Discuss Hughes’ use of Dreams and occult Symbolism

Discuss Hughes’ use of Dreams and occult Symbolism

Ted Hughes is a highly symbolic and mythical poet who dreams and animal imagery have been traced with symbolic notes. Almost each and every thing mentioned in Ted’s poetry is symbolic. A symbol is an object which stands for something else as Dove symbolizes Peace. Similarly, Blake’s tiger symbolizes creative energy; Shelley’s wind symbolizes inspiration; Ted Hughes’s Hawk symbolizes terrible destructiveness at the heart of nature. There is a difference between an image and symbol, the former evokes a picture and the latter has wide range of connotations. Hughes’ poetry permeates with animal imagery which serves as a symbolic purpose. Ted’s poem ‘Thought-Fox’ is the best example of symbol.

            “I imagine the midnight moments’ forest:
            Something else is alive
            Beside the clock’s loneliness”

The Thought-Fox describes, in an indirect or oblique manner, the process by which a poem gets written. What a poet needs to write a poem is inspiration. A poet waits for the onrush of an idea through his brain. And, of course, he also needs solitude (loneliness) and silence around him. Solitude and silence are, however, only contributory circumstances. They constitute a favourable environment, while the poem itself comes out of the poet’s head which has been invaded, as it were, by an idea or thought. The idea or thought takes shape in his head like a fox entering a dark forest and then coming out of it suddenly. The fox embodies the thought which a poet expresses in his poem. The fox here serves as a symbol. Hughes’s sensibility is pagan in the original sense; and his poetry is as suggestive of the lair as it is of the library. He feels greatly attracted by ancient mythologies, Oriental as well as Western, though he makes use of those ancient myths for his own purpose. He certainly does not believe literally in the ancient myths, but he finds a great value in them and, throughout his poetry, tries to show his readers where the value of these ancient myths lies.

            “As if we flew slowly, their formations
            Lifting us toward some dazzle of blessing”

As a poet, Hughes believes that he must make “secret flights” to go back in time in order to be able to probe his own mind through his knowledge of the past consciousness of the human race. He believes that the principal method of making such secret flights is through dreams which provide an insight into the unconscious mind and which have a collective meaning when they have mythical contents. Hughes invests his poem with a dream-like quality because dreams reveal the unconscious mind just as the shamanistic procedures do that. The Thought-Fox is a dream-like poem, a reverie on a cold winter’s night. The same is the case with the poem called ‘That Morning’. What is even more remarkable is his ability to adjust his style to the purpose. Sometimes, as in “The Thought-Fox” he can convey his meaning and tone through the use of diction. At other times, he uses animals as symbols; but his symbols are occult and perceived only through senses. This occult symbolism is pronounced in the following lines:

The subjects he prefers to write on are, however, several: man in relation to the animal world, man and nature, war and death. Hughes’s animal poems are among the best in his work, and among the finest in the whole range of English poetry. The imagery in these poems has its own appeal. The imagery in these poems is at once graphic and realistic; and the language which Hughes has employed in describing the various animals shows a striking originality and felicity. The emphasis in this imagery is on the vitality or energy of the animals concerned and also on the violence, the fierceness, and the cruelty of most of those animals.  The Thought-Fox is also partly an animal poem, in which the poet’s inspiration is compared to a fox making a sudden and silent entry into his head. In this case, instinct replaces intellect. In the poem ‘Chaucer’ Ted says:

            “You declaimed Chaucer
            To a field of cows”

Where the image of ‘cow’ symbolizes the so-called critics and those scholastic critics whose only purpose is to find faults with or find pleasurism in literature. The cows have similar resemblance to the Hawk. In the poem ‘Hawk Roosting’ the poet does not praise the hawk so much as he denigrates man by comparison. The hawk is here seen as vastly superior to man who is unable to accept Nature for what it is and, instead, tries to tame it by giving it philosophical names.  Elsewhere, cows are the symbol of nature and the purity one may wish to enjoy:

            “Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath”

Thus, he uses images, metaphors and realistic imagery for a symbolic purpose; but purpose seems to be more and more occult. Alliteration and syntax structure are one of the devices for Ted to achieve the purpose.  The paradoxical situations are in the hawk are also vividly presented.  Hughes’s technique of writing poems includes one very striking and highly commendable quality which is to be found in almost every poem that he wrote. This quality is the structural unity of his poems. Almost every poem by him is well-knit, compact, and self-sufficient as the poems discussed above.  Hughes has the ability to capture the reality of things in words; and he has displayed this ability in his poem ‘The Though-Fox’ and ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’.

 Conclusively, it is established that Ted Hughes’ is a highly symbolic poet who uses an individual style and technique. Although, his symbols are occult, yet they are unique and cinematic. Especially, the symbolic use of Hawk and that of Fox gets so much stamped on the mind of the reader that it is difficult to forget it.  No wonder that his poetry, like the poetry of every modern poet, is a tough nut to crack, because the modern poet tends to be more subtle and more elusive in the expression of his ideas than the traditional poet (like Thomas Hardy). But otherwise too, poets are the seers, sages, philosophers, and Magi of the world, and their techniques of expression, like their modes of thought, are often complex, involved, intricate, and sometimes even baffling and bewildering. In any case, Hughes’s work has considerably enriched English poetry and enlarged its scope and its bounds.

Discuss the major themes and subject matter of Ted Hughes’ poetry

Discuss the major themes and subject matter of Ted Hughes’ poetry

Ted Hughes is a very important modern British poet. As a poet, he commands full individual technical superiority over most of his contemporaries. He understands modern sensibility and contemporary issues; but writes in his own perspective. He creates before us worlds which delight and instruct us and elevate us emotionally, intellectually and esthetically. Unlike some modern poets so believe that a poem should not mean but be, Ted Hughes is profoundly concerned with the subject matter of his poetry.

