William Blake as a Lyric Poet

William Blake is a lyric poet. He was born in the neo- classical age, but the things that distinguish him from other poets of his age are the lyrical qualities of his poetry. By the lyrical qualities we understand such poetic features as subjectivity, melodiousness, imagination, description and meditation. Moreover a lyric poem is usually short and may fall into such genres as elegy, ode, ballad, sonnet etc. A lyric poem expresses a poet’s private thoughts and emotions rather than telling a story. From all these perspectives the poems of Blake in Songs of Innocence and Experience are lyrics.

The first quality that makes his poems lyrics is subjectivity. The neo-classical approach to poetry was objective. Blake on the other hand took a subjective approach. Blake was a disturbing prophet who desired social change. He was personally against all kinds of repressions, materialism, institutional corruption, racism, worship of money and hypocrisy.

Blake voiced against repression and constrains. He did not follow the neo-classical restrains of writing poem. He also expressed his hatred towards institutional and personal repressions in such poems as- The Holy Thursday, The Nurse’s Songs (Experience),

In Blake’s time many children had to depend upon charity. In his poem ‘Holy Thursday’, Blake raises his voice against such repression.

And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their as are filled with thorns
It is eternal winter there.

Blake means here that all children are angles, not scapegoats to be the butchered on the altar of the society. How can England call herself rich and fruitful land if she has hunger children waiting for food from the so-called benefactors of society?
Blake believes that children should be free and their life should be colorful. But the guardians always try to restrict them. Blake opposes such kind of restriction. In Nurse’s Song, the nurse keeps a constant watch over the children and her instincts reflect her disposition. From her angle of view, life is aimless, a useless waste of time in childhood and in old age, a shame. It has no purpose as she says:
Our spring and our day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.
She sets all her views in a depressing background such as winter, night, and dew darkness and so on. She looks back with frustration on her childhood, and instead of feeling merry she grows pale. Her ‘spring’ and “day” seem to express the agony of growing up to a regretful maturity. She is hostile and insensitive to innocence. She takes the children back home, leaving them unable to protest, to play and enjoy.
 William Blake dislikes Industrial Revolution and in his poems he focuses how the Industrial Revolution represents the devil and that it must be purged. Blake focused on child labor and prostitution-the two adverse effects of Industrialization Revolution in his poems The Chimney Sweeper and London.

Blake hated the exploitation of children's labor because of Industrial Revolution. Blake believed in the innocence of childhood pleasures. The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake expressed the difficult lives of working children. As the title reveals it, the children are cleaning chimneys all day long in unimaginable conditions. Blake gives his readers a clear understanding of the harsh conditions of these young chimney sweepers. He says:

“There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curl’d like a lamb’s back,” ( lines 5-6)

Blake focuses how badly these children are left powerless and with no escape. On another instance, the poem relates the misery felt by these children when it says:

“A little black thing among the snow/
Crying “ ‘weep, ‘weep,” in notes of woe!” (lines 1-2).

Blake is here pointing out that man is responsible for evils of society. The picture drawn by Blake is disturbing and heartbreaking at the same time.

In his poem "London," from his work Songs of Experience, Blake describes the woes of the Industrial Revolution. He describes the Thames River and the city streets as "chartered," or controlled by commercial interest. He refers to "mind-forged manacles"; he relates that every man's face contains "Marks of weakness, marks of woe"; and he discusses the "every cry of every Man" and "every Infant's cry of fear."

In “London” Blake describes a world during and after the industrial revolution in which there have been many ill-fated side effects as people move away from the traditional farming families and their beliefs.

