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William Blake 布莱克
Life and Literary Career (1757-1827)
Engraver, painter, printer and poet At age 4, had a vision of God, later saw a tree
full of angels Went to a drawing school at 10, thus began his
London
William Blake
What do you know about the poem from the title?
It is a poem about London, the city and people in London.
What is the location of the poem, countryside or city?
The speaker is not the piping, pastoral bard of the earlier poem: he is in the city. The poem’s title denotes a specific geographic space, not the archetypal locales in which many of the other Songs are set.
Change of voice into bitterness and anger, more concern about social ills and human weakness, exposition of tyranny in religion and patriarchy
Songs of Innocence and Experience
career as an artist Started writing poetry in his teens (12) A man of sharp perception, original thinking,
exceptional boldness, contempt for reason, deep concern with the Revolution
The third quatrain
How the chimney sweeper’s cry Every blackening Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down palace walls.
charter: n. a written statement describing the rights that a particular group of people should have.(宪章)
Charter: v. to state officially that a new organization, town or university has been established and has special rights and privileges.(特许设立)
Significance
A precursor of Romanticism in English poetry
An innovative poet and thinker (mystic) Strong opposition to rationalism and
tyranny of all forms, emphasis on intuition and imagination An undaunted revolutionary
Strange, simple beauty both in themes and in language and in verse form and rhythm
Some songs from “Innocence”:
“ The Echoing Green”, “The Lamb”,
“The Little Black Boy”, “The Little Boy Lost”, “The Little Boy Found”, “Nurse’s Song”, “The Chimney Sweeper” ,“Infant Joy”
Works
Blake’s poetry largely divided in to 2 groups:
lyrical poems: “Poetical Sketches”
(poetry of ages 12-20), “Songs of Innocence”, “Songs of Experience”
Presenting a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repression with a melancholy, sometimes bitter tone
Experience bringing a fuller sense of evil, joy replaced by bitterness
Besides the word “chartered”, can you find other repetitions in the poem? How do you understand them?
It is as if language itself, the poet’s medium, experiences a hemming-in, a restriction of resources. Blake’s repetition, thudding and oppressive, reflects the suffocating atmosphere of the city.
But words also undergo transformation within this repetition: thus “mark”, between the third and fourth lines, changes from a verb to a pair of nouns--from an act of observation which leaves some room for imaginative elaboration, to an indelible imprint, branding the people’s bodies regardless of the speaker’s actions.
What is the speaker doing?
The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his observations.
What is the meaning of “chartered”?
prophetic poems: “Visions of the
Daughters of Albion”, “America”, “The French Revolution” ,“Jerusalem”, “The Book of Los”, “The Book of Urizen”, “The Marriage of Herain
I wandered through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does
flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe,
In every cry of every Man, In every infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear.
ban: curse
mind-forged manacles: restraints forged for the mind
Depicting “two contrary states of the human soul”: the presentation of the world is colored/prejudiced by the state of mind of the speaker
Poems in two collections well paired off: “The Lamb”/ “The Tiger”, “The Divine Image”/ “The Human Abstract”, “The Chimney Sweeper”/ “The Chimney Sweeper”, “The Nurse’s Songs”
Repetition is the most striking formal feature of the poem, and it serves to emphasize the prevalence of the horrors the speaker describes.
The second quatrain
A mixture of the simple and the childlike with the serious and the thoughtful in voice
Some songs from “Experience”
“London”, “The Chimney Sweeper”, “A Little Boy Lost”, “A Little Girl Lost”, “Infant Sorrow”, “A Poison Tree”, “The Sick Rose”, “Nurse’s Song”
Songs of Innocence (1789)《天真之歌》
Purpose : “And I made a rural pen, / And I stained the