Blake and Volpone Revision

Blake – Songs of Innocence and Experience: language/form/structure

Introduction (innocence)
 ABAB – Regular rhyme scheme. Ballad form - the poem is itself a song like the ones
described within it. Reinforced by the use of repetition and imperatives from the child that
tell the piper what to do. This suggests that the child represents the spirit of poetic
inspiration which is here associated both with innocence and with the idea of the sheep and
the shepherd
 ‘I’ – Blake as narrator
 Blake was an instinctive musician, who often sang tunes to his poems
 ‘Lamb’ is introduced as a symbol of innocence that will be used throughout the collection.
Potential for religious connotations to (lamb of God)
 ‘He wept to hear’ – sombre note to the otherwise joyful song – innocence is
broken/fractured?
 ‘I stained the water clear’ – tainted innocence/referral to the water colours used in his
illustrations
 The piper is also shown in the frontispiece to Songs of Innocence as a shepherd with his
sheep. He is shown naked, a symbol of his innocence, and there are connotations of Jesus as
the lamb, the good shepherd and the child who was god-made-man. Both the frontispiece
and the engraved plate of the poem show the entwined trees of earthly love
 The poem’s semantic field (linguistic meaning/choices/symbolism) contains many words that
show the nature of the songs – ‘pleasant glee’, ‘laughing’, ‘merry cheer’, ‘happy pipe’, ‘wept
with joy’.
A Dream
 ABAB rhyme scheme
 ‘emmet’, ‘glow-worm’, ‘beetles’ – humble creatures
 The glow-worm is ‘set to light the ground’ – Christian image, light of the world – Jesus sent
to guide those who are morally and spiritually lost
 Themes of being lost and found and empathy and guardianship
The Little Girl Lost
 ABAB rhyme scheme
 13 stanzas – uneven
 The voice of the prophet/bard sees a future time when the earth ‘Shall arise and seek/ For
her maker meek: And the desert wild / Become a garden mild’. Indication that Blake is
writing about a symbolic future when the material world (the desert) will become a spiritual
one (the garden) as the human race is reunited with God.
 ‘Maker meek’ – God the creator.
 ‘Lovely Lyca’ represents the human soul.
 Lyca is found sleeping in the world of experience (‘lost in the desert wild’) but is taken by the
lion (potentially a symbol of wisdom), he ‘loosed her slender dress’ (the clothing that is
appropriate in the world of experience) and carries her, in the state of nakedness which is
often used by Blake to depict innocence, to his cave.
 ‘let the moon arise’ – the moon is Diana, goddess of virgins
  The sexual imagery in the poem has been seen as Lyca awakening to sexual desire, but
moving beyond this almost immediately to the new Eden where this knowledge is not
forbidden or shameful
 ‘Seven summers old’ – the number which connects the new Eden to the creation which is
was said in Genesis, to have taken 7 days.
 Repetition of ‘sleep’ and sibilance contribute to the dreamlike quality of the poem
 ‘Loosed her slender dress’ – removal of the physical so the soul can rest in peace?
The Little Girl Found
 AABB
 13 stanzas – links it to the preceding poem
 ‘Moan’, ‘shriek’ and ‘sore’ are harsh words that complete the rhyme. Contrasts to the words
of innocence
 ‘In my palace deep, Lyca lies asleep’ – heaven?
 Number 7 has significance again – ‘Seven nights they sleep / Among shadows deep’. Links to
the creation story
 The parents from the world of experience have followed their child back to the world of
innocence which was Eden before the fall, but which is different in that it contains
knowledge and wisdom.
The Blossom
 ABCAAC
 ‘blossom’ symbolises growth and potential
 Some critics see it as a specifically sexual poem – see references to the ‘arrow’ as the penis
and the ‘cradle narrow’ as the vagina with the obvious implication of the speaker’s ‘bosom’
implying a free embrace of sexual relations. They also argue that the sparrow is ‘merry’ at
the prospect of love, whilst the robin’s ‘sobbing’ implies orgasm
 The image in the engraving is said to depict the penis both erect and flaccid, whilst the small
winged creatures are representative of semen which generates new life
 A blossom traditionally symbolises youth opening into maturity and the poem is said to
celebrate the joy of free and mutual sexual love
 The sparrow is seen in its role as a symbol of the goddess Venus, in classical mythology,
while Blake would appear to be giving a similar role to the notoriously territorial robin.
 Other critics see the poem either as a celebration of the family with the birds and the
blossom being reminiscent of paintings of the Holy Family, or as a plea for compassion and
understanding that the speaker brings to the birds, both in joy and in sorrow.
 The sparrow is seen as a humble and ordinary bird, while the robin symbolises household
harmony and contentment
 ‘Sobbing sobbing’ – indication of the grief of experience that is to come? Compares to the
‘merry merry’ sparrow
 ‘A happy Blossom’, ‘cradle’ – change of season/new life.
The Lamb
 AABB rhyme scheme- series of rhyming couplets
 ‘Gave thee life’ - god as creator
 ‘Lamb’ – symbol of innocence
 ‘Little Lamb who made thee? / dost thou know who made thee?’ – Refrain.
  ‘He calls himself a lamb’ –Jesus. Blake focuses on God in human form
o Association between the lamb and Jesus is a continuation of that established in the
‘Introduction’ and ‘The Shepherd’
o The depiction of Jesus as the child of the nativity and as the lamb is reinforced by the
description ‘He is meek and he is mild’, reminiscent of Christmas carols
 The first stanza is full of images of nature – ‘by the stream’, ‘o’er the mead’, ‘all the vales’
and of happiness – ‘clothing of delight’, ‘softest clothing woolly bright, ‘tender voice’, ‘vales
rejoice’
 In the second stanza where the child answers the question ‘who made thee?’ there is a
movement from the physical to the spiritual as the child talks about Jesus as creator of both
lamb and child
 The poem finishes on a short, childlike prayer ‘little lamb, God bless thee.’
o The repetitive nature of the poem gives it the quality of child’s prayer or hymn and
the simple rhythm, reinforced by the use of assonance, supports this impression
 The repetition of the pronoun ‘thee’ gives the impression of familiarity between the child
and the lamb
 The world of experience is notably absent from the poem
 The illustration
o A young boy and lamb are central – expresses the link between nature and mankind
and emphasises the use of the lamb as a symbol
The Shepherd
 ABCB – simple rhythm and rhyme scheme to remind the reader of nursery songs and
children’s hymns
 Shepherd shown as guardian and protector, following his sheep
 The lambs are depicted as ‘innocent’ like children, while the ewes, the mothers, are shown
to be ‘tender’
 The parallels with Jesus as the lamb of God and also as the good shepherd are clear,
although it is the shepherd himself who is seen by the poet to have a ‘sweet lot’ or a fulfilling
profession as he wanders through the natural scene all day with ‘his tongue…filled with
praise’
 The illustration
o Fills the majority of the page
o The image of the dove is symbolic of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Accords with
the sentiment expressed in the final line – ‘for they know when their shepherd is
nigh’
o Idyllic pastoral scene
Infant Joy
 ABCDDC
 Shows an infant who is wanted and loved
 The repetition of the word ‘joy’ suggests the romantic view of childhood and infancy, where
children are seen as innocents to be protected and played with
 ‘I have no name I am but two days old’ – babies weren’t given a name until they were
baptised. The given name perhaps signified the power of the established churches to ‘own’
an individual through the rites of baptism or christening and may explain why Blake uses the
 dialogue between the parents and child to ‘call’ the infant and to use a name that signifies
the bond between parents and child
 The baby is a consequence of a physical union, which Blake saw as the rightful expression of
love.
On Another’s Sorrow
 AABB
Spring
 ‘He becomes an infant small. / He becomes a man of woe.’ – Incarnation. Again focuses on
God in human form to demonstrate his love for us
 Seeming naivety creates the atmosphere of childhood innocence appropriate to te season.
 Spring is th time for new life and for the emergence of animals who hibernate over winter. A
signal for the coming warmth and light. This is celebrated in the poem by the call to the
piper (‘Sound the flute!’), which is almst a signal for the birds to begin their song
 The flute is also the instrument of Pan, the greek God of nature whose rites celebrate the
fertility of the new year. The poem moves from the birds to a little boy ‘full of joy’ and a little
girl ‘sweet and small’
 While the children are associated with the birds and nature in their greeting of spring, there
are sexual connotations in the association of pipes, boy and cock (a traditionally masculine
symbol) all joining to celebrate the season of new life.
 The illustration
o New life is abundant – the baby and sheep particularly
o The colours are light and bright
The Schoolboy
 Contrast between the freedom of childhood play outside in the natural world and the
repressive nature of the schoolroom
 First stanza relates the pleasure of a child in ‘a summer morn’ when he is free to play and
sing and the image of birds singing with him suggests this is natural
 The distant huntsan who ‘winds his horn’ is reminiscent of the piper in the introduction to
Songs of Innocence and a fgure of the poetic imagination; as the schoolboy comments ‘O!
What sweet company’
 The image in the second stanza of ‘a summer morn’ is deeply contrasting. ‘under a cruel eye
outworn’, the jealous and oppressive gaze of experience that creates ‘sighing and dismay’ in
children. Reinforced by ‘O! it drives all joy away’
 Presents institutionalised education as destructive of true learning, as the child says ‘Nor in
my book can I take delight, Nor sit in learning’s bower’, emphasises the romantic notion that
learning should come from nature and should be through playing and happiness. Children
who are repressed and unhappy are unlikely to learn
 ‘How can the bird that is born for joy, / Sit in a cage and sing’ – the child that is identified
with the birds in stanza one is depicted as caged and imprisoned, as he will ‘droop his tender
wing’. The ‘droop’ of the wing echoes the previous image, ‘I drooping sit’, which is a pose of
unhappiness and vulnerability
 Children need to be nurtured and given care if they are to grow
Laughing Song
 AABB- mimicking laughter?
  Plethora of words that relate to or connote happiness/laughter – ‘laugh’, ‘dimpling’,
‘laughing’, ‘merry’, ‘laughs’, ‘Ha, Ha, He’, ‘sing’
 ‘green’ – repetition indicates abundance of nature
 ‘Mary and Susan and Emily’ – represent idealised rural life, unspoiled girlhood
 ‘the grasshopper laughs’, ‘green woods laugh’, ‘dimpling stream runs laughing by’, ‘the
green hill laughs’ – unity of innocence and nature, atonement with creation
 Although it seems to predominantly be a celebration of innocence and nature, most lines
begin with ‘When’, establishes a lack of permanence. It is only when all these things are
happening together that the reader can be invited to oin the ‘sweet chorus’. This word is an
implied warning that this cannot last. Supported by the engraving which shows a group, not
of carefree children, but of young adults, apparently led by a yung man with a glass of wine
in his hand. All are fully clothed rather than th nudity that Blake often used to establish
innocence.
The Little Black Boy
 ABAB
 Heroic quatrains: stanzas of pentameter lines with ABAB rhyme scheme. longer lines suitable
to the pedagogical tone of this poem (teaching)
 ‘Southern wild’ – slavery? America? Africa?
 ‘I am black, but oh! My soul is white.’ – Dualism. Ideas of a distinct body and soul –
encourages scrutiny of the true nature of a thing rather than appearance (link to ideas
regarding the church?)
 ‘I am black as if bereaved of light’ – depiction of blackness as lacking, negative portrayal,
inverts the assumption of savagery
 ‘gives his light, and gives his heat away’ – God’s free gifts, true charity
 ‘these black bodies and this sun-burn face/ Is but a cloud’ – again emphasises the difference
between true nature and outward appearance
 ‘I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear, / To lean in joy’ – spiritual awakening that
transcends race
 ‘stroke his silver hair’ – age and experience
 ‘And be like him and he will love me’ – growing into God’s true image? Or looking for
acceptance and equality?
 Blake’s view of all people partaking in the divinity of Christ and therefore having equality in
the sight of God is shown in the poem through the narrative of the black chld and the
engraving shows both children, black and white, being welcomed by Christ.
 The illustration
o Sun in the distance – symbol of hope/redemption/God’s love, will relieve the boy of
the ‘cloud’ or shadow
The Voice of the Ancient Bard
 Poem relating the story of the difficult journey through experience
 ‘doubt is fled and clouds of reason, /Dark disputes and artful teasing. /Folly is an endless
maze; / Tangled roots perplex her ways.’ – describes the things that plague or obscure the
poetic imagination, hazards on the path to becoming truly creative and spiritual beings
 ‘How many have fallen there!’ - a warning that many become trapped in experience without
receiving wisdom or ‘enlightened innocence’
  ‘wish to lead others when they should be led’ – comment on the establishment who impose
rules and govern when really they have no true knowledge of the poetic imagination or what
it is to be truly spiritual. Criticism of their power and subsequent abuse of it as they know
nothing else.
 Blake said ‘wisdom dwells with innocence, but never with ignorance’ – the naïve honesty
and openness of childhood is similar to honesty and the creative voice of wisdom but
between the two is uncertain and destructive
The Echoing Green
 AABB – spritely movement conveyed through the rhythm, reflects the games and sports of
the children. Impetus maintained by the rhyming couplets
 Images are pastoral and idyllic
 Blake makes intensive use of sounds in the first stanza to present the happy innocence of
childhood.
 The sunrise is symbolic of youth and immaturity and the ‘merry bells’ set the tone for the
birds, which are the skylark and thrush – both noted for beauty and cheerfulness of their
songs
