William Blake's Infant Joy and Infant Sorrow Essay

There are few poems which surprisingly talk about children from the parents’ point of view. The child on swallowing the world develops its own clear voice. In the poem Metaphors Plath compared herself to a riddle in nine syllables implying the long nine months of pregnancy before child birth and also intensifies the pang and suffering of carrying of a baby in her womb. The strong depiction of the figurative use of the melon skillfully corroborates the two sides of the prototype of a female character- one is of woman and the another is of an unborn baby that is resembled with “fine timbers”. Kate Moses concludes that in the poem’s culminating lines Plath’s narrator becomes completely and willingly “effaced” allowing her child full ownership. His stark idealization of “loaf’s big” image symbolizes the true picture of a pregnant woman whose womb is filled up by the unborn baby. Her strong depiction of the close-connection of a mother with that of her unborn child is incorporated by this images like “ponderous house”, “a cow in calf”

As a new way to criticize the Romantic period, desperate times call for desperate measures and it did through the use of children’s point of view in Romantic poetry. A period of fifty years called Romantic period included the French Revolution, the American Revolution and wars of national independence in Europe. William Blake, one of well known Romantic poets, commented on his society by viewing it through the child’s eyes in the two sets of ‘Songs of innocence and of Experience’. It is said that ignorance is a blessing but not according to William Blake.

There are many devices used in this poem to emphasize the emotions going through the mind of a parent when sending their child off into the world. Of such device used is imagery, the use of imagery is used abundantly in the

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.

The spacing and structure of the poem is set up to allow flow and momentum in the poem and its narrative. The speaker’s voice is present with emotion as emphasised in a natural rhythm of thought offering an honest and bare interpretation of motherhood. The open “blank space” of the poem encourages a calm and breathy atmosphere, fulfilling a mood of tranquility and bliss. Each stanza is short with a couple quick fragmented thoughts before closing each section with the power of a single word. Each stanza breaks apart a separate thought filled with a loving passion the speaker uses to stress the beauty, wonder, and over-flowing love present in motherhood. To better the structure, the poem itself is broken into three parts, each representing a stage of motherhood. The first segment of motherhood that is represented is during the moments while the baby is still in the womb and the mother waits in anticipation for the baby to arrive. This “honeymoon” phase is expressed with a tone filtered through a perception of rose-coloured glasses and excitement as the mother is in utter bliss to carry a life into the world. The

The characters in the story repeat over and over “I want the baby”(Carver 8-20). The reader can perceive the carelessness and selfishness of the characters, as well as the shattering truth that the unfit parents subconsciously decide to put themselves before the baby. The single sentence says it all, four words that will send chills down anyone’s spine. When the author chooses to write the repeating sentence, his intention surfaces when one looks further into its meaning. Not only does the reader find the parents’ interests and their pronoun physically before the baby’s. When one reads the literature, it becomes more and more apparent that the argument revolves around the baby, and not truly for or about the infant. At the end of the short story, the man and woman become increasingly aggressive and begin to endanger the safety of the child. Carver writes, “She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back. But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard” (19-20). Many should find Carver never announces the name of the baby. In this fashion, the child shifts into an object, and no longer a human being.The words the author chooses to signify the child, ‘the baby’, confirms the infant only as

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.

Rhyming couplets such as “date” and “late”, “rehearsing” and “nursing” are surprisingly simple, but meaningful, as they highlight how the author examines this important issue in society. This clearly communicates how sympathetic the poet feels for the women who are faced with nurturing children by themselves, as negative connotations in “departing” and “aimless”. More particularly, the “departing” of the man’s smile emulates how her disconnection from society has left her emotionally broken and somewhat regretful that she decided to have children in the first

When analysing poems 'Netttles ' and 'born yesterday ', both are similar in how they show a parents love and responsibility for a child. While 'Nettles ' highlights the anxieties that a parent has for their child, the latter deals with the hopes a parent can wish upon their child. Both use various language techniques and structure to convey how parents can have different ways of expressing their relationship and love for a child.

In this stylistic analysis of the lost baby poem written by Lucille Clifton I will deal mainly with two aspects of stylistic: derivation and parallelism features present in the poem. However I will first give a general interpretation of the poem to link more easily the stylistic features with the meaning of the poem itself.

Pregnancy is a daunting feat not for the faint of heart. When on this journey of creating life, many mothers have feelings of doubt and regret. The poems The Victory, Metaphors, and The Mother all take varied approaches to the topic of motherhood in regards to their use of imagery, diction, and syntax. The imagery in The Victory is extremely negative and graphic. Anne Stevenson describes her child as a “tiny antagonist.”

Lastly, the Romantic Era blended human emotions with nature. The interfacing of emotion and nature was emblematic of Romantic poetry, whether it engrossed the idea of bequeathing human emotions to an innate article like a river or connecting the scenery to the temperament of the writer. (James, 491) This kind of beauty that is

William Blake focused on biblical images in the majority of his poetry and prose. Much of his well-known work comes from the two compilations Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The poems in these compilations reflect Blake's metamorphosis in thought as he grew from innocent to experienced. An example of this metamorphosis is the two poems The Divine Image and A Divine Image. The former preceded the latter by one year.

Ground-breaking, momentous, and a time of great struggle, the Industrial Revolution was famous for its innovations and infamous for the sobering reality it inflicted upon the standard family. Mid-18th century Britain brought poverty to everyday urban workers. With it, came an increase in child labor like never seen before. In order for a normal family to survive in the urban lifestyle, all members of a family had to work. This included children as young as four years to work as chimney sweepers, miners, and most popularized in 18th century Britain, factory workers. By the year 1800, children under the age of 14 in Britain’s factories accounted for 50% of the labor force (“Industrial Revolution, Child Labor”). Though the number continued to grow, all did not go unaccounted for. Romanticism, an effort opposite the movement, gave recognition to the emotional conflicts overlooked. Romanticism shed light on the daily struggles of the everyday man, woman, and the most neglected up until that period of time, the child. Throughout history, others have written about childhood, but Romantic poets began to question what it meant to be a child. The question, though not answered directly, later became revealed in their works where it exposed their belief systems. The role of the child in British Romantic Poetry represents the early life of Romantic poets, and the qualities they possessed in childhood.

The journal article Blake’s Infant Sorrow, by Ricks Carson, an english professor at Pace Academy, enlightens, “The child at the mother’s breast is an archetype of innocence, vulnerability, and spontaneous affection.” Even though Carson addresses the baby as innocent and finds the child to be a archetype relating to his mother, the infant also can be seen as suffering. In a way, this poem is laughing at the idea of Songs of Innocence. Blake, or the speaker, is harsh about the experience of being a child and refuses to be handled by his parents. Blake further states that the parents of the child treated him poorly throughout his childhood. The parents did not want the kid and was upset that they had a child. The father cried, the mother groaned, and the child was fussy. The poem is not very uplifting or positive, which means it fits perfectly with Blake’s collection, Songs of