Blake vividly portrays another worse effect of Industrial revolution, “prostitution”, in his poem “London”. A prostitute or an unwed mother is unable to rejoice in her child’s birth. It tells of a married couple looking down upon her for what she does in order to make a living. This is ironic because the business of prostitution is caused in part by the restrictions placed upon the married man. It is also ironic because the married man is what has created the need for, and use of prostitutes. The harlot curses the respectable and polite society because it is they who have created the demand for her, and then look down upon what she does. “Blights with plagues” implies that perhaps she also infects them with some sort of venereal disease. The final words of the poem, “Marriage hearse” compares marriage to death. The narrator sees marriage as another type of restriction placed upon man by society, marriage is a sort of death in man’s ability to be free to do as he wishes.
 Blake believed in equality for all men, and this is reflected in his poem. William Blake's The Little Black Boy revolves around the theme of slavery and the ideal slave's mentality. Blake wrote about a black African-American and his experience with slavery. Blake probably expressed his own feelings towards the whites' racism and suppression acts towards African-Americans through the black boy, which is the speaker of the poem.
The poem is about an African-American, who is the speaker of the poem, who remembers his childhood with his mother where she used to indoctrinate her child with the racist beliefs of slavers. The black boy has a dream, that all humans will be equal.

 Blake stands against puritan hypocrisy. Two of his poems from Songs of Experience present his views on the matter: ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ and “The Garden of Love’.

In ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, the child (Blake) is telling society that his pain is being caused by those in whom he put his trust— his parents. They abandon him and go ...to praise God & his Priest & King (Blake, 11). Perhaps they do this, because on the outside their child looks happy and they probably think that they are helping him more than anything:

‘ And because I am happy, & dance& sing
They think they have done me no injury,’

In the meantime, the church is also playing a part in his misery. How? Because it allows the parents to come inside its building to pray when they should be protecting their child from all harm:

‘They are both gone up to the church to pray
………………
………………
a heaven of our misery “

In another of his poems, ‘The Garden of Love,’ Blake portrays religion as the oppressor of human kind. Blake sees the church as an obstacle between men and God. He attacks the Priests because, instead of offering God's comfort as they were meant to do, they become like judges or police officers telling men what they can or cannot do.

“And priests in lack gowns were walking their round

And binding with briars my joys and desires.”

Blake asks society to take a second look at the way the church treats them and to realize that God cannot found among oppressions.

 All of Blake’s poem are short, some very short indeed. All are written in apparently simple style, and the most usual verse form in the rhymed quatrain. (stanza of four lines). A lyric poem is usually melodious. In many of Blake’s poem like “The Tyger” we find melodious tone.

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

For Blake “imagination” is that gift in man, which can hear the prompting’s of God, or “spiritual sensation”. ‘Introduction’ is a canonical poem of the romantic period. In it lies the key romantic element: imagination, emotion, idealism. In “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence Blake as a poet, playing his simple and innocent music attracts the attention of a muse or spirit that appears to him as a child on a cloud. The child encourages him to play a song about a “Lamb” and being impressed with the musician asks him to drop his pipe and write a book “that all may read”. In this way the spirit is asking Blake to share his inspiration with a wider audience, an audience that would not depend on his presence to experience the happiness his imagination can bring.

 Sometimes Blake asks question about creation: how can we understand a God who is capable of creating the innocence of the lamb and the fury of the tiger? The Tyger (Songs of Experiece) is Blake’s famous meditative poem. The tiger is Blake’s symbol for the “abundant life”, and for regeneration. Centrally, it Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful smmetry?

 Nature was not the central focus of Blake's poems, but it was a theme that did occur in many of his works, such as "Nurse's Song" "The Lamb", "Earth's Answer", "The Garden of Love", "To Spring" and "To the Evening Star".

In "Nurse's Song" (from Songs of Innocence), Blake describes children playing outside, enjoying nature and having the time of their lives. In this verse, time is marked by signs in the natural world. The nurse implores: "[t]hen come home, my children, the sun is gone down / And the dews of night arise. . ." (lines 5-6). Nature acts as a gentle guide for the children. Their only concept of time comes from the luminaries and the light they give. The children respond to the nurse, wanting to play until the last lights in the sky are gone. Again, scenes from nature appear.

"Besides, in the sky the little birds fly /
And the hills are all covered with sheep."