 The semantic field of stanza 1 is shown in phrases such as ‘make happy’, ‘merry bells’,
‘welcome’, ‘cheerful sound’, ‘our sports’ all of which suggest the carefree days of youth
 The phrase ‘the echoing green’ implies that nature itself is implicated in the joyful scene and
reflects the happiness of the people in it
 ‘Such were the joys when we all, girls and boys, in our youth-time… on the echoing green’ –
cycle of youth and age
 The children are ‘like birds in their nest’ – links them with nature.
 In the final stanza, the children are shown to be ‘weary’ [a word reminiscent of experience]
and are unable to be merry any more, implying that the games of childhood are coming to
an end – along with innocence? With the sunset, the coming of darkness is prophetic of the
onset of adolescence. The image of the ‘darkening green’ with which the poem ends is
symbolic of the necessary move into the world of adulthood and experience
 The children, here beginning the dangerous journey into a world of oppression and false
ideas, need the guidance of someone like ‘old John who has come through experience to
wisdom and now ‘laughs away care’
Nurse’s Song (inn)
 ABCB
 ‘my heart is at rest’ as long as children are laughing and immersed in nature all is well
 ‘all the hills echoed’ the children’s laughter – the link between nature and children is made
again
 The nurse is presented as a kind and loving carer who has true empathy with the children in
her charge
Holy Thursday (inn)
 AABB - mellifluous (flowing) rhythm
 Emphasises the innocence of the children – ‘their innocent faces clean’, ‘flowers’, ‘lambs’
 Natural goodness is visible – ‘radiance all their own’
 Their singing is likened to ‘a mighty wind’ and ‘harmonious thunderings’ that reaches the
‘seat of heaven’ – suggests God hears the voices of the pure of heart.
  ‘walking two and to in red and blue and green’ – suggestion of regimenting. The ‘wands’ of
the Grey headed beadles’ are symbols of their authority but also a reminder of the frequent
floggings the children would have experienced in the charity schools. The uniforms are a
reminder that they must obey the institutions or they will be turned out on the street
 The charity schools were established by wealthy benefactors to educate the children of the
poor to be useful and God-fearing citizens. Whilst they definitely saved many children from a
life of starvation and beggary they didn’t encourage any ‘suitable’ ideas about freedom,
individuality or imagination. They would instead have been taught religious prudence etc,
which Blake didn’t value as highly as what he saw as truly divine – the imagination
The Divine Image (inn)
 ABCB
 ‘Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love’ – the virtues according to Blake. Capitalisation personifies
them, like deities in their own right to which people pray.
o ‘to these virtues of delight / return their thankfulness’
o ‘For Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love / Is god our father dear’ – God IS these virtues
 ‘Man his child and care’ – capitalisation makes it clear he is talking simultaneously about
man and creation and Jesus as a Man
 3rd stanza describes the human form of these virtues – Jesus – indicating humans can be like
him/possess these virtues
 ‘human heart… human face… human form… human dress’ – anthropomorphises them
 ‘in heathen, Turk or Jew’ – radical message of tolerance; God is in all people no matter what
race or religion as long as they aspire to these virtues
 ‘Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell, / There God is dwelling too.’ – God as ever-present in
creation, not a detached deity but IN humans. The ideas of the soul and the creation of man
in the image and likeness of God are relevant
The Chimney Sweeper (inn)
 AABB Rhyme Scheme – series of rhyming couplets
 Monosyllabic – indication of youth
 ‘weep, weep, weep, weep’ – repetition indicates the depth of sadness
 ‘Sweep’ and ‘sleep’ – internal rhyme creates tension and emphasises the harshness of the
conditions.
 Repetition of ‘sweep’ and ‘weep’ are reminiscent of a bird’s chirping, emphasising the
vulnerability of the child as well as his unhappiness
 The use of the pronoun – ‘Your chimneys I sweep’ – shows the complicity of all adults in the
cruel exploitation
 ‘That curled like a lamb’s back’ – lamb symbolism again, symbolising innocence
 ‘Hush Tom, never mind it, for when your head’s bare, / You know that the soot cannot spoil
your white hair.’ – pitiful optimism creates sympathy
 ‘in coffins of black’ – inversion highlights the blackness. Represents the enslavement of the
children, the claustrophobic dark chimneys an the living death they endure daily
 ‘open’d the coffins and set them all free. Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run’
– opposite of industrialisation. Idyllic
 ‘bright’, ‘free’, ‘green’, ‘shine’, ‘sun’ – natural imagery to convey optimism
  ‘Then down a green plain leaping, laughing they run,’ – in some versions of the text there is
no punctuation here – carefree
 ‘Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm.’ – God as a provider/ source of
happiness
 ‘if he’d be a good boy / He’d have God for his father and never want joy’ – for those who
exploited children, or supported the status quo, ths would mean he should obey his master
and not complain about his miserable life and he will be rewarded in heaven. For Blake,
being a ‘good boy’ would mean he would be true to his imagination (the divine part of
human beings).
 ‘So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.’ – Sense of sarcasm here. Is he criticising the
church’s message to embrace poverty in this life in the hopes of reward in the next.
Advocates a more active approach.
A Cradle Song
 AABB
 ‘sweet’ – repetition has a hypnotic effect, like a lullaby
 ‘dovelike’ – symbolic of innocence
 Changes from present ( ‘sweet dreams form a shade’) to past tense (when he was an infant
small’)
 ‘heavenly face’ – becomes an image of Jesus
 Overtly religious references, such as ‘infant smiles are his own smiles’ – showing Blake’s
equation of innocence with Jesus, the lamb
The Little Boy Lost
 ABCB but irregular 1st stanza
 Lack of regular rhyme in the first stanza reflects the panic of the boy
 ‘the little boy’ – not necessarily a literal image/character but rather a metaphor for spiritual
confusion
 ‘father, father’, ‘speak father, speak’ – repetition reflects desperation and fear
 ‘fast’, ‘lost’ – Consonance
 ‘Wet with dew’ – could be sweat from fear. Odd image, suggestion that he is close to the
ground? Asleep? Buried? Ominous
 1st stanza is in 1st person, 2nd stanza is in the 3rd person
 ‘Vapour’ – intangible presence, some metaphysical being?
 ‘Away the vapour flew’ – dispersed by the boy’s tears or deliberately leading him on?
Malevolent force?
 The illustration
o Ominous
o Black predominates
o White ghost-like figure reaching towards the light
The Little Boy Found
 ABCB
 ‘Led’ – interesting in relation to innocence, corruption?
 ‘wand’ring’ – interesting lexis, suggests confusion/lack of direction
 ‘father in white’ – symbol of innocence
  ‘to his mother brought’ – anthropomorphises God, prefers the human form, involved in
creation
Night
 ABABCCDD
 ‘Flocks’ – ambiguous – children or lambs?
 ‘the feet of angels’ – explicitly anthropomorphic/humanistic form of the divine
 The speaker appears to have the ‘enlightened innocence’ which Blake values. He can see
both natural and supernatural things and has a clear understanding of the innocence of the
natural order o things, whilst also envisioning the superiority of the spiritual.
Introduction (experience)
 ABAAB
 ‘Bard’ – someone who tells a story (through song?) omniscient narrator, acts more as a
prophet than the piper in Songs of Innocence
 ‘Hear the voice of the bard!’ – like a warning, encourages the audience to pay attention to
Blake’s cosmology/ideology
 ‘The Holy Word’ – personified through capitalisation. Reference to the Old Testament, to
Jehovah who forced Adam and Eve from paradise or to Jesus as ‘the word made flesh’, and
Blake believed, the only way to God.
 The connotation of the ‘ancient trees’ may be the tree of life (associated with the cross and
therefore redemption) or the tree of knowledge, which created the need for redemption as
adam and Eve ate of its fruit.
 ‘fallen man’ can refer to the biblical fall of adam and Eve or to imprisoned man in his ‘mind-
forged manacles’ unable to break away from the confines of materialism and realise his true
spiritual and imaginative potential.
 The image of daybreak rising from the ‘slumberous mass’ is a call from the bard, or poet, to
awaken from the sleep of materialism and realise full creative and imaginative capability
 ‘Evening’, ‘night’, ‘morn’, ‘break of day’ – light and dark/ night and day.
Binary/antithesis/opposites
Earth’s Answer
 A reply to the introduction. Same form and rhyme scheme to emphasise this connection
 Earth, personified as a woman, responds from the darkness of reason – ‘her light fled: Stony
dread! And her loks covered with grey despair’ – description of someone imprisoned who
has aged in experience without gaining wisdom, for the light of imagination and joy is
absent. ‘Stony’ reminds us of the mineral world which represents materialism and scientific
reason. Continued as she is ‘prison’d on watry shore / Starry jealousy does keep my den /
Cold and hoar’ – imprisoned by reason and science, the coldness is opposite to the spring of
childhood.
 The ‘Father of ancient men’ is the jealous God of the church, depicted by Blake as Urizon.
Earth refers to this God as the tyrant who keeps her imprisoned by oppressing the forces of
freedom, joy and creativity. He is the
The Clod and the Pebble
 Two opposing ideas of love conveyed by two inanimate objects
 Could be argued to represent the collection – an innocent and an experienced view
  Use of repetition and antithesis and the balance of form and metre suggests the balance
of the two contrary views of innocence and experience
 Clod – traditional connotations of dullness and stupidity and a pebble is associated with
cold hardness. Potentially suggesting that Blake found nether satisfying as an approach,
but they are brought together as they are complementary
 The generally positive view of love that ‘build a heaven in hell’s despair’ is undermined
by the description of it being ‘trodden with the cattle’s feet’, implies it is unrealistic and
naïve
 ‘to bind another to its delight’ – the viewpoint of the pebble is of love as covetous and
selfish (potential link to greed)
 If the relationship suggested by the poem were ever to come about, the clod would be
crushed and degraded whilst the pebble would be fixed and unchanging. Neither state is
desirable any more than continual innocence is desirable without experience, nor
experience desirable without wisdom. Argument for ‘enlightened innocence’
Holy Thursday (exp)
 The first two stanzas include multiple rhetorical questions with implicit answers
 ‘Is this a holy thing to see, /In a rich and fruitful land, /Babes reduced to misery, /Fed with
cold and usurous hand?’ – implication is that a country which has wealth chooses to ignore
the real needs of its children
 ‘Hand’ – metonymy. A part used to represent not merely the guardians but the whole city or
nation, shows a general social responsibility
 ‘It is a land of poverty!’ – spiritual poverty, as he has already established that it is a ‘rich and
fruitful land’
 ‘and their’ stanza 3- anaphora emphasises bleakness
 ‘And their ways are fill’d with thorns’ – allusion to Christ’s crucifixion? They are a sacrifice for
man’s sins?
 The illustration
o Bleak landscape – the tree has no leaves. Corpses litter the page
o Infants cry and cling to a woman
The Chimney Sweeper (exp)
 AABB
 ‘A little black thing among the snow’ – black/white contrast used to emphasise the injustice
which he represents. ‘thing’ dehumanises the boy in the same way that the job itself does
 ‘They are both gone up to the church to pray’ – criticism of institutionalised religion.
Focusing on outward religious observance rather than the practical application of Christian
principles.
 ‘Because I was happy…’ – the word ‘because’ suggests that this harsh life was deliberately
inflicted on him by his parents as punishment for his happiness. Suggests that they were
jealous of his happiness or the imaginative world he inhabited?
 ‘And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King / Who make up a heaven of our misery’
– sense of collusion of the state, church and the oppressive God-figure whom Blake named
Urizon. Also potentially link to the church teachings of the poor as blessed and the idea of
salvation and eternal happiness for those who suffer on earth and therefore a kind of
justification of such suffering?
Nurse’s Song (exp)
 ABCB
 2nd version is much less descriptive, loses wonder of childhood (experience breeds cynicism,
familiarity, contempt)
 Instead of the laughing on the dale from the version in Innocence, there are ‘whisperings in
the dale’; implying secrecy and deception. Link to the ‘dark secret love’ of ‘The Sick Rose’
 The trusting and honest daylight world of childhood innocence is contrasted with the
‘winter’ of experience and the ‘night’ of disguise and falsehood – the darkness that conceals
things.
 The poems are similar in that a guardian calls the children home to protect them from ‘the
dews of night’, but their attitudes towards the children and their play are different
 Form and rhythm is the same as in Innocence but this is half the length.
 The only voice in this version is that of the nurse, the children are silent – suggestion of their
oppression and subservience?
 Different associations of ‘green’ – the grass where the children play which shows their youth
and immaturity and also the ‘green and pale’ face of the nurse, where it symbolises jealousy
focused on the children
The Sick Rose
 ABCB
 ‘Rose’ – flower connotes virginity
 ‘worm’ – link to the snake in the garden of Eden, also a phallic symbol. In the bible story it is
the snake who tempts Eve to gain knowledge, including sexual knowledge
 ‘night’ – suggests something sordid/sexual
 ‘bed’ – both the rose bed and the lover’s bed
 ‘crimson joy’ – breaking of the hymen/colour of the rose
 ‘Dark secret love’ – seems to in some way advocate sexual liberation. Link his views on
suppressed desires/joy (Garden of Love – ‘bind with briars my joys and desires’)
The fly
 ABCB
 Reflection on the transience of life for all living creatures – humans and flies alike
 Just as ‘my thoughtless hand / Has brush’d away’ flies, ‘some blind hand / Shall brush my
