and human world, and in His offer of salvation to all (hence the child is also "called by his name") through his incarnation ("he became a little child") and presumably his death and resurrection.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - Introduction - summary

Following poetic convention, Blake sets the scene for his collection in this first poem. He envisions himself as a shepherd "Piping down the valleys wild," who encounters a child "On a cloud" (line 3) who encourages him to play a song "about a Lamb." After hearing the music, the child asks the shepherd to drop his pipe and sing the words to the song. After enjoying the lyrics, the child tells the shepherd to "write/In a book that all may read" the songs he has created. So he sits down, makes a pen from the materials at hand, and begins to write "my happy songs,/Every child may joy to hear."

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - The Divine Image - summary

Here Blake expresses his belief in the divinity of human nature. Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are divine attributes to which man may attain. Therefore, if a man perfects any or all of these virtues, he is in that regard divine. Blake echoes his statement in "The Lamb" that Christ the Lamb "became a little child." Here, Love has a "human form divine," and Pity wears "a human face," while "Mercy has a human heart" and "Peace, the human dress." Just as Christ in his divinity became human, so humans, insofar as they possess these holy attributes, are divine.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - This Lime Tree Bower My Prison - summary

In prose, the speaker explains how he suffered an injury that prevented him from walking with his friends who had come to visit. Then, in verse, he compares the nice garden of lime-trees where he is sitting to a prison. He is disappointed about all the beautiful things he could have seen on the walk. He imagines these sights in detail by putting himself in the shoes of his friends. They walk through a dark forest and past a dramatic waterfall. They emerge from the forest to see the open sky and the ocean in the distance. He thinks that his friend Charles is the happiest to see these sights because he was been trapped in the city for so long and suffered such hardship in his life. The speaker instructs nature to put on a good show so that Charles can see the true spirit of God. The speaker suddenly feels as happy as if he were seeing the things he just described. This lime-tree bower isn't so bad, he thinks. It has its own beautiful sights, and people who have an appreciation for nature can find natural wonders everywhere. Sometimes it is better to be deprived of a good so that the imagination can make up for the lost happiness. The speaker tells Charles that he has blessed a bird called a "rook" that flew overhead. He imagines that Charles will see the bird and that it will carry a "charm" for him.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - Holy Thursday - summary

In the corresponding poem from Songs of Innocence, Blake subtly critiques the treatment of poor children by English society. Here, he is more direct, questioning the holiness of a day that essentially celebrates the existence of poverty. England is a "rich and fruitful land" but her children are "reduced to misery,/Fed with cold and usurious hand." Despite the outward praise that the poor children offer at the Holy Thursday spectacle, their country is "a land of poverty!" England is doomed to be "bleak & bare" in an "eternal winter" so long as poverty exists within her borders. In contrast, Blake points to lands where "the sun does shine" because there a child "can never hunger...Nor poverty the mind appall."

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Tyger - summary

In this counterpart poem to "The Lamb" in Songs of Innocence, Blake offers another view of God through His creation. Whereas the lamb implied God's tenderness and mercy, the tiger suggests His ferocity and power. The speaker again asks questions of the subject: "What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" The questions continue throughout the poem, with the answers implied in the final question that is not a repetition of an earlier question: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" The same God who made the gentle, obedient lamb also made the frightening, powerful, and bloody-minded tiger, and whereas the lamb was simply "made," the tiger is forged: "What the hammer? what the chain?/ In what furnace was thy brain?"

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Sick Rose - analysis

Nature brings this sickness to the worm with "the howling storm." Although the speaker decries the rose's sickness in the first line, the rest of the poem subtly suggests that the rose is not innocent of her own destruction. The worm has incidentally "found out" the rose's bed, which is "crimson joy" even prior to the worm's arrival. The red of passion and of the vaginal "crimson bed" image counterpart to the worm's phallic one suggests that the rose has already been experiencing some kind of lustful passion. In keeping with much of the Songs of Experience, this poem is brief, with two stanzas, and deviates from the Innocence rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD. Here the rhyme scheme, ABCB DEFE, introduces a note of discord in keeping with the ill effects of the "secret love" which the rose hides, much to its detriment. "Worm" and "storm" are rhymed, connecting the agent of destruction with a force of nature. In the second stanza, "joy" and "destroy" are connected, linking what should be a positive experience to the decaying disease that the rose has contracted.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - Introduction - analysis

