Infant Sorrow, William Blake, Songs Of Experience

My teacher has a fascination with me and my fellow students doing presentation and handouts for the class. So im doing Infant Sorrow by William Blake and just wanted some help with my annotations on a handout. Ive done a attachment that will go my poem. But my annotations suck really bad and i wondering if u guys can help me out?

Reply 1

Endymion

Can I see your handout? I might be able to help you then. :smile:

Reply 2

daveybaker

Im sorry it aint written on the computer, just a few scribbles @ the mo, waiting to see what my partner comes up with (its not looking good lol). It just talks about it being a contrasting poem to infant joy, one from that of the innocent, inexperienced child and that of one who has seen the world and corruption held within rigid institutions, erm... sense of constraint experienced by the Schoolboy in the Songs of Innocence begins at birth in this poem and finally how Blake himself expresses the need to be freed from the chains of repression shown in Infant Sorrow as like with sssoooo much of Blake's other work.

That help you, help me?? I need more kinda help on analysising the poems language/structure certain terms used etc. :confused:

Reply 3

Da Bachtopus

1 My mother groaned, my father wept,
2 Into the dangerous world I leapt;
3 Helpless, naked, piping loud,
4 Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

5 Struggling in my father's hands,
6 Striving against my swaddling bands,
7 Bound and weary, I thought best
8 To sulk upon my mother's breast.

You could look at things like:

metre: tetrameter; 1 is iambic tet, 2 is iambic tet with a trochee substituted in the first foot; 3 and 4 change to catalectic trochaic tet; 5 and 6 same as 2 (substitution = struggle &c); 7 same as 3 and 4; 8 same as 1

So, whilst a four-stress line is established, there is little overarching sense of pattern.

First two hemistiches (= half-line) have same structure; plenty of other grammatical parallelisms, e.g. first two rhymes of each quatrain are on the same type of word (present verb / pl. noun)

Middle four lines contain no finite verbs; series of clauses all aligned hypotactically related (/ subodinate to) "I thought" - where is the action performed?

Various oppositions (dichotomy in 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' as a whole): Mother / Father, bound / leapt (or action / inaction is probably better); helpless / dangerous

That's probably more than enough for doing a handout analysis. I'll leave you the fun of thinking about why Blake might do these things (if he does them consciously, that is?) and what their effect is.