A Chapel By William Blake Analysis Essay

Before watching your presentation, I only knew the basics regarding William Blake. There are various interesting things that you mentioned that I did not know about. For example, you mentioned how he was more commonly known for his art rather than his poems. His art as a whole is really interesting. You mentioned how he took his encounters with the people around him, his brother’s death, and visions and reflected them into his work. One thing from that list that stood out to me the most were his visions. He was able to take his visions and portray them in his paintings even when many people found it difficult to understand the meanings behind it.

In the first stanza, Blake saw his vision, he is showing a colour, the colour of gold. Gold represents value. It is interesting how the author paired up the two verbs weeping and mourning with worshipping. Blake is saying how he saw a chapel of value but no one

and to write historical biographies to make the Order better known. The abbot also urged the

During this time, Adam and Eve loved with no shame and self-consciousness, and their love and sexuality was seen as innocent and unrepressed or unrestrained. However the speaker speaks of a garden where sexuality is looked upon as shameful, as well as being inhibited and barred. The image of the garden can also be used as an image representing the garden spoken of in the book Song of Songs in the Bible. This book of the bible uses the garden as a metaphor for sexual enjoyment, however it speaks more of a pure, spiritual love. (Anon.,

On January 1st, 2017, a gang held an alleyway waiting for people to come through so they and take their money. The alley was very dark. People came through the alley at nights and trashed the alley, cracking windows, leaving cigarettes on the dirty spray-painted ground littered with sharp shards of glass from a broken window. Their leader, Kole Blazer, was there in the rooftops, waiting for someone to come through, when he saw someone betray his gang: Mike Blazer, his brother. Kole was taller than him by only a few inches. He had brown hair, freckles, blue eyes, more muscular than his brother who was always the weaker one, but they were twins and he wanted to keep a secret. His brother betrayed them and now it’s time for payback.

The idea of innocence loss is prominent in the last three stanzas because this is the part of the story where the child begins to understand the world. In order to make this transition, Thomas uses rhetorical situations such as tone and symbolism to convey the shift. In the fourth stanza, Thomas uses the child’s sleeping as a symbolism for the dark coming, meaning the idea of maturity and aging is hinted. This initiation equates the beginning of the world of maturity, and the end of youth. It also involves the loss of innocence, freedom, and purity. The loss of innocence also infers that the child’s unification with nature is no more, since the setting is referred to the Garden of Eden, the child’s ability to create and fantasize is no longer possible. Despite the clear transition where the child is starting to understand the implications of the world outside of his own, he continues to ignore its heavy presence. In the fifth stanza, the child continues to enjoy the paradise of youth, with the author describing his attitude as he “[runs his] heedless ways.” The author describes the child’s reluctant actions by using a rhetorical situation called register. Register helps the language of this poem to give it authenticity, and meaning to the themes. Thomas displays some of his Welch register in the poem, giving the poem a more genuine feel. In stanza five, Thomas uses a phrase “sky

Blake wanted people to read this poem and understand his concept of questioning God, for how could God make something so innocent and pure as the Lamb and then in turn make something so evil? The situation is very similar to the

In lines three and four, the author begins to point out the visual evidences of society's spiritual malaise. Blake uses the word "mark" several times to show the reader the problems he sees have outward signs--"marks of weakness, marks of woe." In stanza two, Blake leaves the visible evidence for the audible evidence, and we begin to hear the groans of a fallen world. Man and infant cry--one in experience, one in innocence--yet, both in a fallen world, both raising a pained voice. From line three on, the poem is filled with mournful, weary, destructive sounds--the pounding out of the "mind-forg'd manacles"; the sad "'weep! 'weep!" of the chimney-sweeper (Blake 33); the dying soldier's sigh; the harlot's explosive, withering curse. All of these sounds contribute to the picture of society reeling in the deadly stages of metastasizing cancer.

In 18th Century Britain, the poets of what became known as the Romantic Period sought to communicate truth in a world where the lofty ideals of The Enlightenment were evaporating to reveal the harsh realities of a society that favored material progress over spiritual progress. In so doing, these poets embraced and drew inspiration from the beauties and mysteries of nature in attempts to draw parallels between the truths they found there and the inner experience of Mankind. Counted among the several writers who recorded their artistic and emotional responses to the natural world, William Blake explores the concept of life’s dualities and how this concept applied to life in 18th Century Britain, as well as to the relationship between the body and spirit, in his most popular works, Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794). Two standout poems, “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” respectively taken from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, demonstrate Blake’s meditation on how innocence and experience in life create a binary and complementary relationship that is observable in our outer world as well as in our inner being.