Each of his poems is a vehicle of expressing his personal emotion. It seems his art had been too adventurous and unconventional for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and we may even say he was ahead of his time.

The Healing Power of Landscapes as Shown in Wordsworth’s Nature Poems

William Wordsworth, the pioneer of the English Romantic movement, carefully studied the landscapes and showed their healing power on humans. As a poet of nature he always found a close relation between men and nature. Throughout his nature poems like Tintern Abbey, Michael and the Immortality Ode his study of nature fould full expression.

Like the many topographical or landscape poems “Tintern Abbey” describes the scene in detail, appealing to our eyes and ears — the sound of “rolling” waters, the sublime impressiveness of “steep and lofty cliffs,” and so forth.

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.


The poet is very much exalted to enjoy the natural surroundings of the place. The reference to “mountain-springs” comes with a suggestion of refreshment and because they have “a soft inland murmur’s of harmony and of seclusion. Wordsworth is here creating not merely a world- picture of a remembered sense but an image of an Eden of Peace, an Eden that is no less a mythic paradise for being a place in real country. For Wordsworth Paradise is a word that can be completely united and harmonized by mind and in the opening passage we see Wordsworth’s imagination imposing that order and harmony on the scene as he observe it.

The “steel and lofty cliffs” which impress on the mind “thoughts of more deep seclusion” at the same time “connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky.” The vertical lines of the cliffs at once enclose in their protective circle the scene in which the poet find himself and link the peace of the landscape with the profounder quiet of the heavens.

In this Eden there is of course a tree the “dark sycamore” under which the poet reposes and from which he views the human scene:-

“The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,”

The poet asserts that the “houseless woods” add a further sense of the paradise quality of life in the valley reminding us of the loneliness and shapelessness which surround it at a distance. The hermit sitting his fire, alone in his cave, is not a figure to be envied and the “vagrant dwellers” are shadow figures outside the ordered seclusion of the valley.

In the second stages of the poem, Wordsworth considers what he has gained from the memory of his first visit to the Wye Valley five years before. His recollections of the landscape have had a therapeutic effect, bringing him “tranquil restoration’ in “hours of weariness.” He also attributes to his remembrances of the Wye Valley a positive, albeit, unconscious influence upon his moral growth, an influence which has encouraged “acts/ of kindness and of love.” The memory of landscape he says has been a source of great joy to him and has acted on him as a stimulus to kind and sympathetic deeds.
He says:-

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

The “beauteous forms” have preserved him in the loneliness of the city- a loneliness which is an echo of the very different loneliness of the Hermit. The forms as they have been remembered are those of nature humanized. This memory even in the noise of the city and in his loneliness, reminds him of man’s capacity for a harmonious relationship with other men and with the world around him.
Wordsworth continues that the recollection of the “forms” of valley creates in him a mood and a physical condition that are propitious to profound thought. What is described here is the state of physical harmony and mental quiet which may for example be induced by certain kind of music and in which it is possible for the mind to become usually contemplative and active. It seems that the remembered order and harmony of the Wye valley serve as a reassurance to the mind in its search for a similar order and harmony in the Universe as a whole. The mood described is apparent:-

…….the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:

Nature provides solace for man. It lightens his burden of humanity. The beauties of nature lull the human passion in a state of repose so that the poet may “become a living soul” a pure soul which can penetrate the corporeal forms of things and see into the life of things”. It is through a power in nature then that the poet transcends nature’s material forms and contemplates a higher more divine state of being. He develops an extraordinary insight as a result of the tranquilizing influence of the nature. By means of this insight he is in a position to understand the meaning, purpose and significance of the Universe.

In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Through the exercise of memory pleasurable experiences of the past are still available to him. Moreover these experiences often have their most profound effect after they have been absorbed and contemplated. Thus remembering the harmonious form of the Wye Valle induces a mood in which the essential harmony of all things can be perceived.