wing’.
 This ‘hand’ could be that of fortune
 The short lines and springing rhythm reflect the movement of the fly as it darts about
The Angel
 AABB
 ‘dream… mean’ – internal rhyme
 ‘For the time of youth was fled, / and grey hairs were on my head.’ – passing of time, gaining
of experience
 The speaker refuses to share her ‘heart’s delight’ – her love for the angel who guards her, so
he ‘took his wings and fled’
 She grows hard in the world of experience and ‘arm’d her fears/ With ten thousand shields
and spears’ – determined not to be made vulnerable by love
 Poem is a warning to those who do not love freely and offer themselves in love
  Those who slavishly follow the church’s rules about sex and the suppression of passionate
feelings will deprive themselves of the warmth and pleasure of real love and will become
froen in the sleep of experience, imprisoned by their own envious fears.
The Tyger
 AABB
 ‘What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ – who could create such a
fearful creature?
 ‘Hammer’, ‘chain’, ‘furnace’, ‘anvil’ – references to industry. Images of hell – ‘fire’ ‘furnace’ –
indicate his views of the industrial revolution
 ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ – The idea of fallen creation. At once beautiful and
evil, containing good and bad. Blake’s ideas about God as creator – found the God the father
figure oppressive and so named him Urizon
 ‘lamb’ again used as a symbol of innocence
 ‘dare’/’dread’ – suggest something at once brave and awful
 Circular structure of the poem with the almost exact repetition of the first stanza at the end
indicates the eternal nature of the questions Blake is asking regarding the problem of evil
My Pretty Rose Tree
 ABAB
 ‘jealousy’, ‘her’ – personification of the rose
 2 interpretations
 The flower is a symbol of adulterous love. The speaker refuses it, saying ‘I’ve a pretty rose
tree’ and goes back to her ‘To tend to her by day and night’ and the envy and jealousy that
results from this love leads him only to enjoy the thorns.
 The flower is a symbol of creative imagination, associated with free and genuine love.
However, the narrator rejects this opportunity ‘And I passed the sweet flower o’er’, in
favour of the world of experience and imprisonment which is symbolised by the thorns. The
plant is now associated with the Sick Rose and with the ‘briars’ in The Garden of Love
Ah! Sunflower
 Associated with the Golden Age- ‘seeking after that sweet golden clime / Where the
travellers journey is done’
 In the world of the new Eden, to which the sunflower turns ts face, oyuth is finally able to
express the love which is natural to it – ‘Where the youth pined away with desire,/ And the
pale virgin shrouded in snow:/ Arise from their graves and aspire,/ Where my sunflower
wishes to go’
 Represents the human condition, with its roots firmly imprisoned in the earth while its face
is always turned towards the sun
The Lily
 Symbol of pure love here contrasted with the rose (which represents jealous love or passion)
and even the sheep, which possesses a ‘threatening horn’ with which to keep off intruders
 Lily may be associated with the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Why take ye
thought for raiment [clothing]? Consider the lilies of the filed, how they grow; they toil not,
neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these’
  Stands for those who delight in the poetic imagination and the beauty of creation and are
not concerned with keeping others away of jealously defending their possessions.
The Garden of Love
 ABCB
 ‘A chapel was built’ – man made/constructed runs contrary to nature. Symbol of
institutionalised religion
 ‘Where I used to play on the green.’ – link to the Echoing Green, loss of innocence
 ‘garden’ – connotations of the Garden of Eden, paradise
 ‘And’ – anaphora emphasises negative images
 ‘Thou shalt not’ – criticises dogmatic religion, restrictive and contrary to what is natural/love
 ‘Graves’, ‘tomb-stones’ – images of death. Death of innocence?
 ‘black’ – morose emphasis
 ‘walking their rounds’ – patrol, prison-like
 ‘binding with briars my joys and desires’ – suppression, negative, unhealthy, unnatural
The Little Vagabond
 AABB
 ‘Cold’, ‘warm’ – antithesis. Additional emphasis placed on the contrast between the church
and the ale-house as these words don’t conform to the rhyme scheme
 ‘Modest dame Lurch, who is always at church, would not have bandy children, nor fasting,
nor birch.’ – the church as it is does not prevent these things, it isn’t a force for good
 ‘God, like a father rejoicing to see / his children as pleasant and happy as he’ – criticism of
institutionalised religion taking the joy from life and thus displeasing God
London
 ABAB
 ‘I wander thro’ each charter’d street, / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow’ – the
word ‘charter’d’ refers to the granting of rights to land or rents, the implication being that
most of London – even what is natural ‘the Thames’ – is owned by a small number of people
and corporations.
 ‘And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe’ – repetition of ‘marks’
suggestion of physical blows/scars
 ‘in every’ – anaphora emphasises the extent to which suffering exists
 ‘mind-forged manacles’ – manacles are chains or handcuffs that prisoners and slaves would
have to wear. Image of london’s poor being enslaved by the establishment, an echo of
Rousseau’s comment ‘Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains’. Description as
‘mind-forged’ refers not only to the legal oppression of the poor but also suggests they are
‘brainwashed’ by the state and church to believe that the poverty of their condition is
ordained by God and that they will receive their reward in heaven.
 ‘chimney-sweeper’s cry’ – criticism of industrialisation
 ‘black’ning church appalls’ – criticism of the church. ‘blackening’ suggests evil
 ‘runs in blood down palace walls’ – revolutions of the period, criticism of enlightenment
thinking
 ‘blight’/’blast’/’plagues’/’hearse’ – words with connotations of destruction and death
 ‘marriage hearse’ – Blake’s view of marriage as legalised prostitution, where a woman
should be contracted to the highest bidder
The Human Abstract
 AABB
 ‘Pity’, ‘Mercy’, ‘Peace’, ‘Cruelty’ – capitalisation, personification
 ‘Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor’ – exploitation of the virtues as
a means to justify inequality?
 ‘Pity’, ‘Mercy’, ‘Peace’ and ‘Love’ are the virtues Blake describes in ‘The Divine Image’. He is
criticising the idea that as long as these virtues are practised then all is ok as the very need
for these virtues indicates suffering and poverty.
 ‘snare’, ‘baits’ – connotations of entrapment, violent
 ‘dismal shade of Mystery’ – all is deceit and hypocrisy
 ‘caterpillar and fly’ – parasites, lowly creatures
 ‘raven’ – blackness, connotations of death/evil
 ‘Tree’ – common image in Blake. Inversion of the tree (cross) of Christ’s crucifixion, serves to
cover tyranny
 ‘There grows one in the human brain.’ – Negative sentiment, the tree of humility bears the
fruit of deceit. The problems in the world stem from within mankind
Infant Sorrow
 AABB
 Compare to infant joy in innocence
 ‘Into the dangerous world I leapt’ – negative portrayal of new life, the continuation of
society. Ideas of fallen creation
A Poison Tree
 Poem about the destructive nature of repressed anger
 The poem explores what happens if anger is turned inwards and becomes obsessive – the
difference between the anger ‘with my friend:/ I told my wrath, my wrath did end’ and the
anger ‘with my foe:/ I told it not, my wrath did grow’
 Metaphor of the anger as a plant which is nurtured and cared for and so it grows and
flourishes. Can be linked to the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden
 The narrator can be linked to the serpent who abuses Eve’s curiosity – he tempts his enemy
by growing ‘an apple bright’ on the metaphorical tree of his anger knowing ‘my foe beheld it
shine’. His enemy steals into the garden to take it and is found ‘outstretched beneath the
tree’ the next morning
 The use of the modifier ‘glad’ to describe the feelings with which the narrator views the
death of another human being is shocking and reveals the damage done to the spirit and the
conscience of someone who allows their repressed anger and hatred to poison themselves
 The narrator in the poem can be equated to the jealous ‘father of men’ associated with
repression and prohibition, as Blake sees God the creator in Genesis who forbids knowledge
to Adam and eve and whose anger bars them from paradise. Jesus, who urged the
forgiveness of enemies and the overcoming of hate by love, is associated with the telling of
anger that releases the spirit from poisonous brooding
A little Boy Lost
 The opening lines appear to be a reference to the words of Jesus when he summarised the
commandments – ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all
your mnd… Love your neighbour as yourself’
  ‘Nought loves another as itself/ Nor venerates another so/ Nor is it possible to Thought/ A
greater than itself to know’ – seems to be a statement of self-love as the primal feeling
alongside the impossibility of the human mind to understand anything beyond its own level
of thought
 ‘And Father, how can I love you,/ Or any of my brothers more?/ I love you like a little bird/
That picks up crumbs around the door’ – offers a different interpretation of the first stanza.
Seems to suggest the child loves all of nature equally, attempting to love the way that he
should but acknowledging his unimportance in creation
 The priest sees the child’s words as a heresy and his reaction – ‘In trembling zeal he siez’d
his hair:/ He led him by his little coat’ – appears to more greatly contradict Jesus’ teachings
to ‘love your neighbour’ than the child’s words. An extreme version of the Church’s
repression of independent thought. The word ‘zeal’ has connotations of fanaticism and
suggests an enjoyment of the repression
 Blake uses contrast to show the hypocrisy of an institution that preaches love but doesn’t
practise it and to show the gap in power between the priest who has the establishment and
most of the people behind him and the child and his parents who can only weep. Repetition
of ‘weeping’, ‘his little coat’ and ‘his little shirt’ emphasising the child’s size and helplessness.
Blake is showing the destruction of free and innocent thought by the forces of experience
 ‘Are such things done on Albion’s shore’ – Albion was the most ancient name given to
England. Lack of question mark indicates it is a statement of fact not a question – accusatory
A Little Girl Lost
 Opens the poem with an address to ‘Children of the future Age’
 Hopes that in the future people will share his indignation that ‘in a former time Love! Sweet
Love! Was thought a crime’
 Goes back to an ‘Age of Gold’ – the Golden Age is a term used for an ancient era when the
world was seen to be in a state of perfection – Utopia, Eden and other terms have been
applied to it. Always held to have been ended by some kind of ‘fall’ or catastrophe. Creates
an image of this time – ‘Free from winters cold:/ Youth and maiden bright,/ To the holy light,
/ Naked in the sunny beams delight’. Clearly a time of innocence shown by the sunlight, the
word ‘holy’ and the delight in their nakedness
 In the second stanza the ‘youthful pair’ are shown meeting in a garden at dawn. Described
as being ‘fill’d with softest care’ while the garden is ‘bright’ and bathed in ‘holy light’ which
connects the scene to the golden age of the first stanza
 The innocent and free love is depicted as being without fear or guilt. Contrasts to the feeling
created once the father is introduced. Compared to the white hared God of oppression,
envies the freedom of innocence and love. ‘All her tender limbs with terror shook’
 The previously happy and innocent girl is ‘pale and weak’ and the use of phrases such as
‘trembling fear’ and ‘dismal care’ contrast with the light and carefree tone of the early
stanzas. It is the father who produces feelings of guilt and fear about the feelings she has
and the sexual love which had before seemed happy, natural and innocent.
To Tirzah
 Emphasis on the struggle of humanity to break free from tyranny and oppression and to set
their creative imagination free
  First stanza concerned with the necessity for people to die in order for their spirits to be
released from their bodies. Anything ‘born of mortal birth/ Must be consumed with the
earth’.
 ‘sprung from shame and pride’ is a reference to Adam and Eve, the biblical parents of
humanity, who created the necessity for death. The redemption of the race by Jesus is
referred to as ‘mercy changed death into sleep’, implying the resurrection of the spirit
 The ‘mother of my mortal part’ refers to the birth mother who brings the child into a world
full of cruelty, hypocrisy and oppression. Through procreation of the body, she closed ‘my
tongue in senseless clay’ and betrayed the write to ‘mortal life’, which can only end in death.
However, since the writer’s creative spirit is set free through the ‘death of Jesus’ he asks
how this true self can be connected with her ‘then what have I to do with thee?’
 ‘me to mortal life betray’ – the idea of mortality as a punishment (potential link to volpone
and the desperation for immortality via wealth)
A Divine Image
 ABCB
 ‘Cruelty’, ‘Jealousy’, ‘Terror’, ‘Secrecy’ – contrasts to the virtues in ‘The Divine Image’ (inn)
 The order (‘heart’, ‘face’, ‘form’, ‘dress’) is then inverted in the second paragraph, draws
attention to the corresponding images – the heart and cruelty and its hungry gorge for
example.
 ‘Forged iron’, ‘a fiery forge’, ‘a furnace sealed’, ‘its hungry gorge’ – violent, metallic, sealed
version of humanity. ‘F’ is a violent consonant. Images of industry and hell linked again (link
to ‘The Tiger)
Irony
Pastoral irony
 Some critics, such as Northrop Frye, have pointed to Blake’s use of the pastoral genre,
involving a ‘vision of simplified rural existence’. They claim that, through this, Blake is making
room for irony and satire in his presentation of innocence.
 Others, such as Gardner, deny the existence of irony in the Songs of Innocence. Instead they
point to the use of Blake makes of events he would have experienced, such as the children
of the poor being brought to play on Wimbledon Common. Gardner claims that these are
recounted without any intention to question the motives o those responsible for this. For
him, innocence remains pure and innocent.