The major theme of his poetry is of course man, that is, the question of human existence, man’s relation with the universe, with the natural world and with his own inner self. He is awfully serious about this last aspect of the problem of being, namely, the problem of human consciousness.  His subjects range from animals, landscapes, war; the problem posed by the inner world of modern man, to the philosophical and metaphysical queries about the status of man in this universe. His moods and methods of presentation reveal a similar variety.  Ted Hughes says about his vigor and vitality (usually associated with violence):

            “Any form of violence—any form of vehement activity-invokes the        bigger energy. To accept the energy, and find method of turning it to good. The old method is the only one. My poems are not about violence but vitality. Animals are not violent; they are so much more completely controlled than me”

The main theme in his poetry is this energy which has to be turned into a positive force. Violence is misunderstood in his poetry. Most of Hughes’s poetry can be said to be an attempt to negotiate with these energies as we see his argument in the case of Hawk. This poem is often criticized on the ground that the hawk is a mouthpiece of fascism. What is forgotten, however, is Hughes’s assertion that the Hawk symbolizes “Nature thinking.” Secondly, the point of view in this poem is the hawks; that is to say, the hawk is as mortal and part of creation as any other creature, violent or timid.  Right from his childhood, Ted Hughes has been interested in animals. When his parents lived in the Calder valley, Ted Hughes had a chance to see the world of the animals from close quarters. Hughes learnt the first lesson that animals were by and large victims. The wild world of the animals was at the mercy of the ordered human world. Yet, as Hughes realized and emphasized in his poetry, the human world was fascinated by the world of the animals because it had pushed into the unconscious what the animal world still possessed: vat, untapped energies. As depicted in ‘That Morning’:

            “Two gold bears came down and swam like men…

            Eating pierced salmon off their talons”

Here, the untamed natural impulses have been beautifully externalized as the two bears representing the two visitors to the lake.  He writes violence chiefly of savage animals, but violence also in human nature. Indeed, violence is one of the dominant themes in Hughes’s poetry; and for this reason he has often been regarded as a poet of violence. But these poems of violence by Hughes are certainly genuine poetry; and we certainly enjoy reading them. And it is not only the sadistic persons among us who would appreciate these poems. Even the normal reader can find a certain degree of pleasure in them, especially because they are perfectly realistic, and very vivid, in their depiction of brutality and cruelty. But not violence alone but treats nature in a unique way as in:

            “A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and

            the clank of a bucket –”

Nature is one of the most prevalent scenes in his poetry. In a way Hughes’s poetry continues the tradition of nature poetry. But unlike Wordsworth who found Nature a “nurse, guide and guardian,” and Tennyson who found Nature “red in tooth and Claw” Hughes tries to take both the Wordsworthian and Tennyson approaches to Nature. In poems like “Full Moon and Little Frieda” Hughes can describe Nature to continue the Wordsworthian tradition, but in poems like “Hawk Roosting” the “That Morning” Hughes recognizes the powerful, vital, violent and predacious Nature without commenting on it.  It doesn’t mean that he copies their style. One of the causes underlying Hughes’s greatness as a modern poet is his maturity and originality of style. Hughes has experiment­ed with several different styles, ranging from the Wordsworthian and ‘their metaphysical to that of the modern East European poets. In each case, he has made the style his own as in ‘Thought-Fox’.

            “The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
            The page is printed”

He can convey his meaning and tone through the use of diction. As in the above extract, as soon as the thought-fox springs into action, the vowels are short: “brilliantly, concentratedly.” The action reaches its climax in the last line which is virtually monosyllabic: “And the page is printed.” The poem thus shows a fine blending of vowels and consonants so as to provide a fusion of sense and sound. At other times, he uses animals as symbols. In each case, there is a remarkable mastery over the medium, whether it is to depict a scene, portray an animal, tell a story, or present a one-sided vision as that of Hawk.  Even the theme of violence is handled with the lexical entities. Ted Hughes is primarily concerned with material reality not simply the reality of a superficial urbanity but the one that governs larger questions of life and death, Nature and the animal world, and above all, the inner world of man as in ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’:

            “A dark river of blood, many boulders,
            Balancing unspilled milk”

Instead of shutting his eyes to the metaphysical and spiritual questions about life, Hughes tries to go to their bottom. He brings round that blood can be spilled as mercilessly as milk and water. The reality is depicted in the ‘boulders’ troubles of life. Like Blake he shows a fourfold vision which progresses from knowledge of the surfaces seen from a singular and therefore one-sided perspectives to the mature philosophic perspective which goes to the heart of the matter. He finds a close kinship between the ambivalent but powerful forces within man and the inscrutable and terrible working of the world of Nature. Equally remarkable is the fact that Hughes has treated of many modern concerns, like war and violence, with an awareness which is lacking in many of his contemporary poets.  His poetry evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in a specific emotional response through language that he chooses and arranges for its meaning, sound, rhythm and a purpose.

Theme of Mercenary in Pride and Prejudice

Theme of Mercenary in Pride and Prejudice

Theme of mercenary or money marriage plays a significant role to the extent that without this theme; the novel is either incomprehensible or prosaic. Although the theme of mercenary resonates through almost all the major characters; we cannot take it to be Austen’s view point. She is against; not for mercenary marriages.

19th century England had some serious social problems left over from the heyday of Royalty and Nobility.  One of the most significant of these was  the tendency to marry for money.  In this basic equation,  a person sought a spouse based on the dowry receivable and their allowance.  This process went both ways; a beautiful woman might be able to snag a rich husband, or a charring handsome man could woo a rich young girl.  In these marriages, money was the only consideration.  Love was left out, with a feeling that it would develop as the years went by.  In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen comments that marriage in her time is a financial contract, where love is strictly a matter of chance.  Lady Catherine states the fact that happiness in marriage is strictly a  matter of chance.  This holds true in the conception of marriage held in the novel.  All of the marriages in the book formed under the bonds of money rather than the bonds of love end up unhappy or unsuccessful.  The whole novel outlines attempts to dance around love for the combination of a wealthy person with an attractive person.  

