William Blake Critical Readings

Blake on society, humanity and nature

"Everything that lives is holy"

Blake and the outerworld

"For all the attention Blake paid to the outer world, he could have been almost blind."

Blake's voice

Blake is "the voice of freedom."

Timothy Vines on Blake's disagreement with institutions

"Blake's poems service to damn those institutions which, by their advocacy of this rationality, sought to stifle divine energy with oppressive morality."

Blake and the 'mind-forg'd manacles'

"Blake's writings were an endeavour to loosen or break society's 'mind forg'd manacles'." (Timothy Vines)

Timothy Vines on the state of childhood

"The state of purity and childlike perspectives in Innocence, established Blake's ideal condition for humanity."

Raymond Williams on Blake and materialism

Blake "criticised his materialistic society for blunting imagination."

Evans on Blake's simpler poems and its voices

In Blake's simpler poems, "wisdom speaks with the voice of a child."

Blake on contraries

"Without contraries [there[ is no progression [...] all are necessary to human existence."

James Thomson on Blake's spirtuality

"Blake was always poor in world's wealth, always rich in spiritual wealth"

Caroline Bowles on Blake's gifts

"Mad though he might be, he was gifted."

Margaret Bottrall on Blake's imagination

Blake is an "isolated dreamer"

Brendan Cooper on Introduction to Innocence

"Innocence is a state of freedom, purity and joy, but darker shadows tend to hover over it."

Kevin Hutchings on Introduction to Innocence

- stages of life

"The 'Introduction' to Innocence allegorises key stages in human life."

Kevin Hutchings on Introduction to Innocence

- movement from innocence to experience

"The poem thus shows wordless innocence gradually transforming into articulate experience." (Kevin Hutchings)

Tom Paulin on The Ecchoing Green

- Truth

"The poems offer tiny psychological truths through myth."

'The Ecchoing Green'

- nature

"The Ecchoing Green is an early poem - almost naive, but reveals a closeness to nature and peaceful surroundings. His poetic project was, in his own words, 'To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wildflower''

The Ecchoing Green

- generations

The gathering together of the generations represents "the full spectrum of earthly existence."

David Simpson on The Ecchoing Green

- Harmonies of the Ecchoing Green

"The natural harmonies of the echoing green are sacramental."

G.E Bentely on The Lamb

- the speakers

"The speakers of these poems of innocence are babies, children and adults, black and white, birds, insects, and animals; none is William Blake."

The Little Black Boy

- Flaws of perception

"Blake's 'The Little Black Boy,' long recognised as a work of astonished complexity has been most often interpreted as a poem about the flaws inherent in a dualistic perception of the world."

Harold Bloom on The Little Blaxk Boy and how its misleading

Harold Bloom sees it as "the epitome of the Songs of Innocence," but insists that it is "one of the most deliberately misleading and ironic of all of Blake's lyrics".

The Little Black Boy and how the boy is loved.

"The actual message being conveyed to the boy is not that life is not a trial, but that he is love."

The Little Black Boy

- Unity of the boys

"Blake portrays both boys in one of his engravings as neither black nor white, but as a kind of bruise-blue."

The Chimney Sweeper in Innocence

- Repression

"An exercise in repression"

Jonathan Roberts on The Chimney Sweeper in Innocence

- Narrative of enslavement

The speaker has "swallowed and internalised the narrative that keeps him enslaved"

York Notes on The Chimney Sweeper in Innocence

- The inverting of conventional associations with devils and angels

"Whereas devils enact the rule of energy and the imagination, angels stand for a kind of purity and reason [...] that puts a brake on energy."

The Chimney Sweeper in Innocence

- Innocence and its vulnerability

"Innocence is being characterised as a condition of vulnerability and danger in which the child is open to victimhood and exploitation."

The Chimney Sweeper in Innocence

- Blake and the established church

"Blake attacks the established church for perpetuating these insidious myths which maintain the dispossessed in a state of what Marx would later call false consciousness."

The Chimney Sweeper in Innocence

- Anger for the forces

"His greatest anger is reserved for the forces - the established Church, mercenary and uncaring parents - that restrict our vision and prevent us from understanding both our oppression and infinite possibilities of true perception."

