ENGLISH
From Prose to Poetry
From Fiction to Reality
MEDIA
The Master’s Mistake
by Henry Lawson
(1900)
Videoclip:
Another Brick in the Wall
( Pink Floyd)
Ebony & Ivory (Beatles)
Videoclip: Material-Child
The Little Black Boy
by William Blake (1789)
W1
“Anotrher Brick in the Wall” explores
the dangers of repressing the creative
self where POETRY not only helps the
individual to survive the horrors of war
but to grow up to be a thinking
individual capable of expressing and
experiencing BEAUTY
Pink Floyd
Another Brick in the Wall
W2
Dear Sir,
your son William was
absent from school
today.
Yours Sincerely
The Master
Initiation: the passage from child to adult by
growing aware of the Otherness through
sacrifice of the Self
Reconciliation of the opposites: a non manichean
vision of Cain and Abel through Mateship
In his characters he
celebrates the idealistic
concept of mateship.
HENRY LAWSON
(1867 - 1922)
Henry Lawson was an Australian poet and writer. Many believe he
was the first poet to capture the Australian way of life. Henry
Lawson was born in 1867, on a goldfield in rural New South
Wales. His father was mining there, and times were tough. The
Lawsons were very poor. Henry didn't get a good education, but
his mother gave him lots of books.
Henry was a shy, sensitive child. He wasn't like most bush boys.
Even his mother thought he was a bit strange.
When he was nine years of age, Henry got an ear infection and
went partly deaf. By the time he was fourteen years old he was
totally deaf. The kids at school tormented Henry and he became
more of a loner. But this made him even better at observing
people...looking at the way they act. Henry Lawson grew up to be
a quite bitter and confused man.
He always believed things would get better ... but it seemed he
didn't have much luck in life.
His writing was a way for him to express his feelings.
Much of his inspiration came from the Australian bush, and its
people. Because he'd known the hardships of bush life Henry
Lawson could understand its ways.
Although his own life was often unhappy, Henry Lawson was kind
to others. He found time for those less fortunate than himself.
He felt he had something in common with homeless people.
Henry got sick., both in mind and body. He spent time in a mental
hospital, and never really recovered.
The bush consists of stunted, rotten
native apple trees, no undergrowth.
Nineteen miles to the nearest
civilisation - a shanty on the main road
... There is nothing to see, however,
and not a soul to meet.
You
might walk for twenty miles along this
track without being able to fix a point
in your mind, unless you are a
bushman. This is because of the
everlasting, maddening sameness of
the stunted trees.
(Source: The Drover's Wife byHenry
Lawson)
William Blake (1757-1827) English painter, engraver and poet,
was born in London.
From the age of seven he habitually saw a white-bearded God
peering in through his window, or angels perching in trees.
Blake claimed to have seen "a tree filled with angels, bright
angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.
He returned home and reported this vision, and he only
escaped being thrashed by his father for telling a lie through
the intervention of his mother.. On another occasion, Blake
watched haymakers at work, and thought he saw angelic
figures walking among them
An admirer of Dürer, Michelangelo and Raphael and a friend of Fuseli,
Blake was extremely eccentric. He walked the streets in a Phrygian
bonnet. His work, still obscure, suggests a new version of Christianity,
whose radicalism lies in its visual Symbolism..
In Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) the world
is seen from a child's point of view, directly and simply but without
sentimentality.
In the first group, which includes such poems as “The Chimney Sweeper
and The Little Black Boy, both the beauty and the pain of life are
captured. The latter group, reveal a consciousness of cruelty and injustice
in the world, for which people, not fate, are responsible..
William Blake’s volume of poetry entitled Songs of
Innocence and Experience is the embodiment of his
belief that innocence and experience were “the two
contrary states of the human soul,” and that true
innocence was impossible without experience. Songs of
Innocence contains poems either written from the
perspective of children or written about them.
Innocence” is the inner state of innocence, freedom
and imagination, a state identified with childhood.
Experience”, instead, means the experience brought
by man's laws and institutions, is the world of normal
adult life, when people are incapable of spontaneity
and imagination. His vision of life is made not of
“contraries” but of “complementary opposites”
Moreover Blake believed that only intuition and
imagination bring man into contact with true reality.
Child, poet and God share this power of vision
Blake also believed that children lost their innocence
through exploitation and from a religious community
which put dogma before mercy..
When I from
black and he
from white cloud
free,
outcast-child
“I Have a DREAM”
W3
The Little Black Boy is a poem by William
Blake published in Songs of Innocence
Blake believed in equality for all men, and
this is reflected in this poem. The Little
Black Boy" was published in 1789, a time
when slavery was still legal and the
campaign for the abilition of slavery was
still young. In "The Little Black Boy", Blake
questions conventions of the time with
basic Christian morality.
This
becomes apparent in the third stanza,
where Blake uses the sun as a metaphor
for God and His Kingdom. The reference
to the sun "rising" introduces us the fact
that it is connotes change.
Several of his poems and paintings express
a notion of universal humanity: "As all men
are alike (tho' infinitely various)".
W4
Children’s commercial culture
has quite successfully
usurped kids’ boundless
creativity
What is most troubling is that children’s culture has become virtually
indistinguishable from consumer culture over the course of the last century.
The cultural marketplace is now a key arena for the formation of the sense of
self and of peer relationships, so much so that parents often are stuck
between giving into a kid’s purchase demands or risking their child becoming an
outcast on the playground.
material
child
W5
Whatever happened to the child-poet?
Is he hiding in you?
W6
Nobody’s child
ARE you ready for MORE ? Surf the net and enter the poetry lane at the Italian crossroad ( scuola
media) and find out what meaning this word MORE had for Oliver Twist who lived in Charles Dicken’s
Victorian England … find out what it was like for Oliver to work in a workhouse and then watch the videoclip
and add captions about the Workhouse or a short poem on what the film sequence inspires you with.
BE CREATIVE !!!!!!!