Before Austen can chart the difficult process through which the heroine of Pride and Prejudice becomes a skilled player of the marriage-gambling game, however, the novelist must establish the association between money and marriage. She accomplishes this throughout the book by mixing the languages of love and economics. The novel's celebrated first sentence presents an example of this type of punning: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife". The line's comic effect derives primarily from the incongruity between the lofty diction of the phrase "truth universally acknowledged" and the baldly mercenary sentiment with which the sentence ends. The humorous conflation of philosophic and monetary speculation continues through the first and into the second chapter, as Mr. Bennet misses no opportunity to amuse himself with repeated puns that portray the arrival of the Bingley party at Netherfield as a serendipitous investment opportunity for the families in the village. When, for example, Mr. Bennet tells his wife that he needn't call on Bingley, since their neighbor Mrs. Long has promised to introduce the Bennet girls to the rich young man at an upcoming party, Mrs. Bennet replies that Mrs. Long is a "selfish, hypocritical woman" who will do no such thing since she has "two nieces of her own" . In that case, replies Mr. Bennet, Mrs. Bennet herself should introduce the girls, justifying such a breach of decorum on the sound financial principle that he who hesitates is lost: "if we do not venture, somebody else will; and after all Mrs. Long and her nieces must stand their chance" . All financial ventures, from the stock market to marriage, entail an element of risk that one must expect and for which one must plan.

The first line of Pride and Prejudice, “It is a universally acknowledged fact that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”, sets the tone for the rest of the novel.  We interpret it to mean that a  wealthy man either actively pursues a wife based on his knowledge that no  one would turn down a wealthy suitor, or attractive women use their beauty to their advantage to attract a rich husband.  Confident in his knowledge of his own wealth and magnificence, Darcy’s less than romantic first proposal to Elizabeth is a good example of the first of these truths.  Darcy marches into the room, and after stating all the reasons why a wealthy man such as himself should never marry a “socially inferior” person such as Elizabeth, he proposes to her.  He is totally confident in the knowledge that no woman would turn down marriage to a person as rich as himself, no matter how obnoxious he is.  He seems outrightly stunned when Elizabeth refuses him. This refusal shatters his conception of reality, showing him that money is not all powerful.  This is what seems to throw him head over heels in love with Elizabeth.

Mrs. Bennett is the embodiment of the second part of the rule.  Her marriage was based on the principal of financial gain, and she desires her daughters to be the same.  She was able to attract Mr. Bennett, a seemingly sensible and self controlling man, by, “keeping her mouth shut and smiling a lot.”  Basically stated, she entered their marriage under false pretenses.  She had no real love for him, only a desire to gain financially.  Every action taken by her in the novel is directly intended to undermine her daughters marriages,  guiding them toward financial gain.  She is furious when Elizabeth turns down Collins, as her marriage to him would mean the estate would stay in the family.  She found Darcy most disagreeable, but would have been furious if Elizabeth had told her the she had turned Darcy's marriage proposal down.  

Charlotte Lucas represents the group entirely left out of this equation. She has neither extreme beauty nor wealth.  She can not even attract a husband through her wit as Elizabeth does,  and so she is basically without hope for inclusion.  Elizabeth is astonished when Charlotte accepts Mr. Collin’s marriage proposal, as she does not understand fully Charlottes predicament.  She can not hope for a wealthy and handsome husband like Elizabeth and Jane can, as she does not have their particular assets.  She can hope at best for security and a degree of comfort. 

In Ch.26 we read that Wickham has switched his affections from Elizabeth to Miss King because she has suddenly acquired 10,000 pounds. In Ch.27 When Mrs.Gardiner teases Elizabeth that Wickham who till then was her admirer  is "mercenary" Elizabeth replies:"Pray, my dear aunt, what is the difference in matrimonial affairs, between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where does discretion end, and avarice begin?" Money no doubt is certainly necessary for a successful and happy marriage. But the vital question is 'how much?': In Ch.33 Col.Fitzwilliam Darcy,the younger son of an earl,  a very rich charming young man, subtly hints that he cannot marry Elizabeth:"Our habits of expense make us too dependent, and there are not many in my rank of life who can afford to marry without some attention to money."  to which Elizabeth playfully sugggests that his price would perhaps  not be "above 50,000 pounds."  In Ch.19 Collins threatens Elizabeth to submit to his proposal by emphasizing her impoverished status:"one thousand pounds in the 4 per cents, which will not be yours till after your mother's decease, is all that you may ever be entitled to." The novel is a heart rending cry for the freedom of young women from the clutches of mercenary men who toyed with their happiness : "Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance."

Mr. Wickham's quick transferral of his affections to Miss King after she has acquired 10,000 pounds provides important insight into his true character. While Elizabeth had clearly been his favorite, Wickham must have realized that her social position gave him little chance of being able to marry her. Of course, this knowledge did not prevent him from forming an attachment to her in the first place. Because he paid no attention at all to Miss King before she inherited the money, his motives for beginning to show a preference for her must be purely mercenary. Elizabeth does not seem to find fault with him for his actions, however, even Mrs. Gardiner points out the purely mercenary reasons for his actions. Having been sufficiently flattered by his preference for her and having formed a positive judgment of him, it seems that even in the face of such strong evidence she is unwilling to rethink her positive judgment of him. It is ironic that while Elizabeth is unable to make excuses for her good friend Charlotte for her choice to marry based on financial concerns, she sees no problem in Wickham's feigning attraction to a woman simply because her sizeable inheritance.