Blake – Songs of Innocence and Experience: Themes

Sex
The Blossom
 Some critics see it as a specifically sexual poem – see references to the ‘arrow’ as the penis
and the ‘cradle narrow’ as the vagina with the obvious implication of the speaker’s ‘bosom’
implying a free embrace of sexual relations. They also argue that the sparrow is ‘merry’ at
the prospect of love, whilst the robin’s ‘sobbing’ implies orgasm
 The image in the engraving is said to depict the penis both erect and flaccid, whilst the small
winged creatures are representative of semen which generates new life
 A blossom traditionally symbolises youth opening into maturity and the poem is said to
celebrate the joy of free and mutual sexual love
  The sparrow is seen in its role as a symbol of the goddess Venus, in classical mythology,
while Blake would appear to be giving a similar role to the notoriously territorial robin.
Spring
 ‘cock does crow, / So do you’ , ‘Come and lick / my white neck’ , ‘let me kiss / your soft face’
o Intimate images
 Poem is called ‘Spring’ – connotations of new life, renewal etc
The Clod and the Pebble
 ‘Love seeketh only self to please / To bind another to its delight’
o ‘bind’ – suggests carnality
o Selfishness of sex explored, in comparison to true love that ‘seeketh not itself to
please’?
 Two types of love explored – potentially one spiritual and one physical?
The Sick Rose
 ‘The invisible worm / That flies in the night… / Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy’
o The ‘worm’ has connotations of semen? Negative portrayal of sex- inglorious and
lowly
o ‘crimson’ connotes passion/virginity
o ‘bed’ – explicitly sexual setting
 ‘His dark secret love / Does thy life destroy’ – suggests it is the secrecy of the love which is
wrong, advocates openness regarding sexuality? Opposes the suppression of desires and
joys (link to The Garden of Love)
The Lily
 ‘The Lily white shall in love delight’
o ‘white’ – virginal/innocent
A Little Girl Lost
 ‘In a former time / Love! Sweet Love! Was thought a crime’
o Seems to promote freedom of sexual expression
Critique of the state/episteme in which he lives
 The happiness or mmisery of the children within the poems is determined by their
relationships with the adults who maintain control over their lives
 Suspicion and mistrust of authority figures – parental, religious, or political – and the power
they yield is an important theme throughout the work
Holy Thursday (both)
 ‘Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor’ in the version from Innocence
contrasts to the children who are ‘Fed with cold and usurous hand’ in Experience
 In the poem from Innocence the children ‘raise to Heaven the voice of song’ whereas in
Experience the joyful message of the song is questioned – ‘Is that trembling cry a song’
 In naming these two poems the same, Blake evidently wrote them to be compared. The
happiness, charity and innocence in the first poem is then questioned in the second and
through this Blake appears to undermine the appearances of the time in which he lives in;
he emphasises the poverty and injustice in his world by contrasting two different versions
 He refers to a ‘rich and fruitful land’ in the poem from experience and thus seems to critique
the state for allowing ‘so many children poor’
The Schoolboy
  ‘How can the bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?’
o Suggests oppression
 ‘To go to school on a summer morn, / Oh! It drives all joy away’
o Institutions/state making people miserable, forgetting what is truly important
London
 ‘mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe’
o Unhappy times in which he lives – poverty, industrialisation and exploitation
emphasised by the reference to ‘the chimney-sweeper’s cry’
 ‘the youthful harlot’s curse/ Blasts the new-born infant’s tear, / And blights with plagues the
marriage hearse’
o Questions the morality of the period
o ‘marriage hearse’ – suggests true love is dead
The Human Abstract
 The ‘Mystery’ and ‘Deceit’ within the poem could e interpreted as the state in control of
‘Humility’ which ‘takes its root’ underneath
 ‘Cruelty’ – criticises those at the top of society. ‘Snare’ and ‘baits’ suggest oppression and
entrapment
Critique of the church
Holy Thursday (exp)
 ‘Is this a wholly thing to see… Babes reduced to misery, / Fed with cold and usurous hand?’
o The church is cold and usurous, doesn’t care for those ‘children poor’ who need
their help
The chimney sweeper (exp)
 A child ‘Crying ‘weep weep’ in notes of woe! ‘Where are thy father and mother?.../ ‘They are
both gone up to the church to pray’’
o In church rather than helping their son who needs them detached from the practical
application of their religious principles
 ‘They think they have done me no injury,/ and are gone to praise God and his priest and
king, who make up a heaven of our misery’
o Deluded almost by their faith ‘make up’
o The Church doesn’t do anything real or compassionate for those in need
The Garden of Love
 ‘a chapel was built in the midst,/ Where I used to play on the green’ ‘it was filled with
graves,/ And tombstones where flowers should be’
o Squashes nature/creation around it. Fails to value what should be valued- love,
playing, innocence etc
 ‘the gates of this chapel were shut,/ And ‘thou shalt not’ writ over the door’
o Closed, suggests it fails to reach out or be effective in the community
o Doesn’t uphold the positive values but merely offers a series of prohibitions
 ‘priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,/ And binding with briars my joys and
desires’
o Source of misery rather than joy
The Little Vagabond
  ‘the church is cold, but the ale-house is healthy and pleasant and warm’ – the church isn’t
welcoming or friendly but rather callous and cold
 ‘We’d sing and pray all the live-long day…/ Then the parson might preach and drink and
sing,/ and we’d be as happy as birds in the spring…/And God, like a father rejoicing to
see/His children as pleasant and happy as he’
o If all were able to unite and be merry and joyous in church then it would please God
more and there would be ‘no more quarrel with the devil’
A Little Boy Lost (exp)
 ‘The priest sat by and heard the child;/ in trembling zeal he seized his hair/ He led him by his
little coat,/ And all admired the priestly care’
o All are in awe of the church when it is callous and mean, prosecution of innocents
etc
Promotes innocence/ Questions experience?
 The poems deal with the opposition between the innocent, joyous perspective of the child
and the more experienced, less spontaneous, perspective of the adult. Blake creates a
dichotomy between wishes and desires on one hand and duties and responsibilities on the
other, always privileging the imaginative over the rational.
 Some, usually earlier, critics have tended to see ‘innocence’ as the good, pure state of the
child, who:
o Is capable of exercising pure, untrammelled imagination
o Has non-hierarchical, mutual relationships
o Is soon contaminated by the repressive effects of society
 By contrast, ‘experience’ is identified with the adult world:
o Characterised by rules, regulations and rationalism
o Which stifles any capacity for imaginative creativity, joy and emotional freedom
 The majority of critics, whatever their interpretation of ‘innocence’ and ‘experience’, see
innocence as a prior state, giving way to experience. Blake, however, describes them as ‘the
two contrary states of the soul’, not successive states
 ‘Unorganised innocence, an impossibility’ Blake wrote in one of the margins of his later
poems, ‘innocence dwells with Wisdom but never with ignorance.’
o This suggests clearly that innocence without experience (or vice versa) would lead to
stagnation and to fixity – a state that Blake deplored as being the ‘status quo’ sought
by the state and the church, those twin satanic mills of oppression and materialism
Laughing Song
 ‘Mary and Susan and Emily’ symbolise innocence and all appears happy around them (‘the
air does laugh’ ‘the meadows laugh’ etc)
The Echoing Green
 ‘Such, such were the joys/ When we all, girls and boys,/ In our youth-time were seen/ on the
echoing green’
Nurse’s Song (inn)
 ‘When the voices of children are heard on the green…/My heart is at rest within my breast/
And everything else is still’
o All is good when innocence is present/survives
The sick rose
  Simplicity of the poem in terms of structure suggests innocence.
Argument and Persuasion
 Through the opposing states of humanity – innocence and experience – Blake presents his
personal philosophy of anti-authoritarian spirituality, the importance of imagination over
science and his critique of the state
 By using contrasting images, tone and language, he argues his perspective on sex, the church
the state, industry and humanity and seeks to persuade the reader of the validity of his
beliefs
The Schoolboy
 Opens with descriptions of natural beauties/joys to be delighted in
o ‘birds sing on every tree;/…/And the skylark sings with me’
 Contrasts with the description of the school
o ‘cruel’ / ‘drives all joy away’
 Blake therefore argues in favour of enjoyment of nature, criticises the state for making the
young ‘sit in a cage’
 Uses rhetorical questions
o ‘How can the bird that… sit in a cage and sing?’ / ‘How shall the summer arise in joy,
or the summer fruits appear?’
o Cumulative impact as there is question after question. Almost reductio ad absurdum
– preposterous that such a thing could be denied to have such monumentally
damaging effects
 Exaggeration/dramatic images at the end – fatalistic/suggests an end to the seasons to
further persuade that his argument is not only right but also almost necessary to avoid
catastrophe
 ABABB Rhyme scheme – songlike, persuasive as it places emphasis on final words and final
lines of each stanza
Holy Thursday (both)
 Positivity of ‘Oh what a multitude they seemed, /These flowers of London town’ contrasts
with ‘so many children poor? /It is a land of poverty!’ – uses this contrast to show the extent
of the suffering in order to be able to go on to criticise the conspirators in this injustice. Both
show a ‘multitude’ of suffering, used to demonstrate the different perceptions regarding the
poor – one which is deceptive and hides the true injustice?
o Similarly ‘the aged men, wise guardians of the poor’ contrast with the ‘cold and
usurous hand’ in experience – shows the perceptions of those who ‘care for the
poor’, indicates a level of deception
 Rhetorical questions again, build in pace (particularly stanza 2 exp)
 Anaphore stanza 3 experience – emphasises bleakness of the situation, persuades and
furthers argument
 Values nature – the bleakness of the children’s lives is described through an absence of
natural life in their landscape
The garden of Love
 Postive images/words contrast to the negative words used to describe the institutionalised
church – ‘graves’, ‘tombstones’, ‘black’ – connotations of death in comparison to ‘green’,
‘sweet flowers’, ‘joys and desires’
  Anaphora, like in holy Thursday, strengthens argument, feeling of building reason after
reason for anti-authoritarian feelings
 Images of oppression create a negative sentiment towards the church – ‘binding’, ‘thou shalt
not…’, ‘priests… walking their rounds’ (like prison guards)
Illustrations
 Support the texts further – aid his argument
o The schoolboy – children playing, intertwined with the vegetation, suggesting they
are in their natural state. Shown as naked – natural. Birds also present, strengthens
comparison and use of bird imagery.
o The Garden of Love – sombre faced figures clad in black, appear to be looking into a
grave
o Holy Thursday (exp) – bleak landscape with what appears to be a dead figure in the
centre

Blake – Songs of Innocence and Experience: Context

Blake’s life
 28th November 1757 – 12th August 1827
 English poet, painter and printmaker
 Largely unrecognised during his lifetime
 Considered mad by his contemporaries
 Idiosyncratic
 Influenced by Milton
 Part of both the romantic and pre-romantic movements
 Influenced by the French and American revolutions
 Was an autodidact – taught himself. Didn’t attend school as a young child but spent his time
wandering freely through the city and the surrounding countryside, where he began
experiencing visions
 At the age of ten he was enrolled in a drawing school operated by James Pars and 4 years
later he began an apprenticeship with a master engraver. He briefly attended the royal
academy
 Was critical of Sir Joshua Reynolds (founder of the royal academy of Art) as he thought that
he was enslaved by classical forms of art and so could not see the true art, he valued vision
and imagination over rationality – devalued science
 Lived in London nearly his whole life
Religion
 Reverent to the bible but hostile to the Anglican church and all organised religion
Jesus
 Blake’s religious views centred very much on Jesus as the mediator between humanity and
the one true God – since he was both human and divine, just as Blake felt people to be
 When he was asked if he believed in the divinity of Christ, Blake replied, ‘Yes Christ was
divine… but then so are you and so am I’.
 He saw Jesus as the figure that put forgiveness at the centre of the Christian religion and
love as its most important duty. As such he was the antithesis of the tyrannical, demanding
God that used fear to enforce oppressive laws, all beginning ‘thou shalt not’
  The emphasis on the lamb in Songs of Innocence is a reminder that Jesus was a saviour who
sacrificed his life for the redemption of all people.
The bible
 Huge literary influence on Blake
 Multiple references throughout the collection to the Garden of Eden. Albion in Milton’s
poetry was linked to Eden.
o The Garden of Love
o The ‘bed’ in The Sick Rose could link to a rose bed, e.g. garden of eden
o
His cosmology/philosophy
 Believed that all humans were, or had the capacity to be divine through the poetic
imagination. This could be achieved through ‘enlightened innocence’, following experience,
but was inhibited by reliance on science and reason
 He valued Jesus as the personal God, the human divine. He also had a strong spiritual belief
in God but found the God of the Old Testament to be oppressive and inhibitive and named
him Urizon
 Advocates spirituality over religion
Marxism
 Marxism is essentially materialist. Blake, whilst being proto-Marxist differs greatly in that he
devalues the material in favour of the spiritual
Illustrations
 Use of light is key – arguably more so than colour
Industrial revolution
 Going on during Blake’s writing
 Rapid urbanisation as a result
 Saw this as a source of greed, jealousy and corruption in society
 Criticised it as it was reliant upon science and reason which he saw as contrary to the
imagination and true freedom
French/American revolutions
 Used his poems in favour of radicalism in so far as it rejected the established order. Blake
was anti-authoritarian but he was also wary of what revolution mght bring
 He originally wore the red cap of liberty in support of the French revolution but later threw it
away following the events of the Terror and the violence that erupted.
 Part of his critique of oppression
Pre-Romantic Movement
 Pre-Romantic poetry was a reaction to 18th century Enlightment.
 The Pre-Romantic Age is a period of transition between the Enlightment and the
Romanticism: in the last thirty years of the 18th century, the faith in reason, which
characterized the first part of the century, started losing its value.
 The consequence of the industrial revolution was an “ugly world”, in which men followed
precise schemes of living ruled by rationality.
 As a result of the unsatisfaction for the present situation, men and especially poets turned
their attention to feelings and emotion. So the nature was no more an organism which man
 can rule through rationality, but became something real and living, existing as a man exists.
The poets' attention was given to sensibility, to the natural and real world.
Romantic Movement
 An artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of
the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to
1850. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also a revolt against aristocratic
social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific
rationalization of nature
 respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and "pure" nature

Blake – Songs of Innocence and Experience: Critics and approaches

Marxist
 Some Marxist critics see Blake as a proto-Marxist in Songs of Innocence and Experience. they
point to:
o His antipathy towards organised religion and the power of the state
o His opposition to the oppression of the poor
o His questioning of accepted sexual morality
Feminist
 Feminist critics have been interested in
o The meaning of the female figures of the mother and the nurse in the entire
sequence
o The nature of the influence and power these female figures are allowed to exert
‘reader-response’ criticism
 Foregrounds the reader’s role in creating the meaning and experience of a literary work.
Some critics have suggested that
o There is no one viewpoint represented by Songs of Innocence
o Each poem must be read individually, considering the point of view of the speaker
o Each should be seen as a dialogue with the perspective of the reader
o It is inevitable that the reader approaches the poems of innocence from the
perspective of someone who is ‘experienced’
Moralising Verse
 Some critics also suggest that Blake should not be seen as a Romantic poet. Instead the
Songs of Innocence should be read in the light of the kind of moral verse for children written
by John Bunyan and Isaac Watts. However, given Blake’s dislike for the moralising religion
for his period, other critics have indicated that his use of this form should be understood as
ironic or parodic
Tom Paulin
 Blake was not a realist but an idealist
 ‘Blake once said ‘without contraries there is no progression’, and it is clear that his poetry
collections Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience were part of a single scheme, like a
painting with light and shade’
 ‘The ballad has a light, uplifting metre but the content is sinister; the meaning subverting the
form and making the poems all the more unsettling’
  David Erdman, a great authority on Blake, points out that in the 1790s the tiger was
frequently used as an emblem of the revolutionary paris mob. The tiger is a poem about
revolution, about the God of wrath and the ungovernable passions of the mob, but the God
off wrath is also the God of mercy, the God who created the lamb. The poem is asking: how
did this natural and virtuous force, the spirit of popular dissent, create a tigerish world of
massacre and bloodshed?
 Blake is attacking the present system, but at the same time he’s concerned about what will
happen next. To overthrow the established order might lead anywhere… the anxiety and
fear of the forces that revolution might unleash
Harold S Pagliaro
 Blake not only participated in the romantic era’s preoccupation wit mortality, but actually
went beyond most of his contemporaries in embracing vulnerability to death
 Blake considered the world ‘death-laden, flled with intimidating foes, deadly tigers,
hypocritical smiles, and constricting social and religious systems that reduce life.’
 It was the aim of the Songs to meet the challenge presented by such a dismal world view
Donald Dike
 ‘Blake was too fine an artist to pair off in detail all the poems in the sequences; to get what
he was after, it was enough to do this with a few’
Heather Glen
 Blake’s text is not an experimental work
 ‘in presentation and subject-matter, Blake’s songs are closer to late eighteenth century
children’s verse than to anything else in the period’
 However, they differ from the usual children’s poetry in their failure to prvide a strong
authorial voice conveying the message young readers should glean from the poems
 Poems of the Innocence sequence contain an element of irony that undercuts their pastoral
quality
 The self-conscousness of Blake’s poetc voice sets hm apart from his contemporaries. The
poem’s speaker, in relating the deplorable conditions associated with urban life, ‘does not
assume a position of righteous indignation: from the very beginning he recognises his own
implication in that which he sees.’ The result is not a moral attitude that exposes and
protests against social problems but rather a ‘profound uneasiness’ on the part of both the
poem’s speaker and the reader.
KE Smith
 Attempts to match up the poems are complicated by the fact that Blake himself changed the
order several times, moving some from innocence to experience
 Blake was ‘constantly highlighting different paths through the innocent world’ rather than
pointing to one final, ideal arrangement of the poems
Jon Mee
 ‘Blake’s reader is directly implicated in what is happening’
Northrop Frye
 Blake depicts his ideal for the way the world should be ordered
TS Eliot
 Blake’s poetry ‘is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is
peculiarly terrifying’
  He seeks to ‘exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul’
 ‘his philosophy, like his visions, like his insight, like his technique, was his own’
 ‘he attacks conventional moralty on the ground of its inhibition of physical desire’
JPR Wallis
 Churches and priests represent the extreme forms of obscurantism and repression, and the
exaltation of the letter of a rigid law above the spirit of love which transcends mere
obligation
 On the Tiger – ‘the poem proceeds entirely by suggestion; its succession of broken
exclamations, scarcely coherent in their rising intensity, gives a vivid impression of a vast
creative spirit labouring at elemental furnace and anvil to mould a mortal form adequate to
the passion and fierce beauty of the wrath of God, the ‘wild fires’ of the human spirit: it is as
though the whole mighty process has been revealed to him in vivid gleams out of great
darkness’
 ‘the world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall
all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body. This world of imagination is infinite
and eternal, whereas the world of generation is finite and temporal. There exist in that
eternal world the eternal realities of everything we see reflected in this vegetable glass of
nature’
 ‘insistence on vision, the immediate perception of the infinite and eternal in everything… in
such a theory of knowledge, reason and sense-perception cannot have a place; they, with
the phenomenon of a corporeal universe, are part of the error of natural religion, the
fallacies of moral valuation and of penal codes completing it.’
Peter Ackroyd
 Blake believed himself to be ‘marked out by faith’
 ‘someone upon whom no authority could impose itself’
 Valued ‘the power of imaginative awareness’
Saree Makdisi
 Blake’s poetry and drawings should compel us to reconsider the history of the 1790s
 Blake questioned and even subverted the commercial, consumerist, and political liberties
that his contemporaries championed, all while developing his own radical aesthetic
 ‘the eternal body of man is the imagination, that is God himself’
 We should think of freedom ‘not in terms of the negative freedom enshrined in the liberal
tradition – consolidated through the struggles of the 1790s – but rather in creative,
affirmative, positive terms… as the power to imagine, and to create through imagining’
 Blake saw an ‘enemy in the rationalising, alienating, mechanising, quantifying, modernising
and empire-building culture of the nineteenth century’
Erdman
 Blake is a historical/political commentator and uses his poems for this more than to argue
his own philosophy
Richard Holmes
 The songs combine extreme simplicity of form with complex and mysterious meanings
 Blake constantly perceived the world around him in symbolic form
  Blake rebelled against all the institutions of the Church and State. He challenged
conventional ideas of education and sexual morality, and promulgated a libertarian view of
the world in which ‘Everything that lives is holy’