The Divine Image

- Concept of man after God

"Blake not only introduces a similarity between the divine image of a benevolent God and the human form but also the concept of the creation of man after God's divine constituency. Regarded as inborn characteristics of humans by Blake, these essentially Christian virtues can be found in every man's soul on Earth, notwithstanding his origin or religious belief." (Wikipedia)

Litcharts on The Divine Image

- God in humans

"God, to this poem's speaker, isn't just a merciful, pitying, peaceful, loving dad-in-the-clouds. (Blake rejected this idea of a separate, distant God outright, dismissively calling such as figure 'Nobodaddy'). God is right here on earth, all the time, actually embodied by every person alive."

Robert F. Gleckner on Holy Thursday in Innocence

"There ought to be no discipline, no regimentation, no marching, no uniforms and no guardians - merely free, uninhibited, irresponsible, thoughtless play on the echoing green" (Robert F. Gleckner)

Harold Bloom on Blake's use of 'innocence'

Harold Bloom refers to Blake's use of 'innocence' as an "equivocal term" and suggests that the songs in the first section exhibit an "ambiguity of tone"

Nurse's Song in Innocence

- Human connection

"A paradise of intimate human connection and happiness"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge criticism on Infant Joy

The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge criticised the poem for its "inaccuracy".

Infant Joy

- The need for song and poetry

'Infant Joy' is about "the necessary place of song or poetry in our development and thus, by extension, the whole of human life."

Geoffrey Keynes on Infant Joy

- Its connection to 'The Blossom'

"'Infant Joy', seemingly innocent, may be understood to show the consequences of 'The Blossom' - the conception of new life."

Infant Joy

- logic

"A beautiful simple, unashamed logic"

Geoffrey Keynes on Introduction to Experience

Geoffrey Keynes states that Blake, as the prophet 'calls the Fallen Man to regain control of the world, lost when he adopted Reason (the 'starry pole') in place of Imagination. Earth symbolises the Fallen Man within the poem. Blake ('the voice of the Bard') calls him to awake from the evil darkness and return to the realm of Imagination, reassuming the light of its previous 'prelapsarian' state.

Robert F. Gleckner on Introduction to Experience

Robert F. Gleckner in his review (1957) notices that Blake introduces two voices in the poem, the Bard's and the Holy Word's, 'calling the lapsed Soul'. He said 'the last two stanzas are the words of both voices: the Holy word of Jehovah is hypocritical, selfish, and jealous, thinking and acting in terms of the earthly morality of rewarding and punishment'. And the same time the Bard being mortal is prophetically imaginative, who 'thinks and acts by eternal time and according to eternal values'.

Michael Ackland on Earth's Answer

- Fall of God

Blake "recasts the Fall in terms of a malicious God" who keeps Earth imprisoned.

The Clod and the Pebble

- Non-favourable types of love

"Neither the Clod nor the Pebble, then, offers a favourable view of love. One is too submissive and the other too selfish. The clod is lacking in any individuality or personality: it is merely part of the wider earth from which it sprang. By contrast, the pebble is a standalone piece of stone, and too hard to accept any outside influences: the waters of the brook merely pass over it.

Nicholas Marsh on Holy Thursday and its voice

The voice in this poem is "outraged" and speaks with "revolutionary anger".

The Chimney Sweeper in Experience

- The reference to the inverted trinity of 'God & his priest & his king'

"an overaching sign for a tyranny which is typical of the world of experience at theological and political levels."

York Notes on The Chimney Sweeper in Experience

- Blake's everyday life and state of the world

"Blake takes the everyday phenomena of his time and links them to his wider picture of the emotional state of the world."

Litcharts on The Chimney Sweeper in Experience

- Organised religion and its own 'heaven'

"Heaven is supposed to be a place of bliss, beauty, joy, freedom, and communion with God - but organised religion offers only a 'heaven in our misery'.

Nurse's Song in Experience

- Representation of the Children

The children represent "the expression of a potential freedom that she cannot bear to contemplate, and wish she must repress at all costs."

Geoffrey Keynes on Nurse's Song of Experience

"A parody of the corresponding poem"

Geoffrey Keynes on Nurse's Song of Experience

- Female domination

"The evil of female domination so destructive of the male personality, already explicit in this poem, was often in Blake's mind"

C.M. Bowra on The Sick Rose

- Lossed humanity

"He had transposed into this song the central ideas and feelings about all young men and women who are robbed of their full humanity." (C. M. Bowra)

Wolf Mankowitz on The Sick Rose

- Sexuality

"Sexuality is revealed as the basis of life, the social concept of love, as something destructive to life. Love in its social definition is a negative creed of secretive joyless forbidding."