Elizabeth learns from Lydia that Mr. Wickham has given up his thought of marrying Miss King also. This and the other facts show Mr. Wickham to be an utterly unreliable kind of man. When Elizabeth tells Jane the true facts about Mr. Wickham, Jane too feels shocked and says: "Wickham so very bad! It is almost past belief." Mr. Wickham provides further evidence of his being a rascal and a villain by eloping with Lydia. The news of Lydia's elopement with Mr. Wickham comes as a great shock to the whole Bennet family, and especially to Elizabeth. It is true that much of the blame for this elopement rests upon Lydia herself; but Mr. Wickham cannot be exonerated. According to the information supplied by Mr. Wickham's friend Mr. Denny, Mr. Wickham had no intention to marry Lydia. Thus, Mr. Wickham's real purpose in running away Lydia had been only to seduce her and to satisfy his lust for her. If Mr. Wickham does marry Lydia ultimately, it is because of the role played by Mr. Darcy in the whole affair. Mr. Wickham states certain terms and conditions on which he is prepared to marry Lydia; and Mr. Darcy goes out of his way to fulfil those terms and conditions. Of course, Mr. Bennet too has to satisfy certain conditions laid down by Mr. Wickham, but the major role in bringing about the marriage is that of Mr. Darcy. Mr. Wickham also reveals at this time that he had incurred certain debts which are also now paid by Mr. Darcy. Thus, Mr. Wickham shows himself to be a mercenary man, besides being unscrupulous in his relations with girls.

Wickham's next victim is Lydia. It is rather difficult to explain his motives here, for Lydia has neither money, nor beauty, nor brains. And Wickham does not love her at all. The fact is that his gambling and his reckless extravagance involve him in a number of undischarged debts of honour, and he is forced to leave the neighbourhood. The elopement is brought on by the strength of Lydia's love for him. He has absolutely no intentions of marrying her. Mrs. Gardiner's letter to Elizabeth clearly reveals that, even after elopement, he cherishes the hope of more effectually making his fortune by marriage in some other country. His willingness to take Lydia along is either a pure piece of rakishness or an attempt to blackmail Mr. Bennet and extort as much money as possible. However, Darcy’s intervention persuaded intervention promises him substantial immediate relief and he is persuaded to marry Lydia. His conduct in this episode betrays his extreme selfishness, his mercenariness and venality, and his utter baseness and want of principle. In pursuing his selfish aims he is thoroughly calculating - as in the careful plan to gain Georgiana Darcy's money as well as revenge on Darcy. In most of his pursuits he is thoroughly mercenary, as in his pursuit of a wealthy wife and his readiness to marry Lydia when offered enough money. His style of living is debauched: he likes gambling to excess and drinking, and his sexual morals are weak or non-existent. He is totally lacking in honour, and runs away from paying gambling debts, feels no guilt about the social stigma which will attach to Lydia after she has run away with him, and shows no intention of marrying her. Nor on his return to Longbourn after the marriage does he show any shame. At the end, we feel that in marrying Lydia he gets the fate he deserves.

In conclusion, the essential statement made about marriage in Pride and Prejudice is that a marriage for money will end up unsuccessful. At the same time, a marriage based purely on the means of passion and love alone will also be doomed to failure. A balance must be met. Balance doesn’t necessarily have to be equal, but must be present in order for a marriage to be successful. This is proven in the novel Pride and Prejudice, by examples of unsuccessful marriages formed for money, and successful marriages formed by a combination of love and security.

Compare and Contrast William Blake’s Holy Thursday (I) of Innocence with Holy Thursday (II) of Experience.

Compare and Contrast William Blake’s Holy Thursday (I) of Innocence with Holy Thursday (II) of Experience.

The two poems: Holy Thursday I, II reflect Blake’s theory of contrariness. The tile of the poems refers to the Thursday before Easter Sunday, observed by Christians in commemoration of Christ's Last Supper in which the ceremony of the washing of the feet is performed: the celebrant washes the feet of 12 people to commemorate Christ's washing of his disciples' feet. In England a custom survives of giving alms to the poor.

So the title has religious significance. Both the poems deal with the same theme; but their approach to the theme is different; the first being light and ironic and the second being more savage and direct. I first analyse Holy Thursday (I) and then Holy Thursday (II) and finally, I will compare and contrast both the poems.

“Till into the high dome of Paul's they

like Thames' waters flow.”

The poem's (Holy Thursday I) dramatic setting refers to a traditional Charity School service at St. Paul's Cathedral. The first stanza captures the movement of the children from the schools to the church, likening the lines of children to the Thames River, which flows through the heart of London: the children are carried along by the current of their innocent faith. In the second stanza, the metaphor for the children changes. First they become "flowers of London town." This comparison emphasizes their beauty and fragility; it undercuts the assumption that these destitute children are the city's refuse and burden, rendering them instead as London's fairest and finest. Thus Blake emphasizes their innocence and beauty in Holy Thursday I. Next the children are described as resembling lambs in their innocence and meekness, as well as in the sound of their little voices. The image transforms the character of humming "multitudes," into something heavenly and sublime. The lamb metaphor links the children to Christ and reminds the reader of Jesus's special tenderness and care for children. As the children begin to sing in the third stanza, they are no longer just weak and mild; the strength of their combined voices raised toward God evokes something more powerful and puts them in direct contact with heaven. The simile for their song is first given as "a mighty wind" and then as "harmonious thunderings." The beadles, under whose authority the children live, are eclipsed in their aged pallor by the internal radiance of the children. Thus the ‘guardians’ are beneath the children. The final line advises compassion for the poor. Blake’s basic aim in this poem is to emphasize the heavenliness and innocent or the children. The beginning of  Holy Thursday (I) is transformed into Holy Thursday II as:

“Is that trembling cry a song?   

Can it be a song of joy?

