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Blake and His Work

In the second poem Blake points a finger at the adults responsible. These adults include both the church and the state. Where the first poem seems to be guidance and expression of hope the second is clearly a condemnation of the tragedy of the polarized classes of the time.
             The two poems, "Holy Thursday" are also an excellent example of the common man, or in this case child, being used as a focus of literary work. I found the "Holy Thursday" poems to be much more moving and effective. This is likely because I was able to grasp the images Blake offers much more easily because of my own visit to St Paul's. The first "Holy Thursday" poem creates a beautiful vision of London's blessed children parading to church. Blake achieves these images and this emotion with the line: "The children walking two and two, in red, and blue, and green." A peaceful scene and an idealized image of what society wanted to see at the time. Blake not only shares with his reader the beautiful images of these perfect children, but also touches the senses with the description of the sounds of the scene: "Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song." The first poem is warm in emotion and beautiful in imagery while the second poem is cold, uncaring, gray and great illustrates through all the senses extreme poverty and sadness. I feel like the first poem is what society desperately wants to believe and the second is the reality that Blake is showing his audience through a magnifying glass. The contrast is just like that of looking at the same picture in two different ways. The first picture printed in color and the second in black and white. There always seems to be more truth and emotion in those pictures that are printed in black and white. The second "Holy Thursday" poem contrasts the first with the harsh reality of what is really happening in this scene. Blake is now raising the question of who is really the rich and who is the poor.


Essays Related to Blake and His Work

1. The Tyger by William Blake

... hinting the creator is God, or some "higher power." In the third stanza, Blake returns to the creator with descriptions of "his" omnipotence. Writing "what shoulder, and what art" suggesting strength and skill required to create the "Tyger." The second and fourth stanzas ask where and how "the Tyger" (evil) was created. In the second stanza ... " are all tools used by the blacksmith. The reader feels the complexity of the blacksmith's job: the work is hard, dirty, hot, and rough, yet takes skill and strength. Blake ties this metaphor into stanza two where in line two he asks how the crea...

  • Word Count: 681
  • Approx Pages: 3
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2. Religion in the Poetry of William Blake

... believed that the soul was split up into two halves, good and bad.  In the poem, "Lamb", Blake assumes the role of the teacher or prophet who will lead his people by means of simple catechisms to profound truths. Blake's picture of the lamb is apocalyptic. It is taken from the work in The New Testament called Apocalypse or The Book of Revelation ... "The Chimney Sweeper" from Songs of Innocence. In fact, he even says that it is God, the church, and the king, which includes his parents and the rest of society, who "make up a heaven of our misery." Everything in the picture is gray and ...

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3. Blake The Romanticist

... . Aside from simple comparisons though, Blake was his own person in a multitude of other ways. He established his own extensively detailed mythology designed to explain the origins of "modern society- as he knew it and physically engraved a mass amount of his poems, with illustrations, for presentation. He was unique in his plethora of additional efforts placed into his work to make it that much more ... coherent and ultimately inimitable. The common person must take more than a passing glance at Blake to truly appreciate the vast array of ideals for which ... he stood. When Blake compo...

  • Word Count: 509
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4. London: Imagery in Blake

... all of the coal dust, if they were not already afflicted by the plague. The work of the sweepers, as described by Blake, literally "appalls" the churches and makes them white. The fact that the children of London are in misery and poverty makes the upper class, the church and the monarchy even richer. The children who cry out for salvation portray the impoverished London ... anyone arrested to be brought before a court, was suspended. This was done so that parliamentary reformers like Thomas Hardy and John Thelwall could be denied a fair trial. Taxes were high and food production was lo...

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5. Love Displayed by Heinrich Heine and William Blake

... the moon comes out, the flower is happy and "uncovers herflowering face" to him, as he takes her as his for the night until he has to leave again in the morning (7, 8). Whereas in Blake's poem, he does not compare the lovers to anything, he keeps them as people, instead of making his work an extended metaphor. This shows that the author does ... not want to romanticize the emotion of adoration, and wants to keep it as negative as he possibly can because of his own experience with that part of his life. "[L]ove and the sorrows of ... love" can be shown in both Heinrich Heine and William...

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6. Poems on Childhood by William Blake

... 's proverb: "if all do their duty, they need not fear harm" (Blake, 1967, plate 12). This moral is representative of the times, signifying the work ethic that was so dominant. Little Tom, and indeed the speaker believe naively that their innocence will be preserved if they continue to work hard. Yet this is tragically ironic, as it is precisely the nature of ... their work that makes the boys less innocent. In this sense, the boys are being lured into a false sense of security, and could therefore be viewed as victims of innocence. Blake also highlights the Romantic elevation of the rura...

  • Word Count: 2182
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7. A Critical Interpretation Of William Blake's The Sick Rose

... , a series of longer poems written from 1789 on, Blake created a complex personal mythology and invented his own symbolic characters to reflect his social concerns. A true original in thought and expression, he declared in one of these poems, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." In his work entitled "Prophecy" (1794) Blake expresses his condemnation of 18th-century political and social tyranny. Theological tyranny is the subject of The ... Book of Urizen (1794), and the dreadful cycle set up by the mutual exploitation of the sexes is vividly described in "The Mental ...

  • Word Count: 556
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8. the tyger and the lamb

... applied to the Prometheus Myth, in that the man questioning creation, like Prometheus, is in revolt from the Gods. Blake sees his questioning in an impetuous context, this is a dominant theme in much of Blake's Poetry and deserves the readers attention. In his writing in Felpham and after Blake approaches this. "Reason says miracle, Newton says doubt- Aye that's the way to make all nature out- Doubt ... powerful, and as such the stars throw down their spears in surrender. Reason is no match for the energy exhibited by the Tyger. In this Blake makes a comment on experience attempting to ...

  • Word Count: 2271
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9. blake - imagery and sound

Write an essay on the importance of imagery and sound in the work of a poet or poets you have studied In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, by William Blake, imagery and sound are both very important. They help express ideas effectively and link the poems together. Blake uses different types of imagery, the first of which is nature imagery. In London, the "charter"d Thames does flow". ... immediately conjures an image of boundless rolling hills and unrestricted freedom. This contrasts the difference between innocence and experience as seen by Blake. Innocence is the freedom of the human sp...

  • Word Count: 808
  • Approx Pages: 3
  • Grade Level: High School

10. Blake Poetry

... into the simple, as evident in the poems published in The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience. His approach to most topics: poverty, pressure, friendship, honesty, jealousy, survival, truth, human rights, industrialisation, child labour, and the complexity of his ideas contradict the simplicity in language and construction that Blake uses in his poems. This clearness does not always mean the poem is easy to understand ... the ones he used in The Songs of Innocence. That is, he used simple language and construction through alliteration, repetition, punctuation and the rhyming ...

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