Jonson – Volpone: The play

The argument
 Acrostic poem summarising the whole play (other good words – portends, encapsulates)
 Dramatic effect – serves to intrigue (‘cross plots’, ‘all are sold’)
 Link to the prologue in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in terms of revealing the entire plot from the
outset
 Jonson was interested in the classical tradition, the audience would be aware of the
dramatic form of the play and so were less interested in the actual story but rather the
telling of it; they already know that, as a comedy, it will conform to a certain type. Jonson
hopes to place the emphasis on the moral lessons of the play (the ‘why’) rather than the
plot.
 There is a moral dimension to the play, a sense of justice having been met – ‘all are sold’
 In maths ‘argument’ means trajectory (path or direction)
 Notably it is the ‘parasite’ who ‘deludes; then weaves other Gross plots’ – Mosca is
established as the true manipulator
The prologue
 Very aware of his context, audience and critics
 Jonson comments on the money he is going to make from the play and then goes on to
satirise greed. He is highly self-aware, similar to Blake’s self-implication potentially?
 Written in rhyming couplets
 Boastful
o The play was supposedly written in 5 weeks (‘five weeks fully penned it’)
o He had no help in writing it (‘from his own hand, without coadjutor, novice,
journeyman or tutor’)
o All the jokes are his (no ‘old ends reciting’)
Act 1 Scene 1
 Semantic field of worship/holiness
o ‘world’s soul’, ‘shrine’, ‘saint’, ‘celestial’, ‘splendour’, ‘relic’, ‘glorious’
o Volpone’s opening speeches are permeated with religious language blasphemously
redirected towards gold.
 ‘O thou son of Sol, / But brighter than thy father’ - in alchemy the sun was described as the
father of gold. Gold as a source of life, sustenance and light in the world.
 ‘Cupids’ – volpone is unwittingly confessing that he has perverted the love inspired (in the
classical tradition) by Cupid into the greed defined (in the Christian tradition) as cupiditas
 ‘The price of souls; even hell, with thee to boot / Is made worth heaven!’ – another
blasphemous reference. Christ’s sacrifice paid the ‘price of souls’ and here Volpone suggests
that money too can buy them back from damnation.
 ‘hoards’ – like a squirrel, animalistic
 ‘riches, the dumb God that giv’st all men tongues; /That canst do nought, and yet mak’st
men do all things’ – suggestion is that with money, all can have self-determinitation and
 need no rules or intervention from God. Reminiscent of Aristotle’s prime mover – the God of
the philosophers who causes all movement and action in the world but remains himself
uncaused and unmoved. Not interactive (contrasts with the highly personal God in Blake)
 ‘I glory more in the cunning purchase of my wealth, /Than in glad possession, since I gain
/No common way’ – indicates that it is the art of deception which he fnds truly gratifying,
although he evidently enjoys the wealth itself too.
 ‘You are not like a thresher, that doth stand / With a huge flail, watching a heap of corn,
/And, hungry, dares not taste the smallest grain… You know the use of riches, and dare give,
now, /From that bright heap, to me, your poor observer’ – Mosca’s flattery. Indicates
Volpone’s greed as he enjoys and revels in his riches rather than merely enjoying the
‘cunning purchase’ of it. The multiple sub clauses give Mosca a constantly referential, meek
manner of speech; he could be constantly bowing at every comma.
 ‘Still, bearing them in hand, /Letting the cherry knock against their lips, /And draw it by their
mouths, and back again’ – language of seduction and temptation, link between greed and
appetite
Act 1 Scene 2
 ‘one of the reformed, a fool’ (Androgyno) – an attack on the radical protestants, now known
as puritans, whom Jonson would have hated as enemies of three things very dear t him:
theatre, bodily pleasures and Catholicism
 Volpone – ‘Was thy invention?’ Mosca – ‘If it please my patron, not else’ – oily,
aiming to promote himself in Volpone’s esteem, taking credit only for that which pleases
him
 The Song that Mosca sings opens ‘Fool, they are the only nation /Worth men’s envy, or
admiration; /Free from care, or sorrow-taking’ – potential to link to Blake in that it advocates
innocence?
 ‘Now, now, my clients /Begin their visitation! Vulture, kite, /Raven, and gorcrow, all my birds
of prey, That think me turning carcass, now they come; I am not for ‘em yet.’ – the relevance
of the animal imagery within the play is made explicit. As the play progresses they are
referred to more and more by the animals of their names, suggesting they become
increasingly bestial.
 ‘And not a fox /Stretched on the earth, with fine delusive sleights, /Mocking a gaping crow?’
– Volpone jokes that the coat of arms engraved on the plate should refer to the tactcs (such
as playing dead) by which a fox consumes the crow who was hoping to consume him
Act 1 Scene 3
 Voltore - ‘I am sorry, /To see you still thus weak’ Mosca – ‘[Aside] That he is not
weaker’ – shows the duplicity and self-interest of ALL the characters within the play.
 ‘I feel me going – uh, uh, uh, uh – I am sailing to my port – uh, uh, uh, uh!’ – sheer
ridiculousness of Volpone’s acting. Comic value for the audience who know he is pretending.
Through such ridiculousness, Jonson is mocking the greed of Voltore which appears to cloud
his judgement and make him completely blind to the obvious falsity before him.
 Mosca – ‘When you do come to swim, in golden lard, /Up to the arms, in honey, that your
chin /Is borne up stiff with fatness of the flood, /Think on your vassal’ – Excess and feeding
used to represent the degeneration.
Act 1 Scene 4
  Mosca – ‘[to the silver plate] Stand there, and multiply’ – blasphemous, echo/allusion to
God’s words to Adam and Eve in Genesis. Replacing procreaton and life with greed and
wealth. Suggesting that it is now this which populates the earth?
 Corbaccio – ‘Tis aurum palpabile, if not potabile’ – again reference to feeding to indicate
excess/greed
 Mosca – ‘No, sir: he is rather worse.’ Corbaccio – ‘That’s well’ – greed of
corbaccio as one of the scavengers is made explicit.
 Corbaccio’s constant question and mishearing (e.g. Mosca – ‘no amends’, Corbaccio –
‘What? Mends he?’) makes him a source of comedy within the scene. He appears ridiculous
and decrepid and his ambition to outlast Volpone and therefore inherit his fortune appears
increasingly ridiculous as the scene goes on.
Act 1 Scene 5
 ‘Tis the common fable. / The dwarf, the fool, and the eunuch are all his: he’s the true father
of his family’ – if he is the ‘true father’ then he is in some way as twisted and degraded as
the freaks whom he has supposedly fathered. They represent his internal degeneration
 Mosca describes Celia’s appearance again using language of feeding – ‘a beauty, ripe, as
harvest!... And flesh, that melteth, in the tough, to blood! Bright as your gold, and lovely, as
your gold!’ – connects lust and avarice. Desire and appetite for all things intertwined as
general greed. Perverted lust.
Act 2 Scene 1
 Pperegrine – a type of falcon
 This scene demonstrates sir Pol’s stupidity/pomposity
o ‘This fellow, does he gull me, trow? Or is gulled?’
o Opening 13 lines of grandiose, suspending sentences in response to Peregrine’s
monosyllabic response ‘yes’ ridicules Sir Pol’s pretensions.
 Comments on hierarchy
o ‘I have been consulted with, in this high kind, touching some great men’s sons,
persons of blood, and honour’ – Sir Pol’s social ambitions made evident
 Socio-political comments
o ‘I hope you travel, sir, with licence?’ – a kind of passport or visa, required by the
privy council for overseas travel, and often excluding Catholic countries as
dangerous to the traveller’s soul and England’s safety
o ‘spinola’s whale’ – a spansh general feared in England for his ingenious secret
weapons, including a whale ‘hir’d to have ddrown’d London by snuffling up the
thames and spouting it upon the city’ – Charles Herle, Worldy policy and moral
prudence 1654
 Almost meta-theatrical
o ‘O this knight, were he well known, would be a precious thing to ft our English stage.
He that should write but such a fellow should be thought to feign extremely, if not
maliciously’ – insulates himself from criticism but also commends his own
characterisation.
Act 2 Scene 2
 The contrast between Peregrine’s opinion of the Mountebanks and that of Sir Pol highlights
his stupidity. Peregrine – ‘They are quicksalvers,… they are most lewd imposters; Made all of
 terms, and shreds; no less beliers Of great men’s favours, than their own vile med’cines’ , Sir
Pol – ‘They are the only knowing men of Europe!’
 Volpone speaks in prose as the Mountebank –disguise?
 Jonson not only builds on standard episodes from the beast fable and commedia dell’arte
traditions but also builds an extended metaphor that makes Volpone/Scoto a playful parody
of jonson himself: a proud intellectual selling his goods now at a lower price to a public
audience (at the Globe) instead of his usual aristocratic private one (at Blackfriars), after
being jailed for offending a powerful man (angered King James, a Scot, in Eastward ho!).
 Volpone uses latinate dction wherever possible as Scoto (lines 98-116) to give the
impression of knowledge. Is Jonson mocking the Jacobean perception of latin as a sign of
education (it was this which saved him following his arrest)
Act 2 Scene 3
 Corvino scolds Scoto/Volpone for selling outside his house
Act 2 Scene 4
 ‘like a flame’, ‘burning heat’, ‘ambitious fire’, ‘my liver melts’, ‘heap of cinders’ – fire imagery
used to sow greed/lust for Celia. Links to Blake’s use of it to criticise industrialisation.
Indication that both are all consuming and destructive.
 ‘I have not time to flatter you, we’ll part and, as I prosper, so applaud my art’ – Mosca
directly refers to his shameless flattery of his master
Act 2 Scene 5
 Corvino’s perverted ownership of his wife is presented
o ‘the murder of father, mother, brother, all thy race, should follow, as the subject of
my justice’
o ‘thy restraint, before, was liberty… I will have this bawdy light dammed up; and, till’t
be done, some two, or three yards off, I’ll chalk a line; o’er which, if thou but chance
to set thy desp’rate foot, more hell, more horror, more wild, remorseless rage shall
seize on thee’
Act 2 Scene 6
 Corvino – ‘Not his recovery?’ Mosca – ‘Yes sir’ Corvino – ‘I am cursed, I am
bewitched, my crosses meet to vex me’ – explicitly curses Volpone’s health. Morbid and
horrific level of greed to wish the death of another human being
Act 2 Scene 7
 Even Corvino is a master of deception – ‘Come, dry those tears. I think, thou thought’st me
in earnest? Ha? By this light, I talked so but to try thee’ – attempts to convince Celia of his
affection and kindness in order to further use her to satisfy his own greed. Duplicitous.
Act 3 Scene 1
 Mosca’s true iintentions made available/revealed
 Comparable to iago (Othello) – Machiavellian
 The relationship between virtue and vice is explored. Virtue as something to be aspired to.
Dissembling as an art form. ‘your fine, elegant rascal, that can rise and stoop, almost
together, like an arrow; shoot through the air, as nimbly as a starr; turn short, as doth a
swallow… This is the creature had the art born with him; toils not to learn it, but doth
practise it… such sparks are the true parasites, others but their zanies’
  ‘subtle snake’ – animal imagery,satanic, biblical allusion to the deceptive snake in Genesis.
Use of sibilance further compounds the image
 ‘All the wise world is little else, in nature, but parasites, or sub-parasites’ – the self-
interested nature of all mankind, greed has infected all. ‘wise’ – potentially a criticism of the
educated/those at the top of society? (link to Blake?)
Act 3 Scene 2
 ‘Heaven, be good to me. These imputations are too common, sir, And eas’ly stuck on virtue,
when she’s poor. You are unequal to me, and howe’er Your sentence may be righteous, yet
you are not, That ere you know me, thus, proceed in censure; St Mark bear witness ‘gainst
you, tis inhuman’ – criticises Bonario for judging him so hardhly. Exemplifies his deception,
manages to convince Bonario of his virtues (when he doesn’t have any?!)
 ‘This cannot be personated passion’ – ironic as it most definitely is deception, Mosca is
putting on this ‘passion’ to gain Bonario’s affection and trust
 ‘Lead, I follow thee’ – evidence of Mosca’s success.
Act 3 Scene 3
Act 3 Scene 4
 ‘band’ – could refer to the band around the neck of a parrot, a bird the English commonly
called ‘Pol’ or ‘Polly’, thus extending the avian metaphor
 ‘the storm comes toward me’ – unflattering description of Lady Would-be, indicates she is
unkempt and unwelcome
 ‘Troubled with noise, I cannot sleep: I dreamt That a strange fury entered, now, my house,
And, with the dreadful tempest of her breath, Did cleave my roof assunder’ – directly talking
about the unpleasantness of his encounters with Lady W-B with HER! She’s an idiot as she
cannot recognise the direct references to her breath and manner.
 ‘Which o’your poets? Petrarch? Or Tasso? Or Dante? Guarini? Ariosto? Aretine? Cieco di
Hadria?’ – attempting to appear intelligent and well-read but it merely emphasises her
pretensions and stupidity as she recites a list of progressively worse poets. Aretine was a
notorious pornographer and Cieco di Hadria significantly below the others in terms of
literary merit
Act 3 Scene 5
Act 3 Scene 6
Act 3 Scene 7
 ‘Did e’er a man haste so, for his horns?’ – a ‘cuckold’ in the Jacobean era was portrayed as a
man with horns like a ram on his temples. Mosca is emphasising and criticising Corvino’s
greed as he is actually eager to be cuckolded (cheated on) in order to gain material wealth
 ‘Honour? Tut, a breath; There’s no such thing, in nature: a mere term invented to awe fools’
– indicates he has prescribed himself to a different set of virtues (greed, self-interest, lust,
capitalism etc). compare to the use of the ‘good’ virtues in Blake (we would need ‘pity’
unless we made someone poor etc…)
 Celia – ‘is shame fled human breasts? … modesty an exile made, for money?’ – replacement
of the true virtues with greed. The inverted syntax of the final line of her speech emphasises
the new importance of ‘money’, rhetoric effect
 ‘he leaps off from his coach’ – comic, in comparison to his apparent weakness previously,
following her sober assessment of the condition of mankind. The reminder of Volpone’s
deception thus far serves to emphasise her condemnation of greed
  ‘He would have sold his part of Paradise Fore ready money’ – emphasises Corvino’s greed to
excess
 ‘Why should we defer our joys?’ – shouldn’t live a life enslaved by the rules of the age, the
church or society, there is joy to be had in the physical world. Potential link to Blake ‘bind
with briars my joys and desires’
 ‘We will eat such at a meal. The heads of parrots, tongues of nightingales, the brains of
peacocks, and of ostriches’ – birds. Grotesque link between hunger and sexual appetite.
Feeding and excess again
 Conscience ‘Tis the beggar’s virtue’
 ‘any part, that yet sounds man’ – any part still human, containing manly honour or humane
mercy. Suggests that mankind has been totally consumed by self-interest and greed
 Volpone – ‘yield, or I’ll force thee’ – grotesque image of an elderly man springing upon a
woman. Rape.
 Bonario’s rescue speech borders on the ridiculous – his use of excessively long words and
romantic language undermines the gallantry of his actions. Jonson is not applauding the
virtuous within the play. ‘Forbear, foul ravisher, libidinous swine! Free the forced lady, or
thou diest, impostor’
Act 3 Scene 8
 ‘Guilty men Suspect what they deserve still’ – Volpone getting what he deserves, the
audience enjoy this, dramatically effective.
Act 3 Scene 9
 ‘You may be state in a double hope. Truth be my comfort, and my conscience, My only aim
was, to dig you a fortune Out of these two, old, rotten sepulchres’ – demonstrates Mosca’s
skill and deceit. Reference to truth serves to further emphasis his dishonesty
Act 4 Scene 1
 ‘First, for your garb, it must be grave, and serious; Very reserved, and locked; not tell a
secret…’ – like Polonius’s advice to Laertes in Hamlet, Sir Pol’s advice emphasises shallow
social tactics rather than deep moral sense. Dissembling again. Critique of society? Satirises
its superficiality. Link to Blake’s ideas of morality and corruption and deception in society
 ‘for your religion, profess none; But wonder, at the dversity of all; And, for your part,
protest, were there no other But simply the laws o’th’land, you could content you: Nick
Machiavel and Monsieur Bodin, both, Were of this mind’ – absence of institutionalised
religion but toleration of ideas arguably something that would have appealed to Blake.
Demonstrates Sir Pol’s pretensions –he misunderstands the argument of Niccolo Machiavelli
that advocated putting political considerations ahead of religious ones. Bodin would have
appealed to Jonson as a Catholic convert who advocated religious toleration
Act 4 Scene 2
Act 4 Scene 3
Act 4 Scene 4
Act 4 Scene 5
 ‘fatherhoods’ – not only the proper term of address but also a rhetorically advantageous one
as it encourages the judges to side with the father Corbaccio
 Voltore’s speech starting line 61 is a satire of the judicial system, showing the power of
language and argument over truth or justice.
  ‘His soul moves in his fee’ (Bonario) – Criticism of lawyers. Greed at the heart of society’s
institutons (link to Blake- critique of the state/establishment)
Act 4 Scene 6
 ‘I’d ha; your tongue, sir, tipped with gold, for this’ – link to appetite/taste again
Act 5 Scene 1
 ‘Give me a bowl of lust wine… This heat is lid; tis blood’ – Catholic imagery, life sustenance
and spirituality
 ‘O more than if I had enjoyed the wench! The pleasure of all womankind’s not like it’ – Value
of deception over lust for Celia, dissembling as an artform, elevates it beyond bodily desires
 ‘We must here be fixed; Here, we must rest; this is our masterpiece; We cannot think to go
beyond this.’ – Mosca’s skilful deception. He dares Volpone into even more ridiculous action
by limiting him. Tempts him by denying him further trickery
 ‘out of conscience, for your advocate’ – Mosca’s false honour again, his deceit is emphasised
by his outward claims of honesty
Act 5 Scene 2
 Animal imagery continues
o Explicitly refers to the Vulture, raven and crow
o Volpone refers to himself as carrion
o ‘It is the vulture He has the quickest scent’
o As the play becomes more chaotic it resembles the animal kingdom – degeneration
of society
 Greed/avarice
o Volpone’s reference to himself as carrion links hunger/appetite/scavenger-ism etc.
o ‘gold Is such another med’cine, it dries up All those offensive savours…’ Mosca’s
speech line 98-105
Act 5 Scene 3
 Mosca dismisses each of the legacy hunters in turn. Hugely comical, treats them extremely
badly. Contrasts hugely with his subservience and flattery thus far
 ‘Raise no tempest with your looks’ – To Lady W-B, comic
 Speech beginning line 80 – satirises lawyers. Class relevancy. Playing to the crowd’s
preconceptons of the law and lawyers as moneygrabbing.
 ‘The fox fares ever best when he is cursed’ – he revels in his identity as the fox
Act 5 Scene 4
 ‘I see, the family is all female, here’ (Peregrine) – implying it is a whorehouse, another
opportunity for Jonson to mock the W-Bs.
 ‘What might be his grave affair of state now? How to make Bolognian sausages, here, in
venice, sparing One o’th’ ingredients?’ – mocking Sir Pol, incapable of having any true
serious business
 Scene of tremendous comic value – Sir Pol ‘[climbs into the tortoise shell]’
 ‘[aside to sir Politic] Creep a little’ – this entire section is laughable, with Sir Pol inside the
tortoise shell and the merchants prodding and poking him
Act 5 Scene 5
 ‘no man would construe it a sin’ – just actions, Volpone is getting what he deserves
  ‘this is called the fox-trap.’ – Mosca’s true intentions revealed, Volpone referred to explicitly
as the fox twice in this scene, decent into animalistic, bestial behaviour
Act 5 Scene 6
 ‘Here comes my vulture, Heaving his beak up I’ the air, and snuffing’ – increasing references
to animals. Growing ever-more bestial in their behaviour. Almost ceasing to be humanlike at
this point
Act 5 Scene 7
Act 5 Scene 8
 ‘Corvino,… Should not have sung your shame, and dropped your cheese, To let the fox laugh
at your emptiness’ – reference to the beast-fable in which the Fox tricks the Crow into
dropping his cheese by flattering it into singing (obviously when it opens its beak, it drops
the cheese)
Act 5 Scene 9
Act 5 Scene 10
 ‘I’m caught I’mine own noose’ – Volpone acknowledges that just as he tricked the
scavengers into giving him their fortunes, Mosca tricked him. Also a reference to his fake
death which has now brought about real tragedy in his life.
 ‘conscience – conscience, my good sires – That makes me, now, tell truth’ – only now has
conscience, still acting out of self-interest really? Attempting to clear his name in order to
continue practising the law?
 Corbaccio – ‘The advocate is a knave: And has a forked tongue… So is the parasite too.’ …
corvino – ‘And credit nothing the false spirit hath writ: it cannot be, my sires, but he is
pssessed’ – still acting out of self-interest to discredit Voltore and Mosca in order to serve
themselves
Act 5 Scene 11
 ‘To make a snare for mine own neck!’ – refers to himself again using language associated
with animals (the fox snare)
Act 5 Scene 12
 ‘A proper man! And, were Volpone dead, A fit match for my daughter’ – wealth as a status
symbol, Mosca has risen in terms of status. The avocatori are shown to be self-interested
rather than just – securing the status of their offspring rather than concerning themselves
with the carriage of justice.
 Volpone – ‘I was born with all good stars my enemies’ – the ideas of fate and the stars
deciding character (see the section in King Lear revision booklet on Jacobean ideas of
astrology and fate)
 ‘The fox shall, here, uncase’ – taking off his disguise – becoming human?
 ‘And mercy’ – Celia advocates mercy for those who wronged her, makes her seem slightly
pathetic. Appears to be satirising moral/religious practise
 ‘since the mot was gotten by imposture, By feigning lame, gout, palsy and such diseases,
Thou art to lie in prison, cramped with irons, Tll thou be’st sick and lame indeed’ – just
punishment, fitting. Volpone responds ‘This is called mortifying of a fox’
 ‘Let ll that see these vices thus rewarded Take heart, and love to study ‘em.’ – moral
message of the play
  ‘Mischiefs feed Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed’ – feeding and excess in
relation to greed again