John Carey on The Sick Rose

- Opposites in the poem

"Blake sees Reason and Energy as opposites. He associates reason with the tyrannical, Old Testament God. Energy is good; Reason is evil. Energy expresses itself in sexual desire and sexual gratification. But God and his church condemn sexual desire resulting in life-blighting chastity. 'The Sick Rose' explores the unhealthy effect of such chastity. In Blake's illustration, the rose is defended with thick thorns and a caterpillar is eating its leaf. Self-restraint and sexual repression is, for Blake, destructive."

Leo Damrosch on The Sick Rose's Illumination

"In the illumination, a crimson blossom is bent down to the ground, with a worm wriggling into it while a terrified female figure tries to escape. Above, a caterpillar is feeding, and two more females - withered blossoms, perhaps - huddle on bare stems. The big thorns are no help in protecting the rose from blight. Thus, the poem is clearly concerned with corrosive sexual guilt."

Leo Damrosch on The Sick Rose and what it calls for

"a call for sexual liberation"

Nicholas Marsh on The Sick Rose

- Blake's anger at sexuality

"The poem expresses Blake's outrage at the denial and perversion of natural sexuality."

Nicholas Marsh on The Sick Rose

- Personal relationships

"Blake's poems make a clear point about personal relationships - natural sexuality, free from interference by adult prudery, materialism and hypocrisy and unfettered by oppressive laws, is positive and fruitful; (he advocates 'an improvement in sensual enjoyment'). Darkness, secrecy and hypocrisy however lead to destructive, sinister, negative forms of 'love'." (Nicholas Marsh)

Nicholas Marsh on The Sick Rose

- The Church's denial of desire

"By forbidding natural desire, the Church tyrannised over the population and 'The Sick Rose' explores the effects of such tyranny."

Shira Wolosky on The Sick Rose

- Symbolism of the rose and the worm

"The rose seems allied with love, but here there is a 'dark secret love'. 'The invisible worm' may represent some form of corruption, which turns love's life-giving joy into destruction."

Stephen Matterson and Daryl Jones on The Sick Rose

- Symbolism

"Roses have traditionally symbolised love: is the poem a bitter comment on decaying and destroyed love? Or is it, indeed, a poem about sexually transmitted disease? Conversely, the rose can also symbolise Britain: is the poem, then a symbolic representation of 'something rotten' in England, a state-of-the-nation poem?"

Blake on The Fly

- Eyes of humanity

"I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes of man..."

Stevenson on The Sick Rose

- The last two stanzas

"The last two stanzas may be approximately paraphrased: 'if the essence of human nature and life is reflection and consideration, I will have none of it: I am content to live the simple, instinctive life of the fly.''

Marsh on The Sick Rose

- Happiness

"The speaker comes to a chilling conclusion: it doesn't matter if we are alive or dead, because in either state we are 'happy'. But this happiness consists of a merely stupid senselessness in life, where the speaker kills and dances, and drinks and sings. It is in the chilling 'thoughtlessness' of such logic that we discern the limited and destructive viewpoint of Experience. Blake makes us aware of the poverty of the speaker's view which renders his life and death futile. Remember the obstinate despair of the Earth refusing to see that 'the morn / Rises from the slumberous mass' and refusing to turn to the light. The speaker of 'The Fly' is equally imprisoned by his own limited perceptions. Life is not futile but he creates his own futility and maintains it with all his mental energy."

The Tyger: Peter Ackroyd comments that even as Blake worked upon the poem the revolutionaries in France were being branded in the image of a ravening beast - after the Paris massacres of September 1792, an English statesman declared:

"One might as well think of establishing a republic of tigers in some forests in Africa", and there were newspaper references to "the tribunal of tigers". At a later date Marat's eyes were said to resemble "those of the tyger cat'".

W.B. Yeats on The Tyger's symbolism

In 'The Prelude', Wordsworth describes post-revolutionary Paris as "a place of fear [...] Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam". The tiger, powerful, unpredictable, gorgeous but deadly, becomes a potent image for what W. B. Yeats would later call the "terrible beauty" of revolution.

