Revision:Blake and Childhood

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Infant Sorrow

• disturbing image, ominous, bleak - sorrow = heavy sounding.
• rhyme scheme like a childlike song
• struggling against life
• list of three - helpless, naked, piping - vulnerable
• dangerous world/fiend - evil presence? world itself
• giving in/giving up - bound and weary - acceptance? futility?
• verbs - groaned, wept, leapt, struggling, striving - images of suffering
• rejects the father
• realism about giving birth, or being upset? powerful exclamation.
• child's perspective
• piping - creating a sound
• baby compares itself to a devil
• battle and conflict between baby and parents, disharmony
• longer lines, more complex metre for more complex issues, more crafted rhyme

Infant Joy

• mother = happy, positive and nurturing
• short lines, simple repetitive structures, uncomplicated end with refrain
• joy - pure happiness, song like, musical
• speech marks - persona, spoken voice, other isn't. could be mother?
• no name, no identity, no individuality
• questioning, giving ideas
• "i happy am" - emotion is the name
• abstract nouns used, lack of concretes
• befall thee - religious lexis? befall usually used in a negative sense
• pretty joy! exclamations for volume but lost at end, gets quieter
• at end gets quicker
• repetition, uses anaphora
• lots of sibilance - smile, singing, sweet - all linked, parallel structures.
• lullaby and celebration

Other ideas on childhood

• Ideals - Echoing Green
• play, rural environment
• joyful
• adults are protective.

Nurse's Song

• image of childhood
• freedome
• persistence - quite a modern idea. pushing boundaries.
• sense of unity between nature and man
• nurse is protective role but more active than in Echoing Green
• direct speech from children - they have an opinion
• nurse is persuaded by argument - suns light is also protective
• nature is their reasoning
• happy when children are happy
• 4 stanzas - perfect simplicity of childhood.

Nurse's Song (Exp)

• ideas about words having different meanings
• no direct speech from the children - not allowed an opinion
• oppressive not protective
• revenge for lost youth?
• seems colder and wintry - whisperings
• in innocence - man and nature are reciprocal but here it is wasted
• repetition and title - same nurse?
• different world view - no value in play
• selfish? other nurse is happy for the children
• adult oppression of children in society - completely inverts whole image of the nurse, changed meaning.

A cradle song

• long poem - lullaby connotations
• sibilance - soothing? hushing, whispering. double meanings
• good for AO3 points - repetition, sibilance, song like. also AO5 religious contexts.

The schoolboy

• Blake was home schooled and virtually self taught
• schools - chanting, learning for regurgitation not understanding
• his parents didn't want that for him - innocence
• however he technically didn't experience the schooling that he criticises here
• Blake sees children as birds - natural and free
• He's not criticising the learning - just the institution
• restriction of children's ability to imagine and play.

Quotes

The Schoolboy

"But to go to school in a summer morn / Oh! it drives all joy away"

"The little ones spend the day / In sighing and dismay"

Infant Joy

"I have no name; / I am but two days old"

Infant Sorrow

"Striving against my swaddling bands"

A Little Girl Lost

"And the maiden soon forgot her fear"

The Chimney Sweeper (Innocence)

"When my mother died, I was very young"

The Chimney Sweeper (Experience)

"A little black thing among the snow"

LITTLE BOY LOST + LITTLE BOY FOUND

Analysis

• The apparent simplicity of these poems, with their easy rhythm and clear rhyme, each poem a mere two quatrains, is an impression created by Blake from some quite complex alternations between iambic and dactylic lines.
• The rapidity of two adjacent unstressed syllables in dactylic parts of the poem (e.g. ‘The little boy lost in the’) gives an added effect to subsequent iambs. This works on the reader’s expectations while reading; we expect two adjacent unstressed syllables in between each stress. To put this in audible terms; if we hear the rhythm as ‘di-dum-diddy-dum-diddy…. etc.’, this sets up our expectation that we will find a ‘diddy’ after each ‘dum’. When we don’t find what we expect, we make an automatic adjustment; we add to the stress in order to make up for the missing syllable we were expecting. In this way, the stressed syllable in iambic feet is made to hang and ring out longer than it otherwise would. Blake uses this effect to give an extra, mournful resonance to some of the sounds and words in the poems. In particular, look at the second speak in line 3 of ‘The Little Boy Lost’, which adds sound value, and therefore desperation, to the child’s plaintive cry. In ‘The Little Boy Found’ look at the mournful ringing sound of ‘lonely fen’, and the accent on the mothers distress and a bleak setting in line 7; ‘Who in sorrow pale, thro’ the lonely dale’.