The "Introduction" is a four-stanza poem, with each stanza made up of an ABAAB rhyme scheme. The rhyme is slightly more complex than the "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence, indicating the increased sophistication the reader may expect from the Songs of Experience. The first two stanzas urge the reader to hear the voice of the "Bard," while the second two are directed at the Earth herself, calling her to return to her prior state of primordial bliss to better hear and heed the Bard/Prophet's words. Also unlike the shepherd of Songs of Innocence, this bard is a prophet intent on calling fallen man to reclaim the world he lost to the "starry pole" of Reason. Man needs to return to his imagination and awaken from his slumber of materialism. However, the Bard's call must often go unheeded, simply because it is impossible for his audience (in some cases Earth, in others fallen human beings) to pull themselves up out of their spiritually diseased state. While recognizing the preeminence of God and the singular potency of His will to redeem a fallen world, the Bard unfortunately slips into the error of addressing others as if they could be self-redeemed and have a choice in the matter. The Bard's voice differs from Blake's own in this way: when Blake "sings" in such poems as "Holy Thursday" and "London," he recognizes the depravity of man and nature, and the inability of both to purify themselves without divine intervention.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - Infant Sorrow - summary

The companion poem to "Infant Joy," this brief piece focuses on the pain and tribulation accompanying childbirth, but from the infant's perspective. He finds himself "helpless" and "naked," but also describes himself as a "fiend hid in a cloud," suggesting future harms he may perpetrate. To the infant fresh from the safety of his mother's womb, there is no comfort in the father's arms, so he settles for sulking at his mother's breast.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Fly - summary

The speaker draws a comparison between himself and a fly that he has thoughtlessly brushed away. He asks if he is like the fly, or the fly is more like himself. He imagines another, greater hand, perhaps that of God, brushing him away some day and ending his private designs. He concludes with the belief that he is indeed like the fly, not in his insignificance to Fate or chance, but in the fly's significance in the natural world. Just as the fly dances and sings, so does the speaker. Thought is what gives him life and breath, and "the want/Of thought is death." He takes joy simply in existing, with little thought or worry over what tomorrow may hold.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Frost at Midnight - "commentary"

The speaker of "Frost at Midnight" is generally held to be Coleridge himself, and the poem is a quiet, very personal restatement of the abiding themes of early English Romanticism: the effect of nature on the imagination (nature is the Teacher that "by giving" to the child's spirit also makes it "ask"); the relationship between children and the natural world ("thou, my babe! shall wander like a breeze..."); the contrast between this liberating country setting and city ("I was reared / In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim"); and the relationship between adulthood and childhood as they are linked in adult memory. However, while the poem conforms to many of the guiding principles of Romanticism, it also highlights a key difference between Coleridge and his fellow Romantics, specifically Wordsworth. Wordsworth, raised in the rustic countryside, saw his own childhood as a time when his connection with the natural world was at its greatest; he revisited his memories of childhood in order to soothe his feelings and provoke his imagination. Coleridge, on the other hand, was raised in London, "pent 'mid cloisters dim," and questions Wordsworth's easy identification of childhood with a kind of automatic, original happiness; instead, in this poem he says that, as a child, he "saw naught lovely but the stars and sky" and seems to feel the lingering effects of that alienation. In this poem, we see how the pain of this alienation has strengthened Coleridge's wish that his child enjoy an idyllic Wordsworthian upbringing "by lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds..." Rather than seeing the link between childhood and nature as an inevitable, Coleridge seems to perceive it as a fragile, precious, and extraordinary connection, one of which he himself was deprived. In expressing its central themes, "Frost at Midnight" relies on a highly personal idiom whereby the reader follows the natural progression of the speaker's mind as he sits up late one winter night thinking. His idle observation gives the reader a quick impression of the scene, from the "silent ministry" of the frost to the cry of the owl and the sleeping child. Coleridge uses language that indicates the immediacy of the scene to draw in the reader; for instance, the speaker cries "Hark!" upon hearing the owl, as though he were surprised by its call. The objects surrounding the speaker become metaphors for the work of the mind and the imagination, so that the fluttering film on the fire grate plunges him into the recollection of his childhood. His memory of feeling trapped in the schoolhouse naturally brings him back into his immediate surroundings with a surge of love and sympathy for his son. His final meditation on his son's future becomes mingled with his Romantic interpretation of nature and its role in the child's imagination, and his consideration of the objects of nature brings him back to the frost and the icicles, which, forming and shining in silence, mirror the silent way in which the world works upon the mind; this revisitation of winter's frosty forms brings the poem full circle.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Clod and the Pebble - analysis

