William Blake (1757-1827)
1. Biography:Born and brought up in London .
His father, an Irishman, carried on a small
hosiery （袜子类，卫生衣类）business.
Showing a precocious talent for painting as a
child, Blake was sent to a, drawing school;
then at the of age of 14 he was apprenticed to
James Basire, an engraver. After his 7-year
term was over, he studied briefly at the Royal
Academy of Arts. In 1779, he began to earn his
living as an engraver, receiving
commissions from publishers both for book
illustrations and for engravings from pictures.
At the age of 24, Blake married Catherine
Boucher. The marriage proved to be a
lifelong happiness though there were
difficulties for a time. Through all his life,
Blake had been both a poet and an engraver.
And he also printed a few books of his own.
He lived a life of seclusion and poverty. He
was often misunderstood by other people,
who would regard him as gifted but mad.
Blake's last years found him Chiefly concerned
with painting and engraving. And he gradually
gathered around him a small group of devoted
young admirers. However, Blake’s genius in
poetry remained unknown in his lifetime; he was
recognized only posthumously.
2. Points of View
Blake never tried to fit into the world; he was a
rebel innocently and completely all his life. He
was politically of the permanent left and mixed
a good deal with the radicals like Thomas
Paine and William Godwin. Like Shelley,
Blake strongly criticized the capitalists' cruel
exploitation, saying that the ‘dark satanic mills
left men unemployed, killed children and
forced prostitution’. Meanwhile he cherished
great expectations and enthusiasm for the
French Revolution, and regarded it as a
necessary stage leading to the millennium
（[宗教] 千喜年，太平盛世）predicted by
the biblical prophets. Literarily Blake was the
showing a contempt for the rule of reason,
opposing the classical tradition of the 18th
century, and treasuring the individual's
imagination.
1.3. Major Works
Blake began writing poetry at the age of 12, and
his first printed work, Poetical Sketches (1783),
is a collection of youthful verse. Joy, laughter,
love and harmony are the prevailing notes. And
new elements of poetry derived from the earlier
traditions can also be found, which hint at his
later innovative style and themes. As with all his
poetry, this volume reached few contemporary
readers.
The Songs of Innocence (1809) is a lovely
volume of poems, presenting a happy and
innocent world, though not without its evils and
sufferings. For instance, "Holy Thursday" with
its vision of charity children lit 'with a radiance
all their own' reminds us terribly of a world of
loss and institutional cruelty. The wretched child
described in "The Chimney Sweeper",
orphaned, exploited, yet touched by visionary
rapture, evokes unbearable poignancy when he
finally puts his trust in the order of the universe
as he knows it. In this volume, Blake, with his
eager quest for new poetic forms and
techniques, broke completely with the
traditions of the 18th century. He
experimented in meter and rhyme and
introduced bold metrical innovations which
could not be found in the poetry of his
contemporaries.
His Songs of Experience (1794) paints a
different world, a world of misery, poverty,
disease, war and repression with a melancholy
tone. The benighted England becomes the
world of the dark wood and of the weeping
prophet. The orphans of "Holy Thursday" are
now 'fed with cold and usurous hand'. The little
chimney-sweeper sings 'notes of woe' while
his parents go to church and praise 'God & his
Priest and King' --the very instruments of their
repression. In "London", the city is no longer a
paradise, but becomes the seat of poverty and
despair, of man alienated from his true self. A
number of poems from the Songs of Innocence
also find a counterpart in the Songs of
Experience. For instance, the "Infant Joy" is
matched with the "Infant Sorrow" and the pure
"Lamb" is paired with the flaming "Tyger" The
two books hold the similar subject- matter, but
the tone, emphasis and conclusion differ.
Childhood is central to Blake's concern in the
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience,
and this concern gives the two books a strong
social and historical reference. The laboring
poor in London furnishes him with a sharp
awareness of the economic exploitation of
children, and particularly the practice of
selling young children into apprenticeships, a
practice which provides the context for the
opening lines of the "Chimney Sweeper" The
two "Chimney Sweeper" poems are good
examples to reveal the relation between an
economic circumstance, i.e., the exploitation of
child labor, and an ideological circumstance, i.e.,
the role played by religion in making people
compliant to exploitation. The poem from the
Songs of Innocence indicates the conditions
which make religion a consolation, a prospect of
'illusory happiness'; the poem from the Songs of
Experience reveals the true nature of religion
which helps bring misery to the poor children.
Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
marks his entry into maturity. The poem was
composed during the climax of the French
Revolution and it plays the double role both as a
satire and a revolutionary prophecy. In this
poem, Blake explores the relationship of the
contraries. Attraction and repulsion, reason and
energy, love and hate are necessary to human
existence. Life is a continual conflict of giveand-take, a pairing of opposites, of good and
evil, of innocence and experience, of body and
soul, the authority and anarchy.
'Without
contraries', Blake states,
'there is no
progression'. The" marriage " to Blake,
means the reconciliation of the contraries, not
the subordination of the one to the other.
Marriage of Heaven and Hell is also the
manifesto of Blake's spiritual independence: He
accepts Christianity when young, but reverses its
values later on, He recognizes the coexistence of
good and evil, saying that 'Good and Evil are
here the two contraries married.' He thinks that it
is wrong to separate the body from the soul in an
individual being, and that it is even more wrong
to say that energy--called 'evil' -- is alone from
the body, and that reason--called ‘good’- is
alone from the soul. By separating the body
from the soul, religion, he claims, has
outlawed(剥夺） the body and cut off the mind
from the real source of its energies.
In his later period, Blake wrote quite a few
prophetic books.
Blake who lived in the blaze of revelation felt
bound to declare that 'I know that This
World is a World of IMAGINATION and
Vision' , and that 'The Nature of my work is
visionary imaginative.' From childhood, Blake
had a strongly visual mind, whatever he
imagined, he also saw. For instance, he claimed
that he saw a tree full of angels, visioned the
ancient kings in Westminster Abbey, and drew
'spiritual portraits' of the mighty dead. He
believed he saw what Milton saw and all other
people could see through the efforts of painting
and poetry. As an imaginative poet, he presents
his view in visual images instead of abstractive
terms.
4. His own religion: 1) religion a consolation,
a prospect of 'illusory happiness'; the true
nature of religion which helps bring misery
to the poor children. 2 ） Coexistence of
Heaven and Hell, good and Evil, authority
and anarchy; unseparation of body (energy)
and soul(reason). 3) The mystic power of the
creative hands—create lamb(docile, meek,
innocent, and tame) as well as tiger
(frightening,cruel, but dynamic, and
vigorous). Coexistence of the two contraries.
3)The denial of eternal punishment and the
denial of authority.
5. Style
Blake writes his poems in plain and direct
language. His poems often carry the lyric
beauty with immense compression of
meaning. He distrusts the abstractness and
tends to embody his views with visual images.
Symbolism in wide range is also a distinctive
feature of his poetry.
Summary:
A visionary imaginative . Most thought
him mad, but to Blake the world was mad
with its wars, violence and cruelty. Mysticdeveloped own religious ideas. A Poet and
graver(artist) illustrating his own works.
The Tiger
Form: in ballad form(a 4-lined stanza) with 4
stresses, mostly 7 syllables; in trochee,
rhyming in couplet—very different from
usual, elegant iambic pentameter. The
trochaic meter is a powerful rhythm. This
meter makes the poem sounds stronger.
The Tyger
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry（匀称）?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire（上升，飞翔）?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?（你的心
肌）
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread（可怕的） hand? & what dread
feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
（星星的光芒）
And water‘d （浸湿） heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The structure of the poems
1st stanza: ask who could create the tiger.
2nd stanza- 4th stanza : how those importance
organs, such as the eyes, the hearted, the
brains were created.
5th stanza: imagine what the creator feel
after the creation.
6th stanza: ask who dare create the tiger.
Theme: The poem seems to admire God, the
Creator as a blacksmith who has the
mystic power of creation.He created a
meek lamb, a symbol of the innocence
of the natural world, and also a symbol
of the Son, but at the same time he also
created the tiger, a symbol of the beauty
and the horror of the natural world. But
the poem also contains a very complicated
emotion here Blake identified God's
creative process with the work of an
artist. And it is art that brings
creation to its fulfillment -- by
showing the world as it is, by
sharpening perception, by giving
form to ideas. Blake himself as an
artist might here praise the
creative power of an artist.