The same effect of landscape on poet’s mind is expressed in the poem”Immortality Ode”. The speaker starts the poem saying wistfully that there was a time when all of nature seemed dreamlike to him, “apparelled in celestial light,” and that that time is past;

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.



Then, he says that he still sees the rainbow, and that the rose is still lovely; the moon looks around the sky with delight, and starlight and sunshine are each beautiful. He can still appreciate the loveliness of the rainbow, the moon light, he sun shine etc, but the divine glory which the possessed has now departed.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.


While listening to the birds sings in springtime and watching the young lambs leap and play, he was stricken with a thought of grief. The sense of loss naturally makes Wordsworth sad.

while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:


But the sound of nearby waterfalls, the echoes of the mountains, and the gusting of the winds restored him to strength. He exhorts a shepherd boy to shout and play around him. He consoles himself with the thought that now nature has a deep meaning and significance for him which I did not have when he was a child. He may loss his childhood innocence, but he is thankful to his childhood which helped him understand his close affinity to immortality.

We find the touch of landscape from beginning to end in ‘Michael’.
“Michael” begins with Wordsworth taking us to the mystical place near Greenhead Ghyll, where Michael and his family live.

Wordsworth vividly describes the land on which Michael lives, making it seem like paradise. Michael lives in a solitary place in the valley among the high mountains. There is a small river and by the side of that small river there lie some uncut stones.

“Upon the Forest-side in Grasmere Vale
There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name.”

The story in the poem is very simple and it is connected with these pieces of stones. Michael is then described as a shepherd who has worked the land all his life. Michael faces many storms in the company of the flock of sheep. He can understand the meanings of the winds. He can easily understand when a storm is coming. Michael has a deep love for his fields, rocks, stones and nature.
Hence he had learn'd the meaning of all winds,
Of blasts of every tone, and often-times
When others heeded not

Michael, his wife and his son are found to be busy in domestic affairs along with the sheepdogs. They work from sunrise to till sunset. The son remains busy repairing the plough of the sickle.

Wordsworth describes the cottage and the household with picturesque language. The cottage is on a high ground and during the evening the housewife lights the lamp. The house is named “The Evening Star.”

Down from the cicling by the chimney's edge,
Which in our ancient uncouth country style
…………………………………….
………………………………………..
Of day grew dim, the House-wife hung a lamp;
An aged utensil, which had perform'd
Service beyond all others of its kind.


As the poem continues we watch Luke grow up. At the age of five he is given a shepherds staff from his father. In the following lines Michael is forced to pay back a debt which he owes, and the only way he could do this is to either sell his land or have Luke work off the debt in the city. Before he goes his Father takes him to the brook with the many stones and asks him to lay the cornerstone for the Sheepfold. He wants him to come back one day and finish what he has started, and to leave a permanent mark on the land. He hopes that he will get back his property and built the sheepfold with collected stones.

The son is ruined. Soon Michael dies and his wife follows him. After some time the cottage is pulled down and the unfinished sheepfold is no longer seen. The Evening Star vanished and there emerged only the oak tree.

The Cottage which was nam'd The Evening Star
Is gone, the ploughshare has been through the ground
On which it stood; great changes have been wrought
In all the neighbourhood, yet the Oak is left
That grew beside their Door; and the remains
Of the unfinished Sheep-fold may be seen
Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Gill.



From the above discussion we can say that Wordsworth is a landscape architect. He is a rounded and eminent practitioner of the art of landscape.

William Blake’s Criticism of Society in his Poems

William Blake, as a critic of his time, took an active role in exposing the corruption taking place in his society. He also describes the woes and injustices of civilized society. According to Blake, men are short sighted and blind and they are ignorant of the spiritual nature of life. In this role Blake appears as a critic of the age and of contemporary condition.

William Blake wrote about how the industrial revolution represents the devil and that it must be purged. Blake focused on child labor and prostitution-the two adverse effects of Industrialization Revolution.