The love that has been bound by Reason, and which must be renewed in order to free Earth from her chains, is thus examined to ask if men love selflessly or selfishly. The difference in perspective aligns with the "experiences" of the two inanimate speakers. The clod has been "Trodden with the cattle's feet," so that it is malleable, but also easily shaped to the will of others. The pebble has been hardened by its time in the brook and therefore offers resistance to any who would seek to use it for their own ends. By contrast, the clod is somewhat mobile, whereas the pebble must remain at rest in its place on the bottom of the brook. Blake uses his ironic voice of experience to point out that love, if done according to the edicts of Reason, creates a Hell on earth, whereas selfless love—love from the heart and the ever-adapting Imagination—can make a Heaven out of the Hell surrounding mankind. Nonetheless, the poem does not allow the reader to side completely with the Clod and its view of love. Both clod and pebble experience loss; the Pebble rejoices in the loss of others, while the Clod rejoices in its own loss of ease. Even the Clod's Heaven is built on the despair of Hell, thus "taking" from another in order to increase. In the "Experienced" mind, exploitation of others is a requirement for progress of any sort. Structurally, the poem appears at first to be two balanced syllogisms of the respective viewpoints. The word "but" in line 6 is the turning point from the Clod's argument to that of the Pebble. The former argument is one of Innocence, while the second shifts to Experience. That Blake chooses to end the debate with the Pebble's argument lends to this poem an interpretation that favors the Pebble's hardened point of view regarding love. However, the balancing lines "And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair" (line 4) and "And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite" (line 12) force the reader to see the two views as balanced and to reach his own conclusions based on personal experience.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - Nurse's Song - summary

The nurse of the title listens as the children under her care play on the green hills. As the day ends, she urges them to come home, but the children plead that the sun has not yet set and they "cannot go to sleep." They argue by analogy that "the little birds fly/And the hills are all covered with sheep," and if nature has not put her children to bed, why should the nurse require that her charges go to sleep? She is the one who introduces the argument from nature by claiming the darkening sky as a sign that bedtime drew near, after all. The nurse accedes to their request and the children laugh and play until dark. The last line, "And all the hills ecchoed," implies that just as the children have expressed their desire to emulate nature and the birds and sheep still wandering about, nature in turn emulates the children in their joyous laughter.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - The Chimney Sweeper - summary

The poem is narrated by a chimney sweeper. He tells us a little bit about himself first before giving us the lowdown on another chimney sweeper, Tom Dacre. After introducing us to Tom, he relates a very strange dream that Tom had one night (it involved chimney sweepers in coffins, angels, flying, and a few other bizarre things). The poem concludes with Tom and the speaker waking up and going to work, sweepin' chimneys. Like they do.

William Wordsworth - The world is too much with us - summary with references to the text

The speaker begins this poem by saying that the world is too full of humans who are losing their connection to divinity and, even more importantly, to nature. Humans, the speaker says, have given their hearts away, and the gift is a morally degraded one: In the second quartet the speaker tells the reader that everything in nature, including the sea and the winds, is gathered up in a powerful connection with which humanity is "out of tune." In other words, humans are not experiencing nature as they should: The speaker ends the poem by saying that he would rather be a pagan attached to a worn-out system of beliefs than be out of tune with nature. At least if he were a pagan he might be able to see things that would make him less unhappy, like the sea gods Proteus and Triton:

William Wordsworth - Ode - summary

The speaker begins by declaring that there was a time when nature seemed mystical to him, like a dream, "Apparelled in celestial light." But now all of that is gone. No matter what he does, "The things which I have seen I now can see no more." In the second stanza the speaker says that even though he can still see the rainbow, the rose, the moon, and the sun, and even though they are still beautiful, something is different...something has been lost: "But yet I know, where'er I go, / That there hath past away a glory from the earth." The speaker is saddened by the birds singing and the lambs jumping in the third stanza. Soon, however, he resolves not to be depressed, because it will only put a damper on the beauty of the season. He declares that all of the earth is happy, and exhorts the shepherd boy to shout. In the fourth stanza the speaker continues to be a part of the joy of the season, saying that it would be wrong to be "sullen / While Earth herself in adorning, / And the Children are culling / On every side, / In a thousand valleys far and wide." However, when he sees a tree, a field, and later a pansy at his feet, they again give him a strong feeling that something is amiss. He asks, "Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" The fifth stanza contains arguably the most famous line of the poem: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." He goes on to say that as infants we have some memory of heaven, but as we grow we lose that connection: "Heaven lies about us in our infancy!" As children this connection with heaven causes us to experience nature's glory more clearly. Once we are grown, the connection is lost. In the sixth stanza, the speaker says that as soon as we get to earth, everything conspires to help us forget the place we came from: heaven. "Forget the glories he hath known, and that imperial palace whence he came." In the seventh stanza the speaker sees (or imagines) a six-year-old boy, and foresees the rest of his life. He says that the child will learn from his experiences, but that he will spend most of his effort on imitation: "And with new joy and pride / The little Actor cons another part." It seems to the speaker that his whole life will essentially be "endless imitation." In the eighth stanza the speaker speaks directly to the child, calling him a philosopher. The speaker cannot understand why the child, who is so close to heaven in his youth, would rush to grow into an adult. He asks him, "Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke / The years to bring the inevitable yoke, / Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?" In the ninth stanza (which is the longest at 38 lines) the speaker experiences a flood of joy when he realizes that through memory he will always be able to connect to his childhood, and through his childhood to nature. In the tenth stanza the speaker harkens back to the beginning of the poem, asking the same creatures that earlier made him sad with their sounds to sing out: "Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!" Even though he admits that he has lost some of the glory of nature as he has grown out of childhood, he is comforted by the knowledge that he can rely on his memory. In the final stanza the speaker says that nature is still the stem of everything is his life, bringing him insight, fueling his memories and his belief that his soul is immortal: "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

