blake poesie

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Data:16.03.2006
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Testo

Little black boy
In this child-monologue Blake's treatment of the little black boy's perspective on Christianity and salvation may well be ironic, forming the basis for a more savage attack on religious and social hypocrisy. The child's mother consoles the child with a vision of a better life to come, away from the prejudices and hardship of this life, and the child accepts this, encouraging him to a further vision of leading (rather than being led by) the little white English boy to God and Heaven. The mother's teaching may itself be a form of 'innocence', and the boy's vision of a Heaven, transcending the divisions of race, is certainly 'innocent'. The central question the poem raises, like Holy Thursday (Innocence) is what Blake's attitude is towards the child's (and the mother's) attitudes: does he see them as touchingly naive, or tragically misguided? Throughout the poem, in the references to 'black' and 'white', Blake plays around with the traditional associations between 'white' and 'good', but also, in the little black boy's views on Soul/Body, makes the point that colour is skin deep, but colour is no indication of spiritual state. The poem should, perhaps, be approached in the light of British attitudes towards missionaries, and arguments about the abolition of slavery in the late eighteenth century.

The clod and pebble
This poem provides two contrasting attitudes, one of selfless love for others, and the second, of Love as self-absorption and possessiveness. The first stanza seems to belong to the Songs of Innocence sequence, and the final stanza to Songs of Experience, and perhaps it is left to the reader to adjudicate between the two attitudes. However, as a poem in the Songs of Experience sequence, it is important that the final words are given to the selfish Pebble rather than to the down-trodden Clod, perhaps suggesting that it is the former's attitude which is seen to be the most insightful. An alternative view is that the poem presents both perspectives as equally valid, and mutually true.

The garden of love
This Songs of Experience lyric deals with the repression of joys, desires and instincts by the church and by prohibitive morality. The speaker, presumably no longer a child, returns to the Garden of Love, and sees that earlier pastoral and natural vision of Love transformed by the influence of the Chapel, and by the 'Priests in black gowns' . Given that the poem deals with a vision of a journey into the "garden", it is worthwhile to see the poem as a commentary on the ways that conscience and guilt are imposed on the Imagination and on what is natural and instinctual, the 'mind-forged manacles' of London. In Freudian psychological terms this would correspond to the Superego's policing of the Id. It is also worth noting that the references to playing "on the green" hark back to a recurrent image in the Songs of Innocence sequence.

london

This provides a bitter and harsh view of the city, which is characterised in terms of repression, regimentation, disease, hypocrisy and death. London is dominated by the spirit of "Reason", the "mind-forged manacles" which bind and restrain the natural spirit (symbolised in the regimented streets and the "charter'd Thames"), and the hypocritical Establishment ("church" and "palace") does nothing to prevent or speak out against injustice (symbolised in the cries of the young chimney sweepers, with reference here to the political agitation from the 1780s onwards to improve their working conditions of child ). The new-born child, traditionally a symbol of hope and the promise of a new start, is here the child of an adolescent prostitute, blighted by venereal disease, and every marriage, in this city, is associated with Death (the hearse) rather than Life.

This portrait of a city of repression and death owes something, perhaps, to Old Testament portraits of Jerusalem prior to its destruction, but it is clear also that Blake was offering a perspective on contemporary London, and more particularly to the city under the counter-revolutionary regime of Pitt in the 1790s. Blake, like contemporary Romantic poets such as Shelley and the young Wordsworth, were highly critical of the political reaction to the French Revolution in England, and in this poem we have some insight into the colour of Blake's radical politics, and his attempt to provide a total snapshot of a reactionary culture in all its aspects.
The chimnery sweeper
A very much darker and more savage vision here than in the counterpart poem in the Songs of Innocence. The references to a church which is complicit in the repression of the child, together with the treatment of the negligent parents, make this one of the most bitter poems in the sequence, with its emphasis on a whole system (God, Priest and King) which represses the child, even forcing him to conceal his unhappiness (a reference to being "clothed"), psychologically as well as physically). Comparison with the Songs of Innocence poem The Chimney Sweeper is valuable.

The tiger
Blake's most famous poem raises profound questions, but does not finally answer them. How could the creator make something as terrifying and awesome as the Tiger? Could the same creator also be responsible for making the Lamb (both Christ, and the creator whose meek and mild spirit dominates the Songs of Innocence)? Is the Tiger not created in God's own image? Is the Tiger a symbol of Evil, for elsewhere (as in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) Blake praises energy as a form of good and delight. These speculations lead to wider questions, about the wisdom of a God who can create such terrifyingly destructive creations, and questions of God's creation of Good and Evil, or Good-and-Evil. Comparison with The Lamb in the Songs of Innocence is extremely illuminating here. The Tiger is personified as having been born from fire (stolen from the Gods by Prometheus?), forged rather than created, and characterised also in terms of its (metallic) coldness: note the effectiveness of the poem's imagery in creating associations of fire, coldness and darkness. Interpretation of the poem is complicated by the fact that we cannot assume the speaker of the poem to be Blake himself, but perhaps any poet, who has created this Tiger out of his own imagination ("forests of the night").
The lamb
In this poem, like The Shepherd, Blake again brings out the traditional associations between the Lamb and Christ, in a simple lyric which relies on a pastoral setting. The speaker is presumably the child, which allows Blake to express a joyous state of protected innocence and harmony within and amongst creation. It is worthwhile to compare this poem with The Tiger.
The scheppard
Once again, as in the 'Introduction', we have a bright idyllic pastoral vision, but with perhaps more obvious allusion to the figure of Christ the Shepherd. It is worth noting that, in the poem, the Shepherd may watch over his flock, such that they are at peace and full of trust, but it is he who follows them, and is full of praise for their innocence and trust: the sense is one of mutual trust and responsiveness, rather than docile obedience.

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