Holy Thursday II in contrast begins with a series of questions: how holy is the sight of children living in misery in a prosperous country? Might the children's "cry," as they sit assembled in St. Paul's Cathedral on Holy Thursday, really be a song? "Can it be a song of joy?" In the first stanza, we learn that whatever care these children receive is minimal and grudgingly bestowed. The "cold and usurous hand" that feeds them is motivated more by self-interest than by love and pity. Moreover, this "hand" metonymically represents not just the daily guardians of the orphans, but the city of London as a whole: the entire city has a civic responsibility to these most helpless members of their society, yet it delegates or denies this obligation. Here the children must participate in a public display of joy that poorly reflects their actual circumstances, but serves rather to reinforce the self-righteous complacency of those who are supposed to care for them. The song that had sounded so majestic in the Songs of Innocence shrivels, here, to a "trembling cry." In the first poem, the parade of children found natural symbolization in London's mighty river. Here, however, the children and the natural world conceptually connect via a strikingly different set of images: the failing crops and sunless fields symbolize the wasting of a nation's resources and the public's neglect of the future. The thorns, which line their paths, link their suffering to that of Christ. They live in an ‘eternal winter’, where they experience neither physical comfort nor the warmth of love.

Holy Thursday I is meek and lenient in tone; but the poem calls upon the reader to be more critical than the speaker is: we are asked to contemplate the true meaning of Christian pity, and to contrast the institutionalized charity of the schools with the love of which God--and innocent children--are capable. Moreover, the visual picture given in the first two stanzas contains a number of unsettling aspects: the mention of the children's clean faces suggests that they have been tidied up for this public occasion; that their usual state is quite different. The public display of love and charity conceals the cruelty to which impoverished children were often subjected. Moreover, the orderliness of the children's march and the ominous "wands" (or rods) of the beadles suggest rigidity, regimentation, and violent authority rather than charity and love. Lastly, the tempestuousness of the children's song, as the poem transitions from visual to aural imagery, carries a suggestion of divine vengeance as in these lines:

“Then cherish pity, lest you drive
an angel from your door.”

In the Innocence version, Blake described the public appearance of charity school children in St. Paul's Cathedral In "experienced" version, however, he critiques rather than praises the charity of the institutions responsible for hapless children. The speaker entertains questions about the children as victims of cruelty and injustice, some of which the earlier poem implied. The rhetorical technique of the poem is to pose a number of suspicious questions that receive indirect, yet quite censoriously toned answers as in:

“Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land”

The question may be asked which of the two "Holy Thursday" poems states the right attitude. According to John Beer, a famous critic the innocent poem displays greater insight, in spite of the greater worldly wisdom, and in spite of the superior moral interest, shown in the experienced poem. The innocent speaker, says this critic, sees more of the scene than the experienced one. The speaker in the experienced poem is so anxious to assert his moral ideas that the scene in St. Paul's becomes an excuse for a moral sermon rather than a situation he can give attention to. And John Beer concludes: "The innocent song ends on a positive note without preaching a sermon, while the experienced speaker preaches a sermon that is negative in tone, being full of moral anxiety but destructive of moral obligation." With his "Holy Thursday" of Experience", Blake clarifies his view of the hypocrisy of formalized religion and its claimed acts of charity. He exposes the established church's self-congratulatory hymns as a sham that the sound of the children is only a trembling cry.

William Blake’s A Poison Tree: Critique and Appraisal

William Blake’s A Poison Tree: Critique and Appraisal

Human beings, along with the ability to reason and question, possess the capacity to hate, and yet also to forgive. Unfortunately, forgiving someone is not always as easy as holding a grudge against them and this lack of control over one’s actions is inherent to human nature. In “A poison tree”, William Blake critically discusses these two opposing forces, uncovering the inherent weakness in humans, and the effects of these innate flaws.

Through the use of extended metaphors and vivid imagery, Blake symbolically portrays this fundamental flaw through the poem. The central theme in the poem is hatred and anger, dominating much of the author’s thoughts. Blake expresses this through the introduction of a clever parallelism - the treatment of anger between a friend and a foe. Through this, Blake emphasizes the nature of anger – while expressing and letting go of wrath ends it, suppression nurtures it.  Blake startles the reader with the clarity of the poem, and with metaphors that can apply to many instances of life. A Poison Tree is an allegory. The tree here represents repressed wrath; the water represents fear; the apple is symbolic of the fruit of the deceit which results from repression. This deceit gives rise to the speaker's action in laying a death-trap for his enemy. The deeper meaning of the poem is that aggressive feelings, if suppressed, almost certainly destroy personal relationships.

“And it grew both day and night
Till it bore an apple bright”

Blake further symbolizes this in the next two stanzas. He appears to metaphor the repression of anger and hatred to ‘a poison tree’, thus giving it an identity. The personification in “A Poison Tree” exists both as a means by which the poem's metaphors are revealed, supported, and as a way for Blake to forecast the greater illustration of the wrath. The wrath the speaker feels is not directly personified as a tree, but as something that grows slowly and bears fruit. In the opening stanza the speaker states, “My wrath did grow.” The speaker later describes the living nature of the wrath as one which, “grew both day and night,” and, “bore an apple bright.” This comparison by personification of wrath to a tree illustrates the speaker's idea that, like the slow and steady growth of a tree, anger and wrath gradually accumulate and form just as mighty and deadly as a poisoned tree.

“And I water' d it in fears,          
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles”

To understand the metaphorical sense of the poem, one must first examine the title, “A Poison Tree,” which alerts the reader that some type of metaphor will stand to dominate the poem. In the second stanza, Blake employs several metaphors that reflect the growing and nurturing of a tree which compare to the feeding of hate and vanity explored by the speaker. The verses, “And I watered it …with my tears” show how the tears life lead an object of destruction. The speaker goes further to say, “And I sunned it with smiles” describing not only false intentions, but the processing of “sunning”, giving nutrients to a plant so that it may not only grow and live, but flourish. In both of these metaphors, the basic elements for a tree to survive, water and sunlight are shown in human despair and sadness.