William Wordsworth - We Are Seven - summary - including references to the text itself

The speaker begins this poem by asking what a simple child who is full of life could know about death. He then meets "a little cottage Girl" who is eight years old and has thick curly hair. She is rustic and woodsy, but very beautiful, and she makes the speaker happy. He asks her how many siblings she has, to which she replies that there are seven including her: The speaker then asks the child where her brothers and sisters are. She replies "Seven are we," and tells him that two are in a town called Conway, two are at sea, and two lie in the church-yard. She and her mother live near the graves: The speaker is confused and asks her how they can be seven, if two are in Conway and two gone to sea. To this, the little girl simply replies, "Seven boys and girls are we; / Two of us in the churchyard lie, / Beneath the churchyard tree." The speaker says that if two are dead, then there are only five left, but the little girl tells him that their green graves are nearby, and that she often goes to sew or eat supper there while singing to her deceased siblings: The little girl then explains that first her sister Jane died from sickness. She and her brother John would play around her grave until he also died. Now he lies next to Jane: The man again asks how many siblings she has now that two are dead. She replies quickly, "O Master! we are seven." The man tries to convince her saying, "But they are dead," but he realizes that his words are wasted. The poem ends with the little girl saying, "Nay, we are seven!"

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Chimney Sweeper - summary

The speaker sees a child covered in soot, lying alone in the snow. Good start. The child tells him that his parents, who have forced him into chimney sweeping, are praying at a nearby church. The end. >.> This poem parallels its namesake in Songs of Innocence. Where that poem posits a subtle satirical message against the type of religion that brings false comfort to abused children, this version strikes directly at the problem. Like Tom Dacre of the earlier poem, the chimney sweeper is crying. When asked where his parents are, he replies, "They are both gone up to church to pray." The boy goes on to explain that his appearance of happiness has led his parents into believing that they have done no harm in finding him work as a chimney sweep, but the boy knows better. He says they taught him to "wear the clothes of death" and "to sing the notes of woe." In fact, they taught him to do this "Because [he] was happy upon the heath,/And smil'd among the winter's snow." The boy's happiness was in fact an affront to his parents, and his ability to enjoy life despite the deathly cold and deprivation of winter, which may represent poverty, as it does in "Holy Thursday," is the very quality that condemns him to a life of further labor and danger. The boy finishes with the damning statement that his parents "are gone up to praise God & his Priest & King/Who make up a heaven of our misery."

William Blake - Songs of Experience - Introduction - summary

The speaker urges his audience to listen to "the voice of the Bard!" who can see past, present, and future. In contrast to the "Introduction" for Songs of Innocence, this poem introduces a more mature and polished poetic voice in the bard. No rural shepherd converting his heart's songs to words using merely the tools at hand, this poet has heard "the Holy Word/ that walk'd among the ancient trees." This speaker's poetry is characterized by direct revelation rather than by the shepherds' inner melodies, and therefore holds the authority of both divinity and experience. However, despite the Bard's claims to see past, present, and future, he has only heard the Word of God walking and weeping in the Garden of Eden, in the past. The Bard's moment of divine revelation is singular, and does not continue throughout his present or into his future.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Garden of Love - summary

The speaker visits a garden that he had frequented in his youth, only to find it overrun with briars, symbols of death in the form of tombstones, and close-minded clergy.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - The Lamb - summary

The speaker, identifying himself as a child, asks a series of questions of a little lamb, and then answers the questions for the lamb. He asks if the lamb knows who made it, who provides it food to eat, or who gives it warm wool and a pleasant voice. The speaker then tells the lamb that the one who made it is also called "the Lamb" and is the creator of both the lamb and the speaker. He goes on to explain that this Creator is meek and mild, and Himself became a little child. The speaker finishes by blessing the lamb in God's name.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - The Ecchoing Green - summary

The sun rises on a green field where birds sing and children play. As they play, "Old John with white hair" and other elderly observers laugh at their antics and remember a time when they were young, energetic, and playful. Eventually the little ones grow tired and the sun begins to set. The children gather back to their mothers and prepare for a night's rest.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Tyger - analysis