Jonson – Volpone: Characters

Volpone
 Greedy in excess – demonstrated from the outset with his matins prayer to gold
 Lustful, rich, grotesque
 Despite his abhorant character, the audience find themselves oddly drawn to him- he is a
source of much comic value (e.g. his melodramatic coughing and spluttering as part of his
feigned illness)
 Volpone imagines himself the triumphant fox of several ancient beast fables (Robert
Watson)
 The use of the ‘fox’ as the animal for Volpone instantly creates an image of a sly, cunning,
stealthy man
Mosca
 Parasitic, subservient, crafty, scheming, subversive
 Similar to Volpone, the audience are drawn to Mosca as a source of comedy. His abrupt
criticisms of the scavengers following Volpone’s ‘death’ are a good example of this
 Mosca envisions himself as the all-conquering wily servant of New Comedy
o Asks his master to ‘applaud my art’ even while hoping to avoid the kind of ‘epilogue’
that punished volpone’s strategic role-playing as Scoto
o Preparing to turn against his long-term master and ally, Mosca declares, ‘this is
called the fox-trap’, which is a remnder of the dramatic mouse-trap trick that Hamlet
uses to expose King Claudius. However, Jonson undermines the use of a
Shakespearean plot within his own iconoclastic comedy as Mosca is caught in the
end
 The fly – theme of parasitism. Impression of a lowly, irritating creature, a parasite feeding off
others. Death and decay connotations. Appears subservient initially, justifies his name
Voltore, Corvino and Corbaccio
 The ‘legacy hunters’ or scavengers who aim to become Volpone’s heir
 They are all self-interested
 Through their humiliation and lack of material gain for their greed, jonson criticises the vices
they stand for
 They are ridiculed within the play – Corbaccio is described as a decrepit old man and his
hearing is clearly failing him, Corvino’s obsessive protectiveness over his wife is depicted as
grotesque and unnatural and Voltore is satirised as a money-grabbing lawyer
 Vulture – a carrion bird (feeds on flesh). Vultures are greedy and vile birds, parasitic like the
fly. Feeds on death
 Corbaccio/Raven – traditionally ravens are harbingers of misfortune and deception. Feeds
on dead flesh like a vulture
 Corvino/Crow – symbolic of illusion.
The Would-Bes
 Questionable intergration of the subplot into the play as a whole
  Often generate useful parallels, in terms of plot and theme, to the venetian vices in the main
plot
 Provides further occasions for jonson to attack self-aggrandising literary delusions. If at times
their story seems irrelecant to the centre of the play, that may itself be Jonson’s point – the
Would-Be sub-plot is a Would-be main plot
 Lady W-B’s self-dramatising tendencies are ridiculed
o She acknowledges that she derives her behaviour from Castiglone’s ‘The courtier’
(IV.ii.35), but ends up seeming more like a courtesan
o Her speech is an obsessive chain of literary allusions (III.iv/19-97)
o Her ability to mistake the Englishman Peregrine for a Veenetian courtesan, because
she believes Mosca’s hints that her life is becoming a standard story of Italianate
sexual connivance typifies her self-dramatising tendencies. She is too enthralled with
her role as the righteous detective to notice how peregrine doesn’t resemble such a
courtesan
 Sir Pol is absorbed with such outlandish schemes and tales that Peregrine is lleft wonder
‘Does he gull me trow? Or is gulled?’ (II.i.24). the answer is both: Sir Pol is so enthralled wth
his imaginary intrigues that he begins to believe them
 In his diary he takes the painfully banal events of his daily life, such as replacing shoelaces
and urinating, and writes them down in books (‘quotes’ them) as if they were the makings of
an international spy-thriller (IV.i.128-147)
o He is punished by Peregrine for this. By pretending that these dangerous plots are
actually occurring, that Pol’s spy fantasies have been misread as real by actual spies.
Pol’s reaction s to admit that he drew all his schemings ‘out of playbooks’ (V.iv.42)
 Pol’s fate is analoguous with that of Volpone
o Peregrne wonders if Pol’s ‘adventures’ will be ‘put I’th’ Book of Voyages, And his
gulled story registered for truth?’ such punishment would ironically fit the crime
o After Pol is humiliated, one witness described the scene as ‘a rare motion, to be
seen in Fleet Street’ (V.iv.77)
o Pol moans that he ‘shall be the fable of all feasts; The freight of the gazette; ship
boys’ tale; And, which iis worst even talk for ordinaries’ (V.iv.82-4) he will become,
as he had hoped, renowned, but not at all in the way he had hoped: this master of
gossip about prodigies has himself become a prodigious subject of gossip
Celia and Bonario
 Generate the play’s most remarkable instance of Jonson’s manipulation of generic formula.
o The extreme and apparently authentic virtue of thse characters makes them
anomalous in the world of satiric city-comedy
 Potentially the locus of goodness of the naïve and pretentious targets of ridicule
 WB Yeats found them poignant in their isolation
 It is expected that these 2 will form a romantic union but they don’t. Jonson turns
expectations of romantic theatre against themselves, in favour of his own realism
 Celia isn't a simpleton – she isn't guilty of simplicity but the eccentric perspective of her
extreme and conventional virtue leads her to repeatedly misjudge the situation. Through her
evident lack of judgement, jonson criticises such ‘virtue’.
o She misunderstands her husband’s urging as a fidelity test
 o She repeatedly calls to the heavens to help but ‘the lack of any divine response to
these repeated calls is an exploitation of the audience’s desires and expectations,
used to remind us yet again that the real world doesn’t work in the reassuring
manner of the play worlds we are used to witnessing’ (Watson)
o She spouts clichés of female virtue – she is a martyr and ould rather die than submit
to sexual dishonour. She behaves as a conventional female heroin should
 Bonario’s intervention Act 3 Scene 7 is corny. The play doesn’t use alliteration or rhyme in its
speeches normally – ‘these anomalous signals of more exalted genres involving heroic
Anglo-Saxon warriors or heroic couplets reinforce the impression that the virtuous couple
and their sentiments are badly out of place, comic bathetic in a comic-satiric universe’
(Watson). Jonson criticises such people who do not live in the ‘real’ world as he portrays it.
The Avocatori
 Used to satirise the judiciary
 Shown to be unjust/have poor judgement
The Freaks
 Said to be Volpone’s children they are representative of the degradation and degeneration
of him, the most foul and unnatural parts of his humanity