Blake called the original draft of "A Poison Tree" "Christian Forbearance," suggesting that what is meant to appear as a gentle attitude is often a mask for disdain and anger. Furthermore, Blake believed that the attitudes of piety that adherents of conventional Christianity were taught to maintain actually led to hypocrisy, causing people to pretend to be friendly and accepting when they were not. The righteousness that the conventional religion prescribed, Blake believed, allowed people to hide evil intent and to perform evil deeds, such as stifling the healthy growth of children, under the cover of appearing virtuous.

“And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole

In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree”

The religious context of the poem is also evident in two metaphorical allusions made by the speaker towards the end of the poem. Blake, being a religious visionary, has also criticized the views and actions of Christianity. This is evident in the symbol of the ‘poison tree’, which can be seen to make direct biblical reference to the tree of knowledge, representing the evil existing within man. Thus, as the garden is symbolic of the Garden of Eden, the apple is symbolic of apple which brought Adam and eve to their demise. It is the evil and poison that is bared from anger, the fruit of the poison tree. As in the biblical story, the apple here is beautiful on the outside, while poisonous and deadly underneath. By presenting the apple, Black is symbolic of the Serpent, maliciously deceiving his foe and bringing his demise. The serpent in Black is his weakness, and just like he, all humans have this inherent flaw inside of them. Black uses this to criticize Christian forgiveness, expressing that while Christians believe in ‘turning the other cheek’, by forgiving and repressing anger, they are ignoring the basic flaw existing in our human nature.  Symbolically, the speaker represents God, the foe and garden represent Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the tree represents the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis. If this analogy is true, it shows God rejoicing in killing his enemies, which most people think the God they know would never do.

Conclusively, "A Poison Tree" teaches a lesson and asserts a moral proposition rather than offering a critique of a theological system, the lesson is less concerned with anger than with demonstrating that suppressing the expression of feelings leads to a corruption of those feelings, to a decay of innocence, and to the growth of cunning and guile. Repeatedly in Songs of Experience, not just in "A Poison Tree," Blake argues that the religious doctrines intended to train people, especially children, in virtue are cruel and cause harm. In addition, Blake depicts those who implement religious discipline as sadistic. Blake's poetry, while easy to understand and simplistic, usually implies a moral motif on an almost basic level. The powerful figurative language in “A Poison Tree” is so apparent that it brings forth an apparent message as well. The poem is not a celebration of wrath; rather it is Blake's cry against it. Through this, Blake warns the reader of the dangers of repression and of rejoicing in the sorrow of our foes.

William Blake’s Tyger: Critique and Appraisal

William Blake’s Tyger: Critique and Appraisal

"The Tyger" represents an intense, visionary style with which William Blake confronts a timeless question through the creation of a still-life reverie. To examine "The Tyger's" world, a reader must inspect Blake’s word choice, images, allusions, rhyme scheme, meter, and theme. "The Tyger" seems like a simple poem, yet this simple poem contains all the complexities of the human mystery. The first impression that William Blake gives is that he sees a terrible tiger in the night, and, as a result of his state of panic, the poet exaggerates the description of the animal when he writes:

‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

In the forests of the night…’

The opening question enacts what will be the single dramatic gesture of the poem, and each subsequent stanza elaborates on this conception. Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror? Immediately after seeing the ‘Tyger’ in the forests, the poet asks it what deity could have created it:

‘What immortal hand and eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’

The word ‘immortal’ gives the reader a clue that the poet refers to God. Then, in the second stanza, the author wonders in what far-away places the tiger was made, maybe, referring that these places cannot be reached by any mortal. In the third stanza, the poet asks again, once the tiger’s heart began to beat, who could make such a frightening and evil animal. Next, in the forth stanza, William Blake asks questions about the tools used by God. And he names the hammer, the chain, the furnace, and anvil. All these elements are used by an ironsmith. The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However, as the poem progresses, it takes on a symbolic character, and comes to embody the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake's tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tiger's remarkable nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speaker's questions about its origin must also encompass both physical and moral dimensions. The poem's series of questions repeatedly ask what sort of physical creative capacity the "fearful symmetry" of the tiger bespeaks; assumedly only a very strong and powerful being could be capable of such a creation.

“What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?”

The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine creation of the natural world. The "forging" of the tiger suggests a very physical, laborious, and deliberate kind of making; it emphasizes the awesome physical presence of the tiger and precludes the idea that such a creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced. It also continues from the first description of the tiger the imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations of creation, purification, and destruction. The speaker stands in awe of the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral implications of such a creation; for the poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act. This is a question of creative responsibility and of will, and the poet carefully includes this moral question with the consideration of physical power. Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of "shoulder" and "art," as well as the fact that it is not just the body but also the "heart" of the tiger that is being forged. The repeated use of word the "dare" to replace the "could" of the first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and willfulness into the sheer might of the creative act.

“Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. It also invites a contrast between the perspectives of "experience" and "innocence" represented here and in the poem "The Lamb." "The Tyger" consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God's power, and the inscrutability of divine will. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either. The open awe of "The Tyger" contrasts with the easy confidence, in "The Lamb," of a child's innocent faith in a benevolent universe. The meekness of Blake’s lamb makes his “fearful” and “deadly” tiger appear all the more horrific, but to conclude that one is decidedly good and the other evil would be incorrect. The innocent portrayal of childhood in “The Lamb,” though attractive, lacks imagination. The tiger, conversely, is repeatedly associated with fire or brightness, providing a sharp contrast against the dark forests from which it emerges — “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night.” While such brightness might symbolize violence, it can also imply insight, energy, and vitality. The tiger’s domain is one of unrestrained self-assertion. Far from evil, Blake’s poem celebrates the tiger and the sublime excessiveness he represents. “Jesus was all virtue,” wrote Blake “and acted from impulse, not from rules.”