The use of smithing imagery for the creation of the tiger hearkens to Blake's own oft-written contrast between the natural world and the industrialism of the London of his day. While the creator is still God, the means of creation for so dangerous a creature is mechanical rather than natural. Technology may be a benefit to mankind in many ways, but within it still holds deadly potential. In form and content, "The Tyger" also parallels the Biblical book of Job. Job, too, was confronted by the sheer awe and power of God, who asks the suffering man a similar series of rhetorical questions designed to lead Job not to an answer, but to an understanding of the limitations inherent in human wisdom. This limitation is forced into view by the final paradox: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" Can the God of Innocence also be the God of Experience? If so, how can mere mortals, trapped in one state or the other, ever hope to understand this God? "The Tyger" follows an AABB rhyme scheme throughout, but with the somewhat problematic first and last stanzas rhyming "eye" with "symmetry." This jarring near rhyme puts the reader in an uneasy spot from the beginning and returns him to it at the end, thus foreshadowing and concluding the experience of reading "The Tyger" as one of discomfort.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Fly - analysis

This five-stanza poem takes on a playful rhyme scheme and meter, despite its serious and somewhat morbid subject. The first four stanzas are ABCB quatrains, each made up of terse lines to communicate the brevity of life, which is the subject of this poem. The final stanza, however, is an AABB rhyme scheme, a pair of rhyming couplets, which lends an even more playful quality to the poem as a whole while offering a moral or coda to the entire work. This poem also returns to Blake's theme in Songs of Experience of the place of thought in the quality and quantity of human life. The speaker harms the fly with his "thoughtless hand," indicating that thoughtlessness leads to death. Whatever power exists higher than the speaker may also be thoughtless or completely indifferent to human life, but that cannot be changed. The speaker thus resolves to live each moment fully, but his moment of contemplation leads him to this life-affirming conclusion.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - A Poison Tree - summary

This meditation on the nature of wrath offers two ways of dealing with on an offence. When the speaker is angry with his friend, he told the friend of it and his "wrath did end." However, when he was angry with his enemy, he kept the anger hidden, allowing it to grow. His wrath, which is watered "in fears" and sunned 'with smiles, And with soft deceitful wiles," grows into the poison tree of the title. The tree bears "an apple bright" that the speaker's enemy desires; the greedy enemy takes the fruit, even though he knows it belongs to the speaker, and eats it. The next morning the speaker is glad to see his "foe outstretch'd beneath the tree."

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - Introduction - analysis - take with grain of salt

This poem consists of five quatrains, some of which follow the heroic stanza form. The rhyme scheme of the "Introduction" varies depending upon the stanza. Stanzas 1 and 4 follow the traditional ABAB pattern, while stanzas 2, 3, and 5 use an ABCB pattern. The first and fourth stanzas begin with "Piping" and the noun form "Piper," juxtaposing the musical nature of the speaker with the most musical rhymes of the poem. The poet sees a child in the sky, upon a cloud. This child is both an embodiment of innocence, as he is young, and the inspiration behind poetry, as he charges the shepherd to play, sing, and write. That the child charges the shepherd to play the song specifically about "a Lamb" indicates one of the major foci of Blake's work, the portrayal of Jesus as the innocent, spotless Lamb of Christianity. Ostensibly, the intended audience for this collection is also innocent, as the poet writes, "Every child may joy to hear." It is not only children, however, but also the childlike at heart who will appreciate his works. Using the reed for a pen and stained water for the ink connects even the act of creation to nature. The easily acceptable tools provided by the natural world serve to emphasize both the spontaneity of the works that follow and their place as responses to the bounty and beauty of nature. His subject matter will (allegedly) be "happy cheer" throughout, although several poems of the Songs of Innocence belie this suggestion. The shepherd's progression from piping, to singing, and finally to writing parallels the poet's own progression from inspiration, the music, to the initial composition of the poem, the lyrics, and finally the creative act of putting the words on paper. The poem wishes "that all may read," a phrasing which suggests the superiority of the written word over the recited word in the former's ability to reach a wider audience and to exist apart from the author. Blake's own vocations as printer and engraver are therefore vindicated over that of the performer.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan - summary

This poem describes Xanadu, the palace of Kubla Khan, a Mongol emperor and the grandson of Genghis Khan. The poem's speaker starts by describing the setting of Emperor's palace, which he calls a "pleasure dome." He tells us about a river that runs across the land and then flows through some underground caves and into the sea. He also tells us about the fertile land that surrounds the palace. The nearby area is covered in streams, sweet-smelling trees, and beautiful forests. Then the speaker gets excited about the river again and tells us about the canyon through which it flows. He makes it into a spooky, haunted place, where you might find a "woman wailing for her demon lover." He describes how the river leaps and smashes through the canyon, first exploding up into a noisy fountain and then finally sinking down and flowing through those underground caves into the ocean far away. The speaker then goes on to describe Kubla Khan himself, who is listening to this noisy river and thinking about war. All of a sudden, the speaker moves away from this landscape and tells us about another vision he had, where he saw a woman playing an instrument and singing. The memory of her song fills him with longing, and he imagines himself singing his own song, using it to create a vision of Xanadu. Toward the end, the poem becomes more personal and mysterious, as the speaker describes past visions he has had. This brings him to a final image of a terrifying figure with flashing eyes. This person, Kubla Khan, is a powerful being who seems almost godlike: "For he on honey-dew hath fed/And drunk the milk of paradise" (53-54).