Robert F. Gleckner on My Pretty Rose Tree

- Virtue

The poem shows "how virtue itself is rewarded only by suspicion and unkindness." (Robert F. Gleckner)

C.M. Bowra on Ah! Sun-flower

- Blake's flower symbol

"The flower which turns its head to follow the sun's course and is yet rooted in the earth is Blake's symbol for all men and women whose lives are dominated and spoiled for a longing which they can never hope to satisfy."

David Punter on Ah! Sunflower

- Circular form

"The circularity of form of this poem, beginning and ending with the sunflower, reflects the world of Experience, namely that it is a circular world, from which there is no escape and in which we are condemned - because of the death or the absence of the imagination - to torment. Although this poem appears to provide us with a kind of resurrection, for Blake this type of afterlife is no substitute for pursuing one's desires here below: indeed, the very promise of an afterlife is simply an evil god's excuse for his own tyrannical rule." (David Punter)

The Garden of Love

- Blake's view of holyness

"For Blake, sexuality and instinct are holy, the world of institutionalised religion turns this instinct into imprisonment and engenders hypocrisy. Those rules, which forbid the celebration of the body, kill life itself."

The Garden of Love

- Change from innocence to experience

"The key to the poem lies in its second line. The speaker is talking about the change in how he now sees his surroundings, not a change in the garden itself. The poem marks the psychological passage from childhood innocence to adult experience."

Wolf Mankowitz on The Garden of Love

- The priests

"The priests are black against the light of joy"

David Punter on London

- Establishment thinking

'London' is "the most concisely violent assault on establishment thinking that English poetry has produced."

Steven Biko on London

- Mind of the oppressed

"The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."

London

- Description of the city

It has been described as an "autopsy" of London at the time.

C. M. Bowra on London

- Oppressed individuals of London

"The child chimney-sweeper's condemned life is supported but the churches; the soldier's death is demanded by the court; and the harlot's calling is forced on her by marriage-laws."

Jon Cook on London

- Depiction of London

"The sights and sounds of London are no longer evidence of its variety but of its monotony. Its citizens become spectral and surreal, like the creations of an infernal machine."

Timothy Vines on London

- 'mind-forg'd manacles'

"Blake's writings were an endeavour to loosen or break society's 'mind forg'd manacles'."

Tom Paine, a radical thinker and writer of the time on 'charter'd' towns

"Every charter'd town is an aristocratical monopoly in itself."

C. M. Bowra on The Human Abstract

- Distortion of God's virtues

"In bitter irony he shows how love, pity and mercy can be distorted and used as cover for base or cowardly motives."

Infant Sorrow

- Hope

"In Blake's view, the only hope for a child born in such circumstances [...] is through the eyes of the imagination, but here the very foreshortening of the poem prevents any such possibility."

Infant Sorrow

- Lack of development

"The world of experience is one in which development has been frozen."

Infant Sorrow

- Suffering

"In this poem, existence is inseparable from suffering: being born means the soul being trapped in a dependent infant body 'like a fiend hid in a cloud'."

Infant Sorrow

- Child's restriction

"The baby's physical restrictions also suggest societal ones: civilised conventionality, the poem suggests, stamps out people's individuality and independence - the 'fiend[ish]' energy they're born with."

A Poison Tree

- Prison of Religion

"Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion."

A Poison Tree

"He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence."

A Poison Tree

"As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys."

Kathleen Raine on A Poison Tree

- God's intention for man

"God [...] conceals his evil intentions toward man, and awaits what he knows is bound to follow: man, whom he hates [...] is lured by the brightness of the apple, steals the forbidden fruit, and dies." (Kathleen Raine)

Rousseau on The School Boy

- Man in chains

"Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains"

David Punter on The School Boy

- Blake's disagreement with formal education

"'The School Boy' exemplifies Blake's scepticism about formal education at the same time as it celebrates the natural freedoms of childhood. The challenge to institutional education is seen in the parents' passive acceptance of the child's spiritual suffocation at the hands of the 'cruel eye' of the school."

"Blake sees formal education not as an advantage but rather as all too often a damming up of the soul's creative spirit."

Emma Baldwin on The Voice of the Ancient Bard

"This poem's style is emblematic of Blake's broader body of work, where he often melds rich imagery with profound philosophical themes. Throughout, there's an underlying current of wisdom, as if the Ancient Bard is gently, yet firmly, guiding the reader towards enlightenment and away from pitfalls." (Emma Baldwin)

The Little Boy Lost

- Innocence of the boy

"The innocence of the poem can only reside in the little boy's attitude."