Commentary

• The context of these poems are simple. A boy follows a ‘vapour’ – an illusion of his father – which leads him astray.
• The poem places the child outside the world of ‘Innocence’, categorically telling us that ‘no father was there’ and ‘the night was dark’, so he has entered the world of ‘Experience’.
• In this poem, a false image of paternal care has misled the child and leaves him in lonely misery.
• This is an uncompromising poem, telling a story of cruel deception by the ‘vapour’ and there are no pitying angels here, as in ‘Night’, to soothe the child’s distress.
• The design intensifies the sense of a situation on the brink of disaster. The scene is set on a slope with menacing and overpowering tress on one side pushing the child (with outstretched arms) towards the illusion which is leaving the frame.
• Blake chose to set the sequel as a separate poem and in doing so he emphasises the altered perception.
• In the second poem, God appears and reunites the boy and his mother, so that all is made right in the end.
• However, there are two elements in the second poem which cast doubt on the happy ending:
  • First, Blake carefully inserts the simile that God appeared ‘like his father in white’. We notice that there is still no actual father in the story and the simile leaves an uncomfortable hint that God impersonates a father, so the child is still deluded.
  • Secondly, the picture of the mother who ‘in sorrow pale, thro’ the lonely dale / Her little weeping boy sought’ ends the poem on a note of fear, loss and grief which strikes a discordant note against the happy ending.
• Through several poems, then, Blake uses sinister phrases such as ‘sorrows pale’ and ‘whisperings are in the dale’ to convey a fear of ‘Experience’ and its dewy night. In many of the ‘songs’, this fear leads all too quickly to over-protection and stagnation or the oppressive laws which prevent children from passing naturally into a healthy uninhibited maturity. Blake presents the negativity of an artificially prolonged ‘innocence’.
• Blake has again presented us with a choice of beliefs. In the first poem he explicitly describes a false illusion of God; while in the second, he describes something ambivalent and nonsensical, a sort of ‘true’ illusion of God. The mother finds her child and he is returned into her fearful care. The boundary of ‘Innocence’, with its faith in supernatural care, is not quite crossed. As the same time, all is not quite right in ‘Innocence’s deluded, frightened world.
• In particular we are left to choose our own belief about nature; is the world a ‘lonely fen’ where ‘the mire was deep’ and ‘no father was there’ in a ‘dark’ night? Or is the world cared for by ‘God…like [a] father in white’, who will soothe distress and reunite families?

LITTLE GIRL LOST + FOUND

Analysis

• These poems alternate iambic and trochaic lines without any great disturbance of the rhythm, and with only minor irregularities (one of the most noticeable is in the line ‘Arm in arm seven days’ in the second stanza of ‘The Little Girl Found’, where the extra stress on ‘seven’ perhaps conveys the length of time the parents search).
• The regularity of three stresses in each short line, and Blake’s facility in couching most of the lines as separate phrases, give these poems an aura of simplicity.
• We have noticed this apparent plainness of rhythm in several poems so far; it can be said that Blake’s unforced control of simple metres gives an impression that the poems themselves are obvious. The metre seems to say to the reader: ‘there is nothing complicated here, see for yourself’.

Commentary

• The story is straightforward; Lyca trusts the benevolence of nature and does not suffer from inhibitions but follows her natural instincts and comes to no harm. Her parents, on the other hand, ‘dream their child / Starved in desart wild’ and in terror of nature itself (represented here by ‘pathless ways’ and the wild beasts) they follow this ‘fancied image’. In the final part of each poem a lion plays the part of a different perception of nature, at once overpowering, apparently wild; and at the same time actually loving.
• There is no doubt, also, as to the conclusion to be drawn from these poems. Lyca’s parents were wrong to be so frightened and Lyca herself was wise to follow her instincts without fear. The parents have to learn from their daughter not to be so over-anxious. They learn that the terrors of nature which obsessed them are really a fantasy, a ‘fancied image’, created by their own fears. They learn to overcome their fears by the end of the poem.
• This poem resonates with generation after generation of teenagers who plead with their parents to be more trusting and permissive, to allow some independence.
• Blake presents two opposing views of nature in the poem; the parent’s fear and Lyca’s own trusting instinct. Blake intensifies this conflict by juxtaposing them.
• In ‘The Little Girl Lost’, stanzas 5 to 8, the poem tells of the conflict between Lyca’s trust and the parent’s fears:
  • From Lyca’s viewpoint, ‘Sweet sleep’ is welcome and she has no cause for distress except consideration for her mother’s feelings.

    If my mother sleep,'

    Lyca shall not weep.