William Blake never answers his question about the unknown nature of god. He leaves it up to the reader to decide. By beginning and ending his poem with the same quatrain he asks the question about god creating evil as well as good, again. In conclusion, a reading of "The Tyger" offers different thematic possibilities. The poem seems to change as the reader changes, but the beauty of the words and meter make this poem an astonishing, enjoyable excursion into the humanity of theology. Moreover, the poem is quotable in various situations, and it leaves a permanent impression on the reader. Therefore, "The Tyger" by William Blake emerges from creation's cold, clear stream as a perpetual inspiration - a classic. In my opinion, William Blake wrote the poem with a simple structure and a perfect rhyme to help the reader see the images he wanted to transmit. Above all, the description of the tiger is glaringly graphic due to essentially the contrast between fire and night.

William Blake’s Theory of Contrariness

William Blake’s Theory of Contrariness

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of short lyric poems accompanied by Blake's original illustrations. The two sections juxtapose the state of innocence and that of experience. Many of the poems in Blake's words they were meant to show "the two contrary states of the human soul"; the illustration of innocence and experience. The tone of the first series is admirably sounded by the introductory "Piping down the valleys wild" and that of second the dark picture of poor babes "fed with cold and usurous hand".

Blake is bitter against those who go "up to the Church to pray" while the misery of the innocent is around them. His theory of Contraries is summarized in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence." The essence of Blake's theory is that, in some paradoxical way, it is possible for the contraries of innocence and experience to co-exist within a human being. The crime of "religion" was its attempt "to destroy existence" by ignoring or minimizing the essential oppositions in human nature.  The word ‘contrary’ had a very specific and important meaning for Blake. Like almost all great poets, he was an enemy of dualism. Western thought has been intensely dualistic, seeing everything as composed of warring opposites, head and heart, body and spirit, male and female as though the split between the hemispheres of the human brain were projecting itself on everything perceived. A study of the poems in the two groups shows the emotional tensions between the two Contrary States.

“Piping down the valleys wild”

In the "Songs of Innocence", Blake expresses the happiness of a child's first thoughts about life. To the child, the world is one of happiness, beauty, and love. At that stage of life, the sunshine of love is so radiant that human suffering appears only temporary and fleeting. In the Introduction to the first series, Blake represents a laughing child as his inspiration for his poems. And in the poems that follow in this series, Blake gives us his vision of the world as it appears to the child or as it affects the child. And this world is one of purity, joy, and security. The children are themselves pure, whether their skin is black or white.  They are compared to lambs "whose innocent call" they hear. Both "child" and "lamb" serve as symbols for Christ. Joy is everywhere—in the "Joy but two days old"; in the leaping and shouting of the little ones; in the sun, in the bells, in the voices of the birds; in the Laughing Song all Nature rejoices. But, above all, there is security. There is hardly a poem in which a symbol of protection, a guardian figure of some kind, does not occur. In The Echoing Green, the old folk are close by, while the children play. Elsewhere there is the shepherd watching over his sheep; there are the mother, the nurse, the lion', the angels, and, most important of all, God Himself. There is spontaneous happiness and delight in these groups of poems as “The Infant Boy” illustrates, ‘‘I happy am/ Joy is my name’.

“These flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit
with radiance all their own”

In the first Holy Thursday, poor children sit "with radiance of their own"; while in the second Holy Thursday, the poet deplores the fact that there should be so many poor and hungry children depending on charity in a country which is otherwise rich and fruitful. The second poem is very moving, as it was intended to be. We thus have pictures of contrary states. In the "Songs of Innocence", the prevailing symbol is the Iamb, which is an innocent creature of God and which also symbolizes the child Christ. In the "Songs of Experience" the chief symbol is the tiger as expressed by the first stanza:

“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night”

Where ‘forests of the night’ symbolize experience. The tiger burns metaphorically with rage and quickly becomes for some a symbol of anger and passion. The poet asks a crucial question here. Did God Who made the lamb also make the tiger? The lamb, innocent and pretty, seems the work of a kindly, comprehensible Creator. The splendid but terrifying tiger makes us realize that God's purposes are not so easily understood. The tiger represents the created universe in its violent and terrifying aspects. It also symbolizes violent and terrifying forces within the individual man, and these terrifying forces have to be faced and fully recognized. The two poems called The Lamb and The Tiger do, indeed, represent two contrary states of the human soul. No contrast could have been more vivid and more striking. Blake sees exploitation in the songs of experience as exemplified by the following lines from, ‘London’.

“And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe”

The poems in the second group record the wounds and cruelties of the civilized world. Some of them are bitter comments on the restraints forged by custom and law. Here Blake deplores the dominance of reason, religion, law, and morality, and he deplores the suppression of natural impulses, and more especially the suppression of the sexual impulse. Instead of innocence, joy, and security, Blake finds guilt, misery, and tyranny in the world. The protective guardians have disappeared and in their place are the tyrants. The rigors of sexual morality are depicted in A Little Girl Lost, The Sick Rose, The Angel, and Ah, Sunflower. The Sick Rose shows the destructive effects of sexual repression. In The Angel, the maiden realizes too late what she has missed. Ah, Sunflower shows the youth "pining away with desire", and the "pale virgin shrouded in snow", because both of them were denied sexual fulfillment.

The contrasts Blake sets forth in the Songs are echoes of English society's approach to the social and political issues of his era—a time characterized, on the one hand, by increasing desire for personal, political, and economic freedom, and on the other, by anxiety regarding the potential consequences of that freedom for social institutions. Several of the poems directly address contemporary social problems, for example, “The Chimney-Sweeper” deals with child labor and “Holy Thursday” describes the grim lives of charity children. The most fully-realized social protest poem in the Songs is “London,” a critique of urban poverty and misery. Thus contrariness are a must.  The language and vision not just of Blake but of poetry itself insists that the contraries are equally important and inseparable. ‘Without contraries is no progression’, wrote Blake. He sought to transform the energies generated by conflict into creative energies, moving towards mutual acceptance and harmony. Thus, by describing innocence and experience as ‘contrary states of the human soul’, Blake is warning us that we are not being invited to choose between them, that no such choice is possible. He is not going to assert that innocent joy is preferable to the sorrows of experience.