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Human Abstract - summary

This poem stands in contrast to "The Divine Image" of the Songs of Innocence, and in fact, Blake's original title for it was "The Human Image." In it, Blake argues that human reason and abstract thinking lead to harm, because the virtues they extol require the existence of suffering. Pity presupposes poverty, while mercy assumes the existence of sorrow. He then continues with a litany of false virtues that arise from sin or vice: peace comes from mutual fear, love increases by selfishness, and care is the bait used by cruelty.

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Clod and the Pebble - summary

This poem takes up the refrain of love from the last line of "Earth's Answer" and explicates two views on the nature of love. The "Clod of Clay" sees love as selfless and giving, building "a Heaven in Hells despair." The hard "Pebble of the brook," however, sees love as seeking "only Self to please" in order to eventually build "a Hell in Heavens despite."

William Blake - Songs of Experience - Ah! Sun-Flower - summary

This simple poem echoes the form of "My Pretty Rose-Tree," and it was published on the same page as that poem in Blake's own edition of Songs of Experience. It consists entirely of a meditation upon the sunflower's wish to follow the sun toward the west, much as real sunflowers turn their blooms toward the sun as it progresses across the sky. The sunflower longs for another place, a "golden clime" where travelers find their rest. The second stanza reiterates and develops this longing, concluding with the statement that this place the sunflower longs for is also aspired to by a pining Youth and a Virgin, each of whom rises from his/her grave to long for this land of rest.

William Blake - Songs of Innocence - Infant Joy - analysis GOS

This simple poem is two stanzas of six lines each. The two stanzas each follow an ABCDDC rhyme scheme, a contrast to most of Blake's other poetic patterns. The rhyming words are always framed by the repetition of "thee" at the end of the fourth and sixth lines, drawing the reader's attention to the parent, who speaks, and his or her concern with the baby. The infant's words, or those imagined by the parent to be spoken by the infant, are set off with dashes at the end of each line, turning this short poem into a dialogue between parent and child regarding the naming of the baby. That the baby names itself reflects Blake's desire to see the human spirit determine its own state of bliss, rather than to rely upon a form of happiness imposed upon it by social constructs or religious institutions. This baby is the perfect innocent who, when left alone to determine its own nature, find joy rather than guilt or repression within.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere - summary parts 1-4