  • From her parent’s viewpoint, they cannot imagine their daughter trusting to sleep and say so three times (‘Where can Lyca sleep?’, ‘How can Lyca sleep?’ and ‘Then let Lyca wake’). However, their concern for their daughter becomes increasingly self-centred until it is unmistakably emotional blackmail.
  • The first expression of the parents’ idea is simple disbelief; as far as they can see, there is nowhere safe.
  • The second time they worry they connect Lyca’s state with that of her mother, so that Lyca ought to be worried because of a moral prescription, she should be worried because of her mothers distress, not because of any real danger.
  • The third expression is in the form of a command, ‘Then let Lyca wake’. Here, Blake shows how fear turns into tyranny.
• The two opposed perspectives alternate 5 times in stanzas 5-8, intensifying the pressure of emotional blackmail from the parents and building up to a moment of relief when Lyca finally sleeps.
• The use of the word ‘bright’ could be called the pivotal word of the poem. There has been no light or colour up to this point, but ‘gold’, ‘flame’ and ‘Ruby’, which make the lion glow towards the end of the poem, echo the unexpected word ‘bright’; it stands between the parents’ and Lyca’s attitudes to nature, like a sudden illumination or revelation.
• In ‘The Little Girl Found’ the conflict between the parents’ false fears and ‘true’ nature occurs in stanzas 6 to 10. The parents’ perspective develops from the moment they find themselves facing a ‘couching lion’.
  • The parents begin the episode clearly scared; ‘Turning back was vain’.
  • However, Blake introduces an element of absurdity in the same stanza, the parents are said to be afraid of the lion’s ‘heavy mane’, a symbol of his masculinity, rather than of his teeth or of his strength. Blake reveals their fear to be irrational.
  • The lion continues to do what the parents expect of a beast of prey, he ‘stalked’ around them while ‘smelling… his prey’.
  • The parents’ fearful perception is widened to see the lion in its true form when it licks their hand. The parents can be said to undergo one of Blake’s ‘visions’, they perceive the lion on a separate level to their senses. As they experience this revelation they are ‘Filled with deep surprise’ and ‘wondering’, they perceive the lion as ‘A spirit armed in gold’, wearing a crown. The sudden vision comes to Lyca’s parents when they ‘look upon his eyes’.
  • There is no doubt that this ‘spirit armed in gold’ is a vision of the truth and that this truth was hidden from Lyca’s parents by their fear.
  • Lyca’s parents enter a higher plane of perception; they begin to see with what Blake calls ‘double’ vision. In this higher state they have a clearer understanding of nature than was possible in ‘single vision’, when their perceptions were restricted by fear. The wild and powerful creatures in nature are fine, bright and strong – like the lion. Lyca’s parents now understand that these natural forces are not hostile, they are merely strong. The parents’ response to natural energy is no longer fear, but wonder.
• Blake’s poem suggests a parallel, more specific, message at the same time. Notice that the lioness ‘loosed’ Lyca’s ‘slender dress’ before conveying her ‘naked’ to their caves. This suggests that Lyca had to cast off the thin covering of her parents’ upbringing. Symbolically, this removes the shame about her naked beauty, which she has already acquired from her parents. Notice also that it is the lion’s masculine display – his mane – which overpowers the fearful parents. The poem thus hints at the need for sexual liberation and suggests that the natural energy Lyca’s parents fear is sexual energy. Blake’s target here is sexual prudery, which gives rise to shame, disgust and fear. He asserts that natural sexuality is strong and wonderful. It can shine like the ‘gold’ that suffuses the final part of each of these poems.
• We have not yes considered the opening stanzas of ‘The Little Girl Lost’, however. These place the story of Lyca clearly within the context of ‘Songs of Experience’ and specify the kind of vision the two poems represent.
  • First, Lyca’s story is set ‘In futurity’ and the Bard of ‘Experience’ sees the story ‘prophetic’. This is not the present time of ‘Experience’, then, but a time beyond this state. To underline this point, Blake places the story in terms of the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Earth’s Answer’; for the present time of ‘Experience’, we remember, Earth is still dominated by fear and refuses to ‘return’ or see the growing morning. She is imprisoned in despair.
  • However, in ‘The Little Girl Lost’, the Bard of ‘Experience’ assets (‘prophetic’) that the earth will ‘arise and seek / For her maker meek’ and so throw off the ‘grave . . . sentence deep’ of her ‘sleep’. The final couplet of this first section of the poem tells us of the transformation we are about to read:

    And the desert wild

    Become a garden mild.

    These lines produce a disorientating effect we are becoming used to. Blake appears to assert that nature will change completely. Really, he suddenly exposes us to Earth’s viewpoint. Nature itself may remain the same; but Blake wants us to understand that as long as Earth perceives a ‘desart wild’, that is her reality. So, from her point of view, a new reality (‘a garden mild’) suddenly appears. The suddenness of Blake’s perceptual shift catches the reader unawares. It emphasises the complexity, and multiplicity, of the vision.

• The Lyca poems, then, are from a vision the Bard of ‘Experience’ (‘Who Present, Past, & Future sees’) can see. Other inhabitants of ‘Experience’ cannot see this vision, however, because it is a ‘prophetic’ vision of ‘futurity’.

Comments

These notes are aimed at A Level English Literature students at A2 level.

Originally written by BeckySparrow on TSR Forums. Quotes originally picked out by camiroo.