Blake hated the exploitation of children's labor in the Industrial Revolution. Blake believed in the innocence of childhood pleasures. The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake expressed the difficult lives of working children. As the title reveals it, the children are cleaning chimneys all day long in unimaginable conditions. Blake gives his readers a clear understanding of the harsh conditions of these young chimney sweepers. He says:

“There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curl’d like a lamb’s back,” ( lines 5-6)

We can see how badly these children are left powerless and with no escape. On another instance, the poem relates the misery felt by these children when it says:

“A little black thing among the snow/
Crying “ ‘weep, ‘weep,” in notes of woe!” (lines 1-2).

The picture drawn by Blake is disturbing and heartbreaking at the same time. Blake is here pointing out that man is responsible for evils of society.

In his poem "London," from his work Songs of Experience, Blake describes the woes of the Industrial Revolution. He describes the Thames River and the city streets as "chartered," or controlled by commercial interest. He refers to "mind-forged manacles"; he relates that every man's face contains "Marks of weakness, marks of woe"; and he discusses the "every cry of every Man" and "every Infant's cry of fear."

“London” describes a world during and after the industrial revolution in which there have been many ill-fated side effects as people move away from the traditional farming families and their beliefs.

Prostitution is one of the worse effects of Industrial revolution. A prostitute or an unwed mother is unable to rejoice in her child’s birth. It tells of a married couple looking down upon her for what she does in order to make a living. This is ironic because the business of prostitution is caused in part by the restrictions placed upon the married man. It is also ironic because the married man is what has created the need for, and use of prostitutes. The harlot curses the respectable and polite society because it is they who have created the demand for her, and then look down upon what she does. “Blights with plagues” implies that perhaps she also infects them with some sort of venereal disease. The final words of the poem, “Marriage hearse” compares marriage to death. The narrator sees marriage as another type of restriction placed upon man by society, marriage is a sort of death in man’s ability to be free to do as he wishes.

He also criticizes the institutions that remained silent in the faces of injustice. ‘Holy Thursday’ is an indictment of a society which allows children to depend upon charity.

And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their as are filled with thorns
It is eternal winter there.

Blake means here that all children are angles, not scapegoats to be the butchered on the altar of the society. How can England call herself rich and fruitful land if she has hunger children waiting for food from the so-called benefactors of society?

Blake stands against puritan hypocrisy. Two of his poems from Songs of Experience present his views on the matter: ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ and “The Garden of Love’.

In ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, The child is telling society that his pain is being caused by those in whom he put his trust— his parents. They abandon him and go ...to praise God & his Priest & King (Blake, 11). Perhaps they do this, because on the outside their child looks happy and they probably think that they are helping him more than anything:

‘ And because I am happy, & dance& sing
They think they have done me no injury,’

In the meantime, the church is also playing a part in his misery. How? Because it allows the parents to come inside its building to pray when they should be protecting their child from all harm:

‘They are both gone up to the church to pray
………………
………………
a heaven of our misery “

In another of his poems, ‘The Garden of Love,’ Blake portrays religion as the oppressor of human kind. Blake sees the church as an obstacle between men and God. He attacks the Priests because, instead of offering God's comfort as they were meant to do, they become like judges or police officers telling men what they can or cannot do.

“And priests in lack gowns were walking their round

And binding with briars my joys and desires.”

Blake asks society to take a second look at the way the church treats them and to realize that God cannot found among oppressionists.

In the poem “A divine Image’ the poet says that cruelty, jealousy, terror and secrecy are human qualities. Cruelty may be seen in the heart of man, jealousy may be seen in the face of man. Terror is visible in the human shape which we cal divine. Secrecy is the dress or the garment which human beings wear.

In conclusion, it can be easily seen how Blake stood against the suffering of human kind and used his poems to expose the corruption of the world that surrounded him. He clearly criticized the society and hoped that people would take action to change things for the better. The problems in Blake's society aren't very different than the ones in today's world. People should take a good look around them and take action to better their surroundings.