Jonson – Volpone: Themes

Greed and Avarice
 Further discussed in the ‘appetite’ theme in the comparison section
 Volpone is evidently a satire on greed. Shown almost an entire society driven by love of
money- even the Avocatori.
 Most of the play is a story of competitive greed. We first see the freed of Mosca and
Volpone in competition with the greed of the clients. Increasingly we become aware of the
clients competing against one another. Finally we see competition between Mosca and
Volpone.
 A comment on the rise of capitalism. It became clear that the individual who was able to
make money could achieve more actual power than rulers who relied on authority alone and
were often short of money. It was written in response to a social development we can now
recognise as the beginning of the capitalist free-enterprise system.
 The urge to get rich has never been a new phenomenon. Jonson was studying one of the
most basic of human instincts, the greed for possessions. Portrayed as a disease.
o ‘These possess wealth, as sick men possess fevers, /Which, trulier, may be said to
possess them’ – 1st avocatore
 Volpone is also greedy in his lust for Celia- desire to possess another person.
 ‘Gold replaces God, as it does for Volpone in the opening lines, though it can buy nothing
except more gold. Opulent possessions become the new form of demonic possession
(Watson)
 ‘the play’s primary satiric target is greed, but it also recognises that greed is merely one
facet of the insatiable human desire to continue desiring… and of the fundamental
humantendency… to live in grandiose egotistical fantasies rather than the real world’
(Watson)
 The characters crave wealth as an index of power and status
Death and Disease/abnormality
 Jonson uses disease and sickness as spiritual metaphors
 Sickness is the state which man brings on himself by pursuing greed and perverted
appetities. Disease is a decription of man’s fallen nature.
 Thus volpones pretence of being physically ill is an appropriate symbol of his actual spiritual
state
 Even when the physical ailments are real, as in Corbaccio, we continue to see them as
symbolic. Corbaccio is spiritually blind and deaf, failing to realise that his end is near and that
he should be thinking about the state of his soul.
 Abnormality is treated in a similar way. The dwarf, eunuch, and hermaphrodite are symbolic
of the abnormal values in their father
 Like disease, abnormality is presented not as a misfortune but as a moral fault. The normal
wat to live is the right way to live, in accordance with Christian principles potentially. In this
sense Volpone is immediately seen to be abnormal when he worships his gold instead of
God and finds more satisfaction in wealth than in the love of ‘children, parents, friends’
Crime and folly
 Focuses on the crimes people commit when they forget Christian teaching and follow their
appetites.
 Crime is seen as a kind of folly, since it is foolish to practice short-sighted policies for the
sake of worldly rewards if the true reward is heaven.
Deception
 To flatter oneself is to seek escape from one’s real nature. Jonson held the belief (Stoic as
well as Christian) that man must examine his real nature, attempt to improve it, and then
remain true to it.
 The ‘self’ Mosca says he is in love with is not really his self, but his art, which consists in
suppressing the self and adapting to circumstances.
 The clients never recognise the true extent of their wickedness, and Corvino particularly
always sees himself as a man of honour
 Volpone is constantly playing different roles within the play- the invalid, the mountebank
and the court messenger.
 Acting controls reality within the play, but not in the way wished for
o Volpone becomes truly sick and immobile as he pretended to be
o Mosca is sentenced to the total servility he had feigned
o The legacy hunters reveal themselves as essentially the animals after which they are
named
o Sir Pol becomes a victim of his own paranoid plots
Vanity/Pride
 The chief of the seven deadly sins was pride (superbia)
 This is a state of self satisfaction, of forgetting our dependence on God, closely related to
vanity
 In Volpone and Mosca we see this emphasised even more than their greed. Their deepest
motive is to satisfy their vanity, their pride in themselves and especially their skills.
o Volpone enjoys the triumph of their skill in court ‘more than if I had enjoyed the
wench’.
 o Mosca continually finds satisfaction in his skill (‘I… grow in love/ With my dear self’
III.i.1-2), even when it brings him no material reward
o Mosca seems to be more interested in being treated like a gentleman at the end of
the play than becoming rich, although these two things go together
 Jonson explains the acquisitive instinct (our urge to possess things) as an out-growth of the
even more basic instinct of self-love

Jonson – Volpone: Context

Jonson
 Jonson’s father died before he was born, his step-father was a brick-layer
 Married in his early twenties and had several children, although it is thought that none
survived to adulthood
 August 1597 he went to prison for his part in finishing a satiric play – ‘the isle of dogs’
 The following year, jonson killed another fellow actor (Gabriel Spencer), who had been in
prison with him, in a duel
 He escaped execution as he could speak latin and therefore claim exemption as a clergyman,
but he had his thumb branded and belongings confiscated
 He announced his conversion to Catholicism, which was then effectively illegal
 When the Scottish king James succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, he was arrested again for co-
authoring a play called ‘Eastward Ho!’ which satirised scots
 He had a stroke in 1628 that rendered him paraplegic until his death in 1637
Genre/literary antecedents
 The legacy hunters have prominent sources in classical literature (Horace, Petronius, Lucien,
Juvenal), but they emerge here as venture capitalists – investing more in the hopes of
greater return
 Jonson’s Volpone conveys the same warning as Marlowe’s Dr Faustus: that the modern
world, though it may lack the explicitly diabolical tempters of the old morality playes, offers
to buy our souls n exchange for some superficial power and glory that never really
transcends the mundane
 Uses Aesopian beat-fables, particularly those of Reynard the fox.
o Reynard, too, is tried by a corrupt court, first for attempted rape, then for feigning
death in an attempt to capture the crow’s wife
o He pretends to be a doctos, and is often depicted preaching from a platform like
Volpone when he plays Scoto of Mantua.
o Like Volpone, and real foxes, Reynard often plays dead to trap the predatory birds
that feed on his corpse
 Combines bestiary traditions with commedia dellarte
o Uses comedy stock roles, Pantalone (with whom Corvino explicitly associates
himself), the nattering Punchinello (with whom jonson associates Sir Pol’
Classical comedy
 Jonson draws on classical/New Comedy traditions in his work
 Key features were farce, 5 acts, use of stock characters
Theophrastan Comedy
  The study of the Character, as it is now known, was conceived by Aristotle’s student
Theophrastus. In The Characters (c. 319 BC), Theophrastus introduced the “character
sketch,” which became the core of “the Character as a genre.” It included 30 character
types. Each type is said to be an illustration of an individual who represents a group,
characterized by his most prominent trait. (the entire list of characters can be found on
Wikipedia)
 Jonson appropriates a number of Theophrastan stock characters from Greek New Comedy;
Volpone is the insincere man (Eironeia) or the shamelessly greedy man (Anaischuntia),
Mosca is the flatterer (Kolakeia) or the fabricator (Logopoiia) and Sir Politic the garrulous
man (Adoleschia), for example.
Venice
 Venice is an appropriate setting as, without land or other natural resources, its economy is
built on trade/exchange, thus providing the perfect setting for greed.
 Famously liberal
Morality drama
 Dramatized the Christian idea of God and satan, good and evil.
 Characters were allegorical; representing vices and virtues
 Vice characters were shown to be dangerously attractive, lively and humours and enjoying
the pleasures of the world. Only in the end were they shown to be foolish
 Virtue always triumphed but the good characters were not as superficially attractive
o Spiritual goodness is not clever, doesn’t disguise itself, does not make jokes
Capitalism
 New capitalist economic system came to predominate in the renaissance, the old, feudal
rules of social order collapsed; money became regarded as a goal in itself’ (Watson).
However, those who succeeded financially had little imagination for what to do with their
wealth except generate more and ‘to try to put on the style and seek the power of a feudal
aristocracy’ – to become at best high brow patrons or, more oftem petty barons’
Avarice by Albrecht Durer
 A small oil painting
 Shows a grotesque and wrinkled old woman with one sagging breast hanging out of her
crimson robe holding a bag of gold coins with both hands
 Allegorical and serves as a warning at both the transcience of life and the ultimate
worthlessness of earthly fortune
 May well have been seen by Jonson and provided inspiration for his satire of greed/avarice

Jonson – Volpone: Critics and approaches

Robert Watson
 Wrote the introduction to the New mermaids edition of Volpone – I have referenced him at
several points throughout my discussion of themes etc.
 Volpone depicts unprincipled selfishness thinly covered by sanctimonious speeches, lust ad
possessiveness poorly disguised as love and marriage, cynical legalism passing itself as pure
justice, boastful name-dropping that pretends to be cultural sophistication, snobbery
congratulating itself as decorum, and greed deluding itself that it is really prudence
responsibility, even religion
Sara Van De Berg
 ‘throughout his career Jonson celebrated and mocked the human body. In Jonson’s works
both [self as social construct or moral essence] are figured as the body, ands are set in
tension through tricks of naming, deformity, cross – dressing, disguise and projection, all
designed to augment the body and satisfy its desires’
S Musgrove
 ‘Jonson’s aim, in his great satirical comedies, is deeply serious: he is moved by a stern
passion of moral indignation at the crimes and follies of men, and his laughter is curative and
purgative, not frivolous or accomodating’
 ‘the aim of the comic poet is no less than justice itself, and, as jonson sees it, comedy on this
great scale merits the approval and applause of both moralist and scholar’