Blake is a poet that when you read his work you must really dissect the words to fully understand his writings. He lived in a time that no longer exists. One that was of English Antinomianism which simply means a time and place where one rejects a socially established morality like religion or royalty. To understand Blake you must “rediscover the tradition in which he wrote. By rediscovering this tradition, and seeing him in relation to it, we do not remove the difficulties, but we do begin to equip ourselves to grapple with them” (Morton, p. 64). “Blake who could compress more meaning into a couple of lines than any other poet” was often saying much more than a reader can take in without reflection of the words just read (Morton, p. 30). I find when I read his poetry; I have to unpack each sentence. “Yet nothing will be gained by pretending that Blake is not in many ways a difficult poet. He uses words with extraordinary power, delicacy and precision to express ideas which, to him, were clear enough. But he uses these words often in senses which are quite different from the sense now usual” (Morton, p. 10). I find when I read a line of his work, I have to stop and ask myself, what is it he really saying here and why did he intentionally use those specific words. He uses his words to paint his

The major idea he uses is that of Heaven and religion. In Songs of Innocence, Blake describes an angel who appears to a boy in a dream. The angel releases the boys from the black coffins and lets them free into a green plain with the sun high above and says that if he is a good boy he will never want because god will look after them. Blake makes a strong connection to the idea of Heaven. If you are good in life you will be with God and want for nothing in Heaven. This angel brings them salvation from the harsh world from out of a coffin, playing on the idea of death. Religion is also used in Songs of Experience though it is used more negatively. In the poem, the boy describes that his parents have, “gone up to church to pray” (SoE). This could represent the literal form of church or it could mean they have gone to the “big church” in the sky meaning heaven and have died, leaving the boy to fend for himself. However, the parents seem to have chosen the job for the boy and go to church and think nothing of their child. Heaven is also used generally by saying that this makes up a “heaven” of the boys’ unhappiness, meaning a huge, unconceivable amount (SoE). It is used paradoxically to the praising of the “Priest and King,” meaning the Church and state, by the parents. Religion is used as salvation in Songs of Innocence and negatively Songs of Experience. While the two both have religious language, the two use their points of view to describe different ideas.

William Blake is a world-renowned poet for his inspiration and advancements on modern poetry. His literary works have been discussed and made popular for centuries; his originality and independence towards his work became well known throughout the world. Throughout this essay, many items of William Blake’s life will be discussed, such as, what he foresaw, what he wrote about, and the vision he pictured for his life.

In “Songs of Experience” Blake immediately creates imagery by using the image of the speaker talking a child who is covered in soot and crying in the snow. There is a contrast of misery being understood using the color black and a sense of innocence using white. The speaker demands that the child tells him where his parents are and he expresses how they are in the church. Similar to Songs of Innocence, in line 8 the metaphor “And taught me to sing the notes of woe.” shows this child was also forced to be a chimney sweeper. This also shows his experience and how he learned sadness instead of happiness. But, unlike that version, he was once happy. In line 7, “They clothed me in the clothes of death,” the theme of death arises again as a metaphor that can refer to chimney sweeping outfit or an outfit to wear once you die. This image also applies to experience because he knew that he would die eventually from doing this job.

But the point is that the natural world as depicted in this poem isn't a particularly savage or unpredictable place. What's more, nature is the means by which we learn about God. The poem implies that all the nice things in the world comes from God (Shmoop Editorial Team)

Of the poems and stories we’ve read up to this point the most captivating for me personally has to be the two Chimney Sweeper poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. These poems are incredibly moving in the way that they shed light on the lives of these young chimney sweeps and I think also serve as an important testimony to the horrible repercussions that this era of rapid industrialization had on the lives of contemporary England’s working poor. The hopelessness of these kid’s lives really hit home for me while watching the BBC documentary which did a perfect job of illustrating just how inhuman their working conditions were.