Three young men are walking together to a wedding, when one of them is detained by a grizzled old sailor. The young Wedding-Guest angrily demands that the Mariner let go of him, and the Mariner obeys. But the young man is transfixed by the ancient Mariner's "glittering eye" and can do nothing but sit on a stone and listen to his strange tale. The Mariner says that he sailed on a ship out of his native harbor—"below the kirk, below the hill, / Below the lighthouse top"—and into a sunny and cheerful sea. Hearing bassoon music drifting from the direction of the wedding, the Wedding-Guest imagines that the bride has entered the hall, but he is still helpless to tear himself from the Mariner's story. The Mariner recalls that the voyage quickly darkened, as a giant storm rose up in the sea and chased the ship southward. Quickly, the ship came to a frigid land "of mist and snow," where "ice, mast-high, came floating by"; the ship was hemmed inside this maze of ice. But then the sailors encountered an Albatross, a great sea bird. As it flew around the ship, the ice cracked and split, and a wind from the south propelled the ship out of the frigid regions, into a foggy stretch of water. The Albatross followed behind it, a symbol of good luck to the sailors. A pained look crosses the Mariner's face, and the Wedding-Guest asks him, "Why look'st thou so?" The Mariner confesses that he shot and killed the Albatross with his crossbow. At first, the other sailors were furious with the Mariner for having killed the bird that made the breezes blow. But when the fog lifted soon afterward, the sailors decided that the bird had actually brought not the breezes but the fog; they now congratulated the Mariner on his deed. The wind pushed the ship into a silent sea where the sailors were quickly stranded; the winds died down, and the ship was "As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean." The ocean thickened, and the men had no water to drink; as if the sea were rotting, slimy creatures crawled out of it and walked across the surface. At night, the water burned green, blue, and white with death fire. Some of the sailors dreamed that a spirit, nine fathoms deep, followed them beneath the ship from the land of mist and snow. The sailors blamed the Mariner for their plight and hung the corpse of the Albatross around his neck like a cross. A weary time passed; the sailors became so parched, their mouths so dry, that they were unable to speak. But one day, gazing westward, the Mariner saw a tiny speck on the horizon. It resolved into a ship, moving toward them. Too dry-mouthed to speak out and inform the other sailors, the Mariner bit down on his arm; sucking the blood, he was able to moisten his tongue enough to cry out, "A sail! a sail!" The sailors smiled, believing they were saved. But as the ship neared, they saw that it was a ghostly, skeletal hull of a ship and that its crew included two figures: Death and the Night-mare Life-in-Death, who takes the form of a pale woman with golden locks and red lips, and "thicks man's blood with cold." Death and Life-in-Death began to throw dice, and the woman won, whereupon she whistled three times, causing the sun to sink to the horizon, the stars to instantly emerge. As the moon rose, chased by a single star, the sailors dropped dead one by one—all except the Mariner, whom each sailor cursed "with his eye" before dying. The souls of the dead men leapt from their bodies and rushed by the Mariner. The Wedding-Guest declares that he fears the Mariner, with his glittering eye and his skinny hand. The Mariner reassures the Wedding-Guest that there is no need for dread; he was not among the men who died, and he is a living man, not a ghost. Alone on the ship, surrounded by two hundred corpses, the Mariner was surrounded by the slimy sea and the slimy creatures that crawled across its surface. He tried to pray but was deterred by a "wicked whisper" that made his heart "as dry as dust." He closed his eyes, unable to bear the sight of the dead men, each of who glared at him with the malice of their final curse. For seven days and seven nights the Mariner endured the sight, and yet he was unable to die. At last the moon rose, casting the great shadow of the ship across the waters; where the ship's shadow touched the waters, they burned red. The great water snakes moved through the silvery moonlight, glittering; blue, green, and black, the snakes coiled and swam and became beautiful in the Mariner's eyes. He blessed the beautiful creatures in his heart; at that moment, he found himself able to pray, and the corpse of the Albatross fell from his neck, sinking "like lead into the sea."

William Blake - Songs of Experience - The Chimney Sweeper - analysis

When compared structurally to the companion piece from Songs of Innocence, it is obvious that this poem is half as long as its counterpart is. In addition, many lines are much shorter by one or two syllables. The voice of the young chimney sweeper is similar to that of Innocence, but he clearly has little time for the questions put to him (hence the shorter lines). This poem starts with the AABB rhyme scheme characteristic of innocence and childhood, but as it delves deeper into the experience of the Chimney Sweeper, it switches to CDCD EFEF for the last two stanzas. The final stanza, in fact, has only a near rhyme between "injury" (line 10) and "misery" (line 12), suggesting an increasing breakdown in the chimney sweeper's world, or the social order in general. The entire system, God included, colludes to build its own vision of paradise upon the labors of children who are unlikely to live to see adulthood. Blake castigates the government (the "King") and religious leaders (God's "Priest") in similar fashion to his two "Holy Thursday" poems, decrying the use of otherwise innocent children to prop up the moral consciences of adults both rich and poor. The use of the phrase "make up a Heaven" carries the double meaning of creating a Heaven and lying about the existence of Heaven, casting even more disparagement in the direction of the Priest and King.

William Wordsworth - The Thorn - analysis - diff source

When first reading this poem, it comes off confusing to a lot of readers. The poem starts out by talking about an aged thorn, overgrown by moss that seems to be clasped around the thorn pulling it to the ground. The author says "poor thorn" in stanza two line 6. The thorn sits on the highest mountain top. By the thorn stands a mossy hill which Wordsworth calls "A beauteous heap." Also by the Thorn and mossy hill is a small muddy pond that never seems to be dry. The author then introduces a new character to the poem named Martha Ray. She often goes to the spot on that mountain top and weeps to herself crying "Oh misery! Oh misery! Oh woe is me! Oh misery!" Wordsworth may be suggesting to us that the beauteous heap is an infants grave because in several parts of the poem (ex. Stanza VI, line 6, Stanza IX, line 5) he describes the hill "like" an infants grave. Going to the spot when the women is there is described as a "dare" in the poem, this could be because she is sad and always weeping or she may be crazy, or because she in depression. A common question might come to mind when reading this poem; Why does the women go to the top of this mountain and weep? Well the author answers this with the best to his abilities by saying what he knows previously about this womens life. She was supposedly going to marry a man named Stephan Hill, but then on the wedding day he left her for another women, the poem then describes the women 6 months later as pregnant. We can assume Stephan Hill is the father, and this is why the women goes up to the mountain top to weep. Before she was pregnant people described her as crazy, and in the poem Wordsworth suggests the baby turned her sane. No one knows whether the baby was born or not, or if it died during childbirth, or if the woman may in fact killed the baby her self, either way, the reader gets the idea that the child died and was buried under the beautiful hill covered in moss. Then the poems says the speaker himself saw the woman; she was crying and saying again, "Oh misery! Oh misery!" This poem leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions, or answers that could be true, but the poem never really justifies if its suggestions are actually correct. Throughout the poem we hear a lot of different opinions, and views on the woman. Questions that come to my mind are; What does the thorn symbolize and how does it relate to this obviously sad woman? The quote "every rose has its thorn" stands out to me in this poem. Below this beautiful hill of moss, which the author uses 2-3 stanzas to emphasizes its beauty, is a dead infant, which was either killed or died during childbirth. And the fact that something so incredibly beautiful is hiding something so tragic, justifies the quote.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere - summary parts 5-7