Volpone/Blake Comparison
Themes
Death
Blake
 Peter Ackroyd considers that ‘in the visionary world of William Blake there is no birth and
death, no beginning and no end, only the perpetual pilgrimage within time towards
eternity’. His hope that perfect art will immortalise him is revealed when he addresses
‘Children of a future age/Reading this indignant page’ in ‘A Little Girl Lost’.
 Blake’s fear of death comes from the awareness that ‘so short is the pilgrimage of man
(which some call life)’. Blake also advocates a form of hedonism, but one that is preoccupied
with enlightenment. The idyllic state of innocence as described in ‘Songs of Innocence’ is
peppered with allusions to future unhappiness in the world of Experience, such as the
‘sobbing sobbing’ Robin in ‘The Blossom’. The approach of death makes it all the more
important we do not waste time in institutions such as school but seek our own
understanding of the world. In ‘The Schoolboy’, Blake questions ‘How can the bird that is
born for joy/Sit in a cage and sing?’.
Volpone
 The fear of death is key to the motivations of the characters in ‘Volpone’
o The beautiful gifts, such as an ‘antique plate, bought of St. Mark’ and ‘bright
chequins’, that Volpone and Mosca delight in the ‘purchase’ of, are made of long
lasting and non-tarnishing material. The material of gold has traditionally held
connotations of eternal life, with alchemists dating from 600 A.C to Renaissance
England believing it to hold properties that were essential to creating the elixir of
eternally youthful life. This association with precious materials transcending death is
certainly what is behind the hedonic greed of most of the characters in ‘Volpone’.
 Jonson was preoccupied with the mortality of the human body according to Sara Van De
Berg: ‘throughout his career Jonson celebrated and mocked the human body. In Jonson’s
works both [self as social construct or moral essence] are figured as the body, ands are set in
tension through tricks of naming, deformity, cross – dressing, disguise and projection, all
designed to augment the body and satisfy its desires’.
 Images of death and disease are used within Volpone to emphasise and criticise the greed of
the scavengers – they circle Volpone as though he were ‘carrion’. He uses death as a means
to make money from them
Appetite – linked to Greed
 The greed of Volpone is described in the Argument and is established within the opening
lines of Act 1, this is his ‘saint’, a blasphemous sentiment. Blake advocates true worship
through charity, mercy, pity, peace and love and through the odious characters of Volpone
and Mosca, Jonson also promotes similar virtues and criticises greed.
Blake
 Emphasises the disparity between the wealth of some and the social injustices he observes
in the world around him in order to criticise those who’s appetite for money leads them to
exploit the weak.
o Holy Thursday – contrasts the ‘rich and fruitful land’ with ‘so many children poor’,
also stating that these ‘Bbaes filled with misery’ are fed with a ‘cold and usurous
hand’, emphasising the contrast between the poverty he observes around him and
the greed he perceives to contribute to it.
 Criticises the appetite for power. Criticies the exploitation of the weak in society as a result
of the appetite for power and wealth in the state and church.
o E.g. The Human Abstract – ‘Pity would be no more /If we did not make somebody
poor’. Indicates that the exploitation of the weak in society is what enables the
church to be seen as a positive force, typified by the virtue ‘pity’, and thus to hold
the power it has.
 Criticism of appetite in both texts can be linked to their context – times of rapid
urbanisation, criticising the greed, corruption and moral degernation they perceive to be a
result of this.
o Industrial revolution/science developments – appetite for knowledge. Blake valued
the power of imaginative awareness believing the ‘world of imagination is the world
of eternity’ (TS Eliot)
o Criticises the industrial revolution and enlightenment thinking as opposing
imagination and the true freedom that this brings. The industrial terms used within
‘The Divine Image’ (exp) have connotations of hell and damnation (‘hungry’,
‘furnace’, ‘fiery forge’)
o Drawing of Isaac Newton staring intently at a maths problem whilst surrounded by
amazing brightly coloured foliage conveys unimportance of science in comparison to
the limitless power of the imagination
o Saree Makdisi argues that Blake therefore rejected industrialisation as he saw this as
directly opposite to the true freedom that he considered ‘in creative, affirmative,
positive terms… as the power to imagine and to create through imagining’.
 Sexual freedom/appetite to some extent supported and advocated
o The Clod and the Pebble
 ‘Love seeketh only self to please / To bind another to its delight’
 ‘bind’ – suggests carnality
 Selfishness of sex explored, in comparison to true love that ‘seeketh not
itself to please’?
 Two types of love explored – potentially one spiritual and one physical?
o The Sick Rose
  ‘The invisible worm / That flies in the night… / Has found out thy bed / Of
crimson joy’
 The ‘worm’ has connotations of semen? Negative portrayal of sex- inglorious
and lowly
 ‘crimson’ connotes passion/virginity
 ‘bed’ – explicitly sexual setting
 ‘His dark secret love / Does thy life destroy’ – suggests it is the secrecy of the
love which is wrong, advocates openness regarding sexuality? Opposes the
suppression of desires and joys (link to The Garden of Love)
o The Lily
 ‘The Lily white shall in love delight’
 ‘white’ – virginal/innocent
o A Little Girl Lost
 ‘In a former time / Love! Sweet Love! Was thought a crime’
 Seems to promote freedom of sexual expression
Volpone
 Satirises greed and avarice and thus criticises appetite for wealth within the play
 Use of stock characters enables Jonson to establish the characters within the play as symbols
of vices and virtues in order to better criticise and impose judgement upon such
characteristics or vices as greed of the appetite for wealth.
o E.g. by ridiculing the legacy hunters, Jonson passes morl judgement on their greed
and lack of compassion for the (supposedly) ill Volpone
 Emphasises the influence of wealth on social status and therefore as a means of obtaining
power, and the corruption of the state and its institutions as a result of the appetite for both
money and power.
o Upon receipt of his inheritance,Mosca is transformed into ‘a proper man!’ and thus
jonson conveys the impact of monetary wealth on power
o The greed of state institutions such as the judiciary is conveyed through the desire of
the 4th Avocatore for Mosca to wed his daughter as a means of securing her
monetary status and Jonson’s satire of lawyers, typified by Voltore who’s ‘soul
moves in his fee’
 Criticism of appetite in both texts can be linked to their context – times of rapid
urbanisation, criticising the greed, corruption and moral degernation they perceive to be a
result of this.
o Robert Watson argues that the legacy hunters in Volpone are venture-capitalists,
investing in Volpone in the hopes of greater return upon his death. The capitalist
system came to dominate in the Renaissance and the ‘old, feudal rules of social
order collapsed; money became regarded as a goal in itself.’ Jonson criticises this
‘goal’ as all those attempt to reach it within the play, Volpone, Mosca, Corvino,
Corbaccio and Voltore, are eventually punished for their greed.
 Sexual freedom/appetite
o The Would-Bes – ridicule of their explicit infidelity suggests a criticism of sexual
appetite
 o Celia – negatively portrayed within the play as the virtuous character. Does Jonson
therefore suggest a more open view of sexuality?
o ‘why should we defer our joys?’ – Volpone.
o Makes the grotesque link between hunger and sexual appetite (‘The heads of parrot,
tongues of nightingales…’) in Volpone’s speech to Celia
o The abuse of Celia within the play and the extent of Corvino’s jealousy seem to
suggest that the complete oppression of sexual desires is more destructive than the
sexual appetite itself
Fear
Blake
 fear of death key to the emphasis on poetic imagination/ enlightened innocence. Search for
moral purity in fallen creation
 Blake’s idea of his works as his legacy – addresses ‘children of a future age’
 Blake’s fear of immorality, criticism of social injustices and the institutionalised church,
industrialisation and the enlightenment for continuing and fuelling this instead of looking to
the true freedom of the poetic imagination
 Other emotions
o Love and passion shouldn’t be controlled – ‘Love! Sweet love! Was thought a crime’.
an attack on the Protestant Church’s control of sexual relations in the 18th century.
‘binding with briars my joys and desires’ in the garden of love connotes that church
teaching is parasitic, destroying what is natural, beautiful and pure by restricting an
emotion that so clearly drives us
o Vanity does not manifest itself in the characters of ‘Songs of Innocence and
Experience’ directly, but the vanity of man and of society is revealed symbolically.
‘The Fly’, which questions ‘Am I not/A fly like thee?/ Or art not thou/ A man like
me?’, encourages humanity not to see itself as supreme, but simply as one species
among many others
o Blake’s preoccupations with religious hierarchy and capitalism also reflect vanity in
the individuals that make up society, as to dictate rules or exploit others requires a
certain sense of self importance. reflected in ‘The Chimney-Sweeper’ in which a child
is left while all ‘are gone to praise God and his priest and his king/Who make up a
heaven of our misery’.
Volpone
 fear of death key motivator
 gold as everlasting- transcends mortality
 fear of detection as a driving force for Volpone and Mosca
 fear regarding social standing – wealth seen as a way of gaining social status, Corvino’s fear
of being seen to be the cuckold, Volpone’s fear of being out-tricked by his servant and
therefore seen to be lower than him
 other emotions
o love and passion - Volpone tells Celia ‘’Tis no sin, love’s fruits to steal’. Although
Volpone’s passion is certainly a driving force for him, as he exclaims ‘I am now as
fresh, as hot, as high’, but passion as a driving force fails to convince other
 characters. Celia would prefer a ‘dire lightening strike’ rather than experience a
passionate moment with Volpone, preferring to follow the moral code.
o Vanity drives both Mosca and Volpone to take their deception further and further,
as they grow in confidence.
Deception
Blake
 The cherub is depicted in several of Blake’s illustrations. ‘Thou art the anointed cherub that
covereth’ (Ezekiel 28:14). Harold Bloom suggests that this ‘covering cherub’ represents
corruption and something which appears good but isn't and is the root of error, prevents
true imagination from flourishing and is usually a result of selfhood
Volpone
 Covered in the individual section
Morality
Blake
 Offers his own form of spirituality as what is truly moral
 Criticises the establishment as corrupt and immoral
Volpone
 Link to the greed section- imposes a moral message on the play regarding the moral
degredation that has resulted from capitalism
 Pride and vanity also relevant as one of the seven deadly sins that both Mosca and Volpone
practise.
 New Comedy – see vices punished
Happiness
Blake
 The church as a cause of unhappiness
o Look at the discussion of ‘Holy Thursday’ in the appetite section – Blake directly
implicates the church in the oppression and misery of the children
o The Divine Image – ‘Pity would be no more, if we did not make somebody poor’
o The Sick Rose – the rose as a symbol of pure love and Old England being invaded by
corrupt forces (the invisible worm) and living in the foul episteme which Blake
criticises throughout the collection (‘howling storm’). Blake criticises corrupting
forces in society for ruining true nature and happiness. The poem was set to music
by Benjamin Britten in the early years of WWII where symbolically, the ‘invisible
worm’ pointed to the Nazi threat and the ‘bed of crimson joy’ was England,
demonstrating the transcendent message of the poem’s promotion of liberty and
happiness against oppressive forces
 Industrialisation as a cause of unhappiness
o Evident criticism of the industrial revolution (discussed in the Blake section)
 Poetic imagination/enlightened innocence as true happiness
o Again discussed above, emphasises the importance of the imagination, advocates
innocence over experience etc.
Volpone
 Greed leading to eventual punishment – short vs long term happiness and satisfaction
 o The punishment of the greedy characters indicates that monetary wealth doesn’t
lead to true happiness
o Throughout the play, Jonson ridicules the greed of the legacy hunters and Mosca
and Volpone – indicates he does not advocate this as a path to happiness
Argument/Persuasion
Blake
 Use individual section
 If you are looking at how EFFECTIVELY Blake persuades us of his philosophy:
o Consider how pretty the illustrations are as a means of persuasion
o How horrifically he portrays the injustices in the world in order to convince us o the
necessity for true change
o The images and language of hell which he uses to describe industry – convince us it
is a malevolent force in society, particularly in comparison to the idylls he presents
in poems such as the Echoing Green
Volpone
 Use of rhetoric and irony is crucial to how Jonson ‘argues and persuades’ within the text
o Jonson thought of literature in terms of rhetoric, the art of using language
persuasively
o Moralists were well aware that the verbal skills of rhetoric could be dangerous if
used irresponsibly or maliciously (e.g. by Voltore in IV.v). they therefore insisted that
rhetoric should be used in the service of truth
o Jonson guides and persuades the audience by making us feel disgust at corvino, for
example. He shocks us emotionally with the harsh satiric vision of materialism and
animalism
o One aim of Jonson’s rhetoric is to make us aware of dangerous truths about human
nature
o However, Jonson doesn’t conform to a morality play – doesn’t merely tell the
audience who to like or dislike or condemn
o He tempts the audience to enjoy Volpone and Mosca and laugh at despicable things.
He cheats the hope that Bonario and Celia will trumph in the court and be a model
of wisdom and justice. Instead of merely showing the truth, he challenges the
audience to find it for themselves – enticing and arguably ADDS to the persuasion
 Use of comedy to ridicule the greed of the scavengers and the pretensions of the would-bes
in order to advocate alternate modes of living
 Use of language of feeding and excess to represent the grotesqueness of greed and avarice
and thus criticise it (consider the final lines of the Avocatore at the end of the play (V.xii)
Character
Characters as symbols
 Both William Blake and Ben Jonson use characters as symbols for characteristics, vices or
virtues, such as greed, deception or innocence, in order to elevate the moral messages
contained within their works.
 The figures and ‘characters’ within Blake are used within the poems as symbolic of vices and
virtues such as innocence or corruption in order to demonstrate his personal moral
cosmology and philosophy as well as to indicate the social injustices he observes.
  The characters within Volpone, although more developed than those in Songs of Innocence
and Experience due to the choice of form and a source of comedy within the play, conform
to ‘stock characters’, thus enabling the moral message that permeates the play to be the
focal point for the audience.
 the characters within Volpone are not substantially emotionally developed and it could be
argued that Jonson deliberately flattens the characters within the play in order to better
emphasise his moral messages and use the characters as representative of vices, virtues and
characteristics rather than rounded characters in themselves. (EM Forster described such
characters as ‘Flat characters’)
 Jonson appropriates a number of Theophrastan stock characters from Greek New Comedy;
Volpone is the insincere man (Eironeia) or the shamelessly greedy man (Anaischuntia),
Mosca is the flatterer (Kolakeia) or the fabricator (Logopoiia) and Sir Politic the garrulous
man (Adoleschia), for example.
 Robert Watson argues that Jonson demonstrates that his use of such two-dimensional
characters is deliberate, as Corvino explicitly associates himself with the cuckold Pantalone
and associates Sir Pol with the nattering Punchinello, and thus attempts to diminish the
emotional connection between the audience and the characters in order to emphasise the
moral lessons within the play and vices and virtues which the characters represent over the
characters themselves.
 Blake, like Jonson, uses ‘characters’ as symbols within Songs of Innocence and Experience in
order to convey moral lessons on two levels within the collection; to condemn the social
injustices he notes in the material world around him and to further his mythological
discussion and personal cosmology and ideology regarding the way the world should be
ordered.
o In his poems entitled Holy Thursday, for example, Blake uses the characters of the
children in order to criticise the institutionalised church and propose his own form of
spirituality centred on poetic imagination. In both versions of the poem the
innocence of the children is illustrated; in Innocence through Blake’s description of
the children as ‘flowers’ and in Experience as ‘Babes’. However, The positivity of the
line in the ‘Holy Thursday’ from Songs of Innocence that reads ‘Oh what a multitude
they seemed,/ These flowers of London town’ contrasts with ‘Is it a holy thing to
see… so many children poor?/ It is a land of poverty!’ from the poem in Songs of
Experience, and ‘the aged men, wise guardians of the poor’ of Innocence contrasts
with the ‘cold and usurious hands’ of Experience.
o Through such evidently opposing descriptions of essentially the same scene using
the same characters, Blake emphasises the difference between the innocent
perception of the Church as a ‘wise guardian’ of the poor and the supposedly
experienced or enlightened view of it as ‘usurous’.
Animal symbolism
 Jonson uses animal imagery for the characters’ names in order to indicate the vices and
virtues which his characters represent and thus present them as symbols of a particular
character-type, like the animals used in Aesopian beast-fables. ‘Volpone’ is Italian for ‘fox’
and thus Jonson evokes the image of a cunning, sly creature without the need for detailed
characterisation. This is true of nearly all the characters within Volpone; Mosca is a fly and
thus Jonson conveys his parasitic, lowly nature; Corvino, Corbaccio and Voltore are all
 carrion birds and so are portrayed as scrounging, heartless and cannibalistic; and a Peregrine
is renowned hunting bird, a type of falcon, thus the astuteness of Jonson’s character is
conveyed. By ridiculing the three legacy hunters, for example, Jonson passes moral
judgement on their greed and lack of compassion for the (supposedly) ill Volpone. Mosca
and Volpone’s punishment at the end of the play, similarly, demonstrates Jonson’s
condemnation of avarice and deception.
 Blake, like Jonson, also uses animal imagery rather than characters within his poetry to
represent vices and virtues or characteristics.
o Blake uses birds as symbols within Songs of Innocence and Experience, although to
represent contrasting characteristics to those within Volpone; the ‘dovelike sighs’ in
A Cradle Song represent the innocence, peacefulness and fragility of the child; the
‘Nightingale’ and ‘Lark’ in Spring represent new life, nature and freedom.
o Blake contrasts these ‘characters’ which represent renewal, innocence and freedom
with the oppressive forces in society, emphasising his criticism of social injustices
and enforcing his moral message through his continued use of bird imagery and
rhetorical question in The Schoolboy (‘How can the bird that is born for joy/ Sit in a
cage and sing?’).
o Blake also uses animal imagery in his poetry as a vehicle to persuade his reader of
his own moral philosophy and cosmology. He was a dissenting Christian who valued
the poetic imagination as a form of spirituality, according to Peter Ackroyd. He
viewed creation as ‘fallen’ – at once beautiful and containing evil – and argued that
only through the poetic imagination could it be made fully good, as ‘the world of
imagination is the world of eternity’ (TS Eliot).
o In his poetry he uses characters allegorically, such as in his poem The Tyger, to
demonstrate his ideas regarding fallen creation as simultaneously beautiful and evil,
as well as to convey his criticism of industrialisation. The Tyger’s ‘fearful symmetry’
is exclaimed at, Blake asks ‘What immortal hand or eye’ could create it, thus
indicating its intricacy and magnificence. However, he goes on to describe the ‘fire of
thine eyes’ and the twisted ‘sinews of thy heart’, thus describing its mercilessness.
Blake goes on to make several references to industrialisation; ‘the hammer’, ‘the
chain’, ‘the furnace’ and ‘the anvil’ having connotations of hell in combination with
the ‘fire’ and the description of the tiger as ‘burning bright’. The flaws of the Tyger
therefore do not serve as the focal point of the poem as a character, but rather to
demonstrate Blake’s cosmology and ideas regarding morality in fallen creation and
opposition to industrialisation.
Form
Use of verse form
 I’m sure you could make some sophisticated points about each of their use of verse form as
a means to argue, persuade, entertain, engage, horrify, describe etc but it takes so much
analysis and quite frankly I am so bored of typing.
Self-implication/direct address
Blake

Volpone
  In the Prologue to Volpone, Jonson himself admits that he is going to make money out of the
play which is itself a satire on greed – indication that he himself is part of the capitalist,
avaricious society which he condemns within the play
Language/motifs
Religious language/allusions
Blake
 Blake uses multiple religious allusions such as to the Garden of Eden in ‘The Sick Rose’, the
snake (‘the invisible worm’)
 He read the bible extensively
Volpone
 The opening matins prayer of Volpone is key to this – greed as a new religion with money as
its God, indicates that Christian principles have been totally forgotten, made way for a new
creed. Link to Blake’s criticism of the removal of true Christian principles from the
established church- what remains is greed and corruption
Disease
 Language of disease and decay used in both texts as a motif to indicate moral degeneracy
o ‘o Rose thou art sick’ – Blake
o Corbaccio’s deaf and blindness for example
The sun
 In volpone’s first speech the sun is dimmed by gold, the lesser of the 2. In Blake, the sun
represent the poetic imagination and so in both it’s the ideal of something vs the reality
Context
Urbanisation
 Both texts were written at a time of rapid urbanisation and can be seen as a response to the
moral degredation they perceived to result from this. (see the context for each individual
text for more info)
 Jonson was writing during the rise of capitalism and urbanisation in London
 Blake was writing during the industrial revolution
Critics and approaches
Marxist
 It could be said that both texts write from an ostensibly Marxist perspective – criticising
greed and corruption of society and the social injustice that results from wealth and the
appetite for wealth and power.