William Blake’s poem ‘London’ is a devastating portrait of a society in which all souls and bodies were trapped, exploited and infected. Discuss!

William Blake’s poem ‘London’ is a devastating portrait of a society in which all souls and bodies were trapped, exploited and infected. Discuss!

The poem, ‘London’ is a devastating and concise political analysis, delivered with passionate anger, revealing the complex connections between patterns of ownership and the ruling ideology, the way all human relations are inescapably bound together within a single destructive society.  The poem’s opening shows the narrator wandering the “charter’d” streets of London down to the “charter’d Thames”. 

The loaded word “charter’d” – changed from the first draft’s politically empty “dirty” – is used in a critical sense, and Blake’s contemporary readers would no doubt have picked up on it.  The use of this loaded word – repeated to sharpen the ironic point that the streets, the very river itself, are privately owned – suggests the oppressive nature of early capitalism, in which the Whig alliance of merchants, rising finance capitalists and some of the most powerful landed aristocrats who did not need to lean on the crown for power, were busy accumulating capital via taxation and the establishment of a national debt, thus transferring wealth from the majority to the minority. As the narrator wanders, he marks, notices, the suffering population:

“And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe”

The repetition of “marks” is emphatic; the Londoners are branded with visible signs of sickness and misery. The subtle shift from “mark” used as a verb in line 3 to a noun in line 4 binds the narrator to those he sees, showing he is not a disinterested observer but one of the sufferers himself. No-one is immune.  This is a picture of a whole society in chains, and the tightness of the poem’s structure – especially in the formal second verse – emphasizes this feeling of entrapment.  The move from visual to aural description makes turning away, escape, impossible – ears cannot be shut.  In the second verse, this commonality of suffering is hammered home by the pounding rhythm, stressing the word “every”, five times:

“In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear”

The cumulative effect of this verse enacts the narrator’s helplessness.  The “I” figure doesn’t appear till the very end of the verse, as if he has been overwhelmed by the sounds of human torment. The sense of imprisonment is made absolutely plain in the phrase “mind-forg’d manacles” – literally, metal restraining cuffs, devised by the mind of man to subjugate people by physical force, such as the prisoners languishing in Newgate; but also, metaphorically, mental chains imprisoning through ideological acceptance of the status quo.  After the dirge of passivity in: “In every cry of every Man / In every Infant’s cry of fear”, we are jolted by the phrase into a sudden moment of analysis, of understanding. The tone of anger and condemnation rises, and in the third verse, the long list of accusatory examples has an unstoppable momentum.  The verse begins, as if in mid-sentence:

“How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry

Every black’ning Church appalls;

And the hapless Soldier’s sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls”

From now on in this cinematic poem, we lose sight of the narrator altogether as he becomes subsumed within his furious indictment, leaving the general misery on scene to zoom in on three specific social types – the chimney sweep, the soldier and the harlot – all emblematic figures, a point made clear by the use of capitals, used also for the representative institutions.  The boy sweep blackens the church by literally making the churches sooty but also in the sense that the church’s reputation is increasingly tarnished by its whitewashing of the brutal, smoke-belching commercial system which exploits child-labour. The word “appalls” here means 'indicts' rather than the modern usage of 'disgusts'. The church is not appalled in a compassionate way, but is fearful of the menace the sweeps represent. The soldier whose sigh “Runs in blood down Palace walls” is a “hapless” victim, in spite of the fact that he is part of the armed state.  The soldier, sighing in death or fear, metaphorically stains the palace walls with his blood just as the sweep’s cry blackens the churches. Perhaps the soldier’s discontented “sigh” takes the tangible form of red-painted protest slogans on palace walls. The final verse, which Blake only added in a later revision, reveals how the system, constructed on the savage institutions of power – the law, church, monarchy and army – poisons personal relationships at the deepest level. This is the culmination of the narrator’s apocalyptic description: 

“But most thro’ midnight streets I hear 
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”

It is no longer daytime, but midnight.  The harlot is a young victim, like the boy sweep. She has been robbed of the chance to love her baby, because it is the result of commerce, not love, and because its existence only brings her increased poverty.  She passes her own misery onto her child, and that child, like her, will pass its misery onto further generations.  Her curse, like the sweep’s cry and the soldier’s sigh, has actual effects.  Like “mind-forg’d manacles”, “Marriage hearse” is a fantastically potent phrase, reverberating with meanings: the two words are linked oxymoronically, with the notion of joyous, fruitful marriage undermined by its grim apotheosis, death by venereal disease.  The phrase also fillets bourgeois marriage in all its hypocrisy, the husband routinely unfaithful to his wife, and suggests the sterile death-in-life of the wedded state. Marriage has become the funeral of love, the death of freedom. By striking at the family, the poem attacks the reproductive system of society itself.  The harlot’s curse does more than make the baby cry; it destroys bourgeois complacency.  It’s a fitting end; the poem’s final line has the incantatory power of a curse itself, with the rhyme shutting the lid on the poem once the build-up of hard alliterative sounds (black’ning, blood, Blasts, blights and plagues) has reached its crescendo.

London begins with the economic system, couched in that abstract, legalistic word “charter’d”, protected by its “bans” (laws), and moves to its consequences – the selling of bodies and souls within a sealed system of commercial exploitation.  Yet, though the poem describes claustrophobic trappedness, paradoxically it does not feel defeatist. This is an anti-vision poem, but it implies that a vision is needed, and this lifts it out of despair.  Its rising anger, reaching its height in the Shakespearean last line, is like a battle cry, or at least the precursor to one.  It doesn’t just catalogue the woes, but by ordering the encounters, reveals their cause and their inter-connection.  It shows the power of articulation both in the victims’ utterances – the sweep, soldier and harlot marking the city, by black’ning, splashing their blood, infecting it – and in the poem's own rhetorical eloquence.