Discuss William Blake as a symbolic

Poet.
OR
William Blake’s Symbolism
Blake is a highly symbolic poet and his poetry is rich in symbols and
allusions. Almost each and every other word in his poems 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. Blake’s symbols usually
have a wide range of meaning and more obvious. Few critics would
now wish to call Blake a symbolist poet, since his handling of symbols
is markedly different from that of the French symbolists’, but the
world inhabited by his mythical figures is defined through quasi-
allegorical images of complex significance, and such images are no less
important in his lyrical poetry. The use of symbols is one of the most
striking features of Blake’s poetry.

There is hardly any poem in the “Songs of Innocence and of

Experience” which does not possess a symbolic or allegorical meaning,
besides its apparent or surface meaning. If these poems are written in
the simplest possible language, that fact does not deprive them of a
depth of meaning. The language of these poems is like that of the
Bible—at once simple and profound as the following lines read:

“O Rose, thou art sick!”

When Blake talks of the sick rose, he is really telling us how
mysterious evil attacks the soul. Flower-symbolism is of particular
importance in Songs of Innocence and Experience, being connected
with the fall by the motif of the garden; and its traditional links with
sexuality informs the text of ‘The Blossom’ and the design for ‘Infant
Joy’, which are taken up in Experience by the plate for ‘The Sick Rose’.
‘Ah! Sun-Flower’ is a more symbolic text, and has evoked a greater
variety of responses. Declaring this to be one of ‘Blake’s supreme
poems’, we can interpret the flower as a man who ‘is bound to the
flesh’ but ‘yearns after the liberty of Eternity”. Harper claims that it
describes the aspiration of all ‘natural things’ to ‘the sun’s eternality’.
Identifying the speaker as ‘Blake himself. Blake travels from flower-
symbolism to animal symbols as in the ‘Tyger’:
“Did he smile his work to see
Did he who made the Lamb make thee!”
If the lamb symbolizes innocence and gentleness, the tiger is to Blake a
symbol of the violent and terrifying forces within the individual man.
The lamb, innocent and pretty, seems the work of a kindly Creator.
The splendid but terrifying tiger makes us realize that God’s purposes
are not so easily understood, and that is why the question arises “Did
he who made the Lamb make thee?” At the same time, the tiger is
symbolic of the Creator’s masterly skill which enabled Him to frame
the “fearful symmetry” of the tiger. But the lion described in the poem
Night (in the “Songs of Innocence”) offers an interesting contrary to
the tiger of the “Songs of Experience”. Both the beasts seem dreadful,
but the lion, like the beast of the fairy tale, can be magically
transformed into a good and gentle creature: the tiger cannot. In the
world of Experience the violent and destructive elements in Creation
must be faced and accepted, and even admired. The tiger is also
symbolic of the Energy and the Imagination of man, as opposed to the
Reason. Blake was a great believer in natural impulses and hated all
restraints. Consequently he condemns all those who exercise restraints
upon others. He states in Holy Thursday II:
“And their ways are fill’d with thorns
It is eternal winter there”
The eternal winter are symbolic of total destruction of the country and
the perpetual devastation and ‘Grey-headed beadles’ in ‘Holy
Thursday I’ are symbolic of authority and it is they exploit children for
their own material interests. In the poem London, oppression and
tyranny are symbolised by the king (who is responsible for the
soldier’s blood being shed), social institutions like (loveless) marriage,
and ‘”he mind-forged manacles”. Even further, personal and social
relationships have been symbolised as:
“In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree”
A Poison Tree is another 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. On the surface, however, the
poem is a simple, ordinary story. Thus symbolism is crucial to
understanding Blake as poet of earlier romanticism. What can be more
symbolic than the following lines from, ‘Auguries of Innocence’?
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour”
Thus, Blake’s poetry is charged with symbols. He has depicted nature
and human nature; animals and plants as simple but profound
symbols of powerful forces; “contrary states of the human soul” – for
example, good and evil, or innocence and experience throughout his
poetry. What is different in Blake is that he is not modeling after any
symbols but his own. The symbols always have an inner relatedness
that leads us from the outer world to the inner man. The symbols live
in the ordered existence of his vision; the vision itself is entirely
personal, in theme and in the logic that sustains it. Blake is difficult
not because he invented symbols of his own; he created his symbols to
show that the existence of any natural object and the value man’s mind
places on it were one and the same. He was fighting the acceptance of
reality in the light of science as much as he was fighting the
suppression of human nature by ethical dogmas. He fought on two
fronts, and shifted his arms from one to the other without letting us
know—more exactly, he did not let himself know. He created for
himself a personality, in life and in art that was the image of the thing
he sought.
In short, it is established that William Blake is a highly symbolic and
even allegorical poet. His use of symbolism is unique and cinematic. It
paints a lively and pulsating picture of dynamic life before us.
Especially, the symbolic use of
‘Sun-flower’ gets so much stamped on the mind of the reader that it is
difficult to forget it. He mentions a tiger it becomes a symbol of God’s
power in creation, his lamb turns out to be a symbol of suffering
innocence and Jesus Christ and his tree is symbolic of anger and
desire to triumph over enemies; the dark side of human nature.
Symbolism is the main trait of William Blake as a dramatist as a poet
and this has been well-crystallized in his legendary work, ‘The Songs
of Innocence and Experience’.