The Delicate Balance Between Innocence And Experience

Innocence is something that can only be lost once. Within both The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley there are various characters that lose their innocence in very dramatic ways. A character can lose their innocence due to the death of someone else. They can also lose their innocence by just being looked at from a different perspective by others, this can be seen through the characters Bernard and Rachel. ADD ANOTHER TOPIC Someone who has lost their innocence changes their personality and perspective on life, which results in them acting in situations differently than they would before.

Challenges are a part of everyday life.They’re inevitable and without them life is meaningless. “Chimney sweep” both Experience and Innocence are both a similar in tone by the author’s use of defeatist diction. Even though they have a similar tone, they have different experiences of their childhood.

Set in the times of the Industrial Revolution, Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper is a powerful attempt to fight one of the biggest social injustices at the time: child labour. He illustrates the heartbreaking life story of thousands of kids through two different points of view, one is exposed in the poem pertaining to Songs of Innocence (1789) and the other one is exposed in Songs of Experience (1794). Both poems share the same outline; however, it is the narrator’s view the one that changes drastically between the poems. In the eldest version, the reader is presented with a young chimney sweeper full of hope and aspiration whereas in the most recent poem the author reflected a slightly more experienced child that does not believe in the system anymore. The maturity expressed by the last chimney sweeper is not only seen in his ideals but the whole poem is a 180 degrees deflection from the 1789 version.

The voice in this poem is one of pure happiness and innocence. In this state of joy, the infant is unaware of the world in which he lives and that awaits him. In these opening lines, we see Blake revealing the everyday modeling and structure that categorizes the world, but is absent in the simplicity and purity of childhood. The child has no name because joy needs no other name. Labeling and classification are products of organization and arrangement that the world uses to assimilate innocence into experience. Blake demonstrates that it is through this transition, that the virtue of child’s play is destroyed. Blake utilizes specific emotions such as “happy,” “joy,” “sweet,” “pretty,” “sing,” and “smile” to describe this uncorrupted state of being. There is no danger, darkness, or struggle for the infant. Instead, he exists in a care free state, free of guilt, temptation, and darkness. The birth of a child is celebrated by Blake and it stirs in us powerful emotions of peace, love, and hope.

William Blake's The Chimney Sweeper, written in 1789, tells the story of what happened to many young boys during this time period. Often, boys as young as four and five were sold for the soul purpose of cleaning chimneys because of their small size. These children were exploited and lived a meager existence that was socially acceptable at the time. Blake voices the evils of this acceptance through point of view, symbolism, and his startling irony.

Men and children’s views of the world vary due to the difference in the amount of exposure one has of the world. While men have experienced the evil that lies ahead, children are still virgins to the harsh truth that is the world around them. One lie that children always fall victim to is during the holidays. Kids are gullible in believing the parental lie of “Santa”. It is not till a child is told that Santa is not real that he or she loses a little innocence and grows in maturity. Similarly till the day a child gains knowledge of what society truly is outside their homes, they shall stay a child in their innocence. In the poems “Oranges”, by Gary soto and “Spring and Fall”, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The authors speculate the loss of innocence and transition into maturity in children in two variations. Gary Soto looks at the loss of innocence in a brighter light as it is a child finding young love and becoming mature, while Hopkins story utilizes more of a Juvenalian dark tone because the character is forced into maturity.

As a child, we are focused on the small aspects of life. We worry about eating ice cream on a hot summer day or when we will get the opportunity to go out on a cold snowy day and go sled riding with our friends and drink hot chocolate. We are fully focused on such basic childlike desires that we are completely unaware of serious events happening around us or in this case right next-door. As a nine-year-old boy, Bruno has no idea that his father was running a mass concentration camp right next door to his house and exterminating Jews including his new friend Shmuel. Instead, Bruno acquired an irreproachable friendship due to his innocent way of thinking that allowed for him to ignore society’s prejudices against his Jewish friend Shmuel. This essay will provide information regarding the Holocaust and hash treatment of the Jews within the German concentration camp “Auschwitz”. This essay will then offer a brief summary of the events within The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne. Finally, this essay will analyze the paradox of innocence depicted within the story, in order to explain how innocence supplied both disadvantages and advantages for Bruno and Shmuel. While this innocence led to the death of Bruno and Shmuel due to their ignorance of the dangers of the Holocaust, it also allowed for the boys to live their lives unaware of

The transition from childhood to adulthood is a complex but universal passage. Both Katherine Mansfield's "The Wind Blows" and D.H. Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gipsy embody adolescent angst in their characterization. Matilda and Yvette search for meaning beyond the lives they perceive they are condemned to lead. Both bring about greater understanding of the struggle between a young girl's struggle of innocence versus sexuality. In similar uses of metaphor and imagery the stories tell the tale of social convention, romanticism and sexual awakening.

