Appunti su Blake, William

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Lingue
Voto:	1.5 (2)
Download:	144
Data:	22.01.2001
Numero di pagine:	3
Formato di file:	.doc (Microsoft Word)

WILLIAM BLAKE
He was a romantic author. The ROMANTICISM was a new attitude to the nature, to the senses and sensations; the poets used a new language to express this attitude, they gave importance to childhood and imagination. In England the Romanticism was not a compact movement, every author started from his personal world and truth and made a personal work (because in England there wasn’t a romantic school).
William Blake was against the values and the culture of the Age of the Enlightenment, he shared the very radical political ideas of the left-wing, so he wanted to defend the right of the individual to happiness and pleasure against the restrictions of morality and religion. He was concerned in political and social problems of his time: he supported the abolition of slavery and the egalitarian principles (which came from the French Revolution). He believed in revolution, but then he focused his attention on the evil consequences of the Industrial Revolution; in his poems he speaks about the victims of industrial society, for example about the poor children and the orphans who lived in the Charity Schools (those schools were managed by ecclesiastics).
He considered Christianity and Church as responsible for the tension between opposite state of mind in human life: this complex situation was the reason of the difficult possibilities of progress. Blake thought that the institutions like the Church and the family (the marriage) were based on hypocrisy and they were suffocating, because in the education of the sons, they oppressed innocence and instincts of the children.
He thought that the man could know the world only with imagination and not with sense perceptions; the poet was the mediator who can see more deeply into reality, so he could help the people to identify and to understand the evils of society.
Blake’s poems present a very simple structure and a highly individual use of symbol: for example, the child who represents the state of innocence and the nurse who represents the experience. His works weren’t only poems, because each page was an engraving of a text surrounded by images and designs coloured by hand in watercolour by the poet himself.
NURSE’S SONG
1) The natural elements (hills, sun, sheep, birds) create a quiet and soft atmosphere, that’s typical of children’s mentality, because for an innocent child everything is joyful like the nature in spring. The play of the children stands for innocence, that’s the characteristic of a child, that would go on even if the time (the day) is ended. The nurse represents the adulthood that’s imminent for a child and that substitutes happiness, innocence and carefreeness for a lot of cares and responsibilities.
2) In this poem the theme is not children’s innocence but the pessimistic view of children’s destiny, because the children must become adults, wasting their life and their innocence; the children pass from innocence, represented by their games, to experience, represented by the nurse, when they have to stop playing to assume their responsibilities. The nurse remembers the glad days of her youth and she feel regret for them, so she is envious of the children.
HOLY THURSDAY
1) London towards St. Paul’s Cathedral on an holy Thursday; the people are poor children (who live in Charity Schools) and beadles, who are going to St. Paul’s to celebrate the festivity and to thank their benefactors. The children are happy and innocent, their songs are mighty and harmonious. The beadles are the are guardians, they represent authority, so they are very strict.
2) The poor children live in rich and fruitful land, but they are reduced to misery, because the society is very bad and cruel; so the children’s song is only a trembling cry.
In the first poem the situation in presented in a better way: the children are happy because they are innocent. In the second poem the children become aware in a worse situation and they have lost their innocence.
Experience = a. the realisation of the sad situation of the reality
b. the loss of innocence