he Mariner continues telling his story to the Wedding-Guest. Free of the curse of the Albatross, the Mariner was able to sleep, and as he did so, the rains came, drenching him. The moon broke through the clouds, and a host of spirits entered the dead men's bodies, which began to move about and perform their old sailors' tasks. The ship was propelled forward as the Mariner joined in the work. The Wedding-Guest declares again that he is afraid of the Mariner, but the Mariner tells him that the men's bodies were inhabited by blessed spirits, not cursed souls. At dawn, the bodies clustered around the mast, and sweet sounds rose up from their mouths—the sounds of the spirits leaving their bodies. The spirits flew around the ship, singing. The ship continued to surge forward until noon, driven by the spirit from the land of mist and snow, nine fathoms deep in the sea. At noon, however, the ship stopped, then began to move backward and forward as if it were trapped in a tug of war. Finally, it broke free, and the Mariner fell to the deck with the jolt of sudden acceleration. He heard two disembodied voices in the air; one asked if he was the man who had killed the Albatross, and the other declared softly that he had done penance for his crime and would do more penance before all was rectified. In dialogue, the two voices discussed the situation. The moon overpowered the sea, they said, and enabled the ship to move; an angelic power moved the ship northward at an astonishingly rapid pace. When the Mariner awoke from his trance, he saw the dead men standing together, looking at him. But a breeze rose up and propelled the ship back to its native country, back to the Mariner's home; he recognized the kirk, the hill, and the lighthouse. As they neared the bay, seraphs—figures made of pure light—stepped out of the corpses of the sailors, which fell to the deck. Each seraph waved at the Mariner, who was powerfully moved. Soon, he heard the sound of oars; the Pilot, the Pilot's son, and the holy Hermit were rowing out toward him. The Mariner hoped that the Hermit could shrive (absolve) him of his sin, washing the blood of the Albatross off his soul. The Hermit, a holy man who lived in the woods and loved to talk to mariners from strange lands, had encouraged the Pilot and his son not to be afraid and to row out to the ship. But as they reached the Mariner's ship, it sank in a sudden whirlpool, leaving the Mariner afloat and the Pilot's rowboat spinning in the wake. The Mariner was loaded aboard the Pilot's ship, and the Pilot's boy, mad with terror, laughed hysterically and declared that the devil knows how to row. On land, the Mariner begged the Hermit to shrive him, and the Hermit bade the Mariner tell his tale. Once it was told, the Mariner was free from the agony of his guilt. However, the guilt returned over time and persisted until the Mariner traveled to a new place and told his tale again. The moment he comes upon the man to whom he is destined to tell his tale, he knows it, and he has no choice but to relate the story then and there to his appointed audience; the Wedding-Guest is one such person. The church doors burst open, and the wedding party streams outside. The Mariner declares to the Wedding-Guest that he who loves all God's creatures leads a happier, better life; he then takes his leave. The Wedding-Guest walks away from the party, stunned, and awakes the next morning "a sadder and a wiser man."

Major themes to remember of Romantic poetry

~feelings, emotions, and imagination take priority over logic and facts ("Anything you want you can have if you only want it enough." cf. romance narrative) ~belief in children's innocence and wisdom; youth as a golden age; adulthood as corruption and betrayal ~nature as beauty and truth, esp. the sense of nature as the sublime (god-like awesomeness mixing ecstatic pleasure mixed with pain, beauty mixed with terror) ~heroic individualism; the individual separate from the masses ~"outsiders" as representatives of special worth excluded by rigid societies or irrational norms ~nostalgia for the past ~desire or will as personal motivation ~intensification, excess, and extremes (see Romantic rhetoric) ~common people idealized as dependable source of true common sense and sentiment ~idealized or abstract settings; characters as symbolic types ~the gothic as nightmare world of intense emotions and complex psychology