In To Kill A Mockingbird there are several reason why innocence becomes experience. Phys.com stated “Between ages 5 and 11, the researchers found, children become aware that many people believe stereotypes, including stereotypes about academic ability. When children become aware of these types of bias about their own racial or ethnic group, it can affect how they respond to everyday situations.” This shows that Scout and Jem are in a time of their lives when racism will take effect. Not only because of the exposure do they tend to grow up faster, but also because of the lessons they learn from Calpurnia and Atticus. The symbolism of the mockingbird lingers throughout the novel, which is a symbol of innocence. M.E. Gandy writes, “The novel is of a genre called Bildungsroman, or novel of maturation. In such a novel, the main character journeys through a series of adventures from innocence to experience and mature enlightenment. At the end, the character is prepared for adulthood.” This explains that throughout the novel they will become more experienced. In Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, the theme of good and evil is revealed through the conflict of racism, the symbolism of the Mockingbird, and the loss of innocence in Jem and Scout.

I was 12, the time where children are traveling though milestone of youth to development physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially that I lost my innocence. What I wanted most around that age, probably like most children was to be older than I actually was. Every step of the way when someone asked me about my age I would lie and say 15 or some ridiculous number that couldn’t possibly be true. When I look back now after 21 years of living, of life, I can hardly fathom the degree of changes I have truly undergone. From believing Santa is real to becoming a full on atheist who questions everything and goes against even my families views of religion and concepts. I believe there are many of ways one can lose innocence, it 's a necessary

being kept at home, or were sent out to get money for the family, and

Blake’s two poems are both told from a child’s point of view, which is different from many works and forces adult readers to realize the fault in society’s standards through the bleak eyes of the many unfortunate children.

Similar to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, the poems selected in themselves consist of differences in the manner human life is evaluated on earth. William Blake’s “The Echoing Green”, published in Songs of Innocence, conveys the ultimate effect that old age and maturation has on human happiness, and the innocent voice of childhood undisputed by the experienced voice of a veteran. Moreover, Blake further enhances the importance of human growth by alluding to the correlation between human life and the renaissance of nature, and develops the theme of Nature and its similarity with the human life cycle. In contrast, “London’, published in Songs of Experience, presents a different calculation of human life. The restricted manner in which the individual leads their life under urbanization directly impacts their satisfaction; the lack of communion with nature and pureness enhances the sense of misery in the midst of a city. Furthermore, the similar literary devices used in contrary poems will be examined in how different messages are conveyed but ultimately allude to a mutual theme: the negative effects that industrialization has on human life, as it is directly related to nature. It is important to note that although Blake praises nature for its purity and nurturing, he

William Blake published “The Chimney Sweeper” in 1789 in the first phase of his collection of poems entitled “Songs of Innocence”. A later poem under the same name was published five years later in his follow up collection, “Songs of Experience”. The chimney sweeper’s tale begins in Songs of Innocence with the introduction of a young boy who was sold by his father after the death of his mother; the poem then shifts in the next stanza to describe the speaker’s friend Tom Dacre, another chimney sweeper. Tom is a despondent recruit to the profession, and struggles at first with having to cut off his white hair. The speaker comforts him by explaining that the soot would only soil his light hair anyway, and shortly afterward he falls asleep. The poem describes Tom’s dream at length, wherein he sees other chimney sweepers being taken from caskets by an angel and carried to heaven; there they dance naked in carefree bliss. When Tom awakes, he is reassured and comes to the conclusion that he too can be carefree so long as he does his duty. The later poem in “Songs of Experience” leaves Tom and his friend behind, switching instead to the perspective of an adult who finds a child chimney sweeper abandoned in the snow. The child explains that he was left there by his parents, who had gone to church; it is unclear whether his parents have died.

The poem Chimney Sweeper (Song of Experience), is a story that portrays how life can sometimes be bleak. The poem broken down and told in a way that portrays both the characters age and his opinion on