Romanticism:

William Blake
English Poetry II
To help you answer the questions after the lecture
please make as many notes as possible!

On the poems, underline any words or expressions

you think are important or interesting.

Look up any words you don’t understand and write

their meaning next to the words.
Romanticism (or the Romantic Period) was an
artistic, literary and intellectual movement that
started in Europe at the end of the 18th century
(1789-1830).

It was a reaction against the Industrial

Revolution, social and political norms of the Age
of Enlightenment and a reaction against the
scientific rationalization of nature.
‘Romantic’ artists glorified nature, idealised the
past and celebrated the divinity of creation and
nature. There is an emphasis on the freedom of
self-expression, spontaneity and originality.

The movement rebelled against the Classicism and

scientific rationalization of the 18th century.
Therefore their approach to subjects was emotional
rather than logical, intuitive rather than analytical.
This focus on the human being and our emotions was
manifested in a fascination with the weird and exotic.
Also the effects of guilt, evil, isolation and terror on
the human psyche or brain.

Romantics were involved in the emotional directness

of personal experience and individual imagination.
Romanticism was also seen as a revival of the
spiritual and fantastic culture of the Middle Ages.
This movement encouraged strong emotion as an
authentic source of artistic experience, placing
emphasis on emotions like anxiety, terror
and awe.

In Romanticism, experiencing a sense of awe,

usually caused by nature, is often called the
Sublime experience.
Its effect on politics was considerable and complex,
but at its peak Romanticism was associated
with liberalism and radicalism.

The 1789 French Revolution and the American War of

Independence (1775-83) had a significant impact
upon the politics and spirit of the Romantic Period.

What is Romanticism?
In English literature, the poets now considered
important figures of the Romantic Period
include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord
Byron and William Blake. They are sometimes called
“the Big Six.”

The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads by

Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often said to have
marked ‘the start’ of Romanticism in literature.

What is Romanticism?
Romanticism had an emphasis on personal
freedom and liberty. Heroes and heroines of
Romantic literature often questioned their roles
in society and purposes in life.

The idea of the individual's imagination as a way

of exploring psychology and philosophy also
gained popularity during the Romantic period.

Features of Romanticism -
Individuality and the Imagination
Thus a feature of Romanticism is the free
expression of the feelings of the artist. To William
Wordsworth poetry was "the spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings".

In order to truly express these feelings, the content

must come from the imagination of the artist, with
as little interference as possible from "artificial"
rules. The influence of others’ art was thought to
inhibit the creator's own imagination.

Features of Romanticism -
Individuality and the Imagination
There was a strong belief in the importance of nature.
Romanticism defended the beauty of nature in an
attempt to escape the problems of the city and
industrialisation. Romantics distrusted the world of
people and urbanity, and tended to believe that a close
connection with nature was mentally and morally
healthy.

Previously, many poets gained inspiration from

conventional, organised religion. However Romantic
poets saw Nature as the source of divine inspiration
which influenced and inspired their poetry.

Features of Romanticism - Nature

William Blake (1757-1827) was
born in Soho, London. He
attended school but left at 10,
and was educated at home by
his mother.

The Blake family were Christian

Dissenters. The Bible was an
early and profound influence on
Blake, and remained a source of
inspiration throughout his life.
In 1772, Blake was apprenticed
to an engraver for 7 years. At 21,
he became a professional engraver.

In 1779, Blake became a student

at the Royal Academy. There, he
rebelled against the style of the
school and its teachers. Over time,
Blake detested the school’s
attitude towards art and thought
the teachers were hypocrites.
In 1782 Blake married Catherine
Boucher, but they had no
children.

In 1783, Blake's first collection

of poems, Poetical Sketches,
was printed. In 1784 Blake
opened a print shop, and
worked with radical
publisher Joseph Johnson.
In 1789 he published Songs of
Innocence and in 1794 he
published Songs of Innocence and
Experience.

He published many more works

including The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell (1790-3) and Jerusalem
(1804-20).

In 1827 he died from liver disease.

We do not know a lot about
William Blake because there is
little contemporary material
about his life. However, we know
that he was a Dissenting Christian
and he was politically radical.

His poetry and paintings were

unknown throughout most of his
life, although he achieved small
fame in his 60s.
 Songs of Innocence and of
Experience is an illustrated
collection of poems by William
Blake. It was published in 1794
and was illustrated by Blake
himself.

It aimed to show the "Two

Contrary States of the Human
Soul,” - Innocence and Experience.

Songs of Innocence and Experience - Introduction

Songs of Innocence was actually
published first in 1789.

It contains poems which are

mostly positive in tone and
celebrate innocence, love,
childhood and nature.

The language in the poems is

relatively simple and
uncomplicated.

Songs of Innocence and Experience - Introduction

The Songs of Experience poems are
intended to provide a contrast to
Innocence, and illustrate the effects
of the Industrial Revolution on
people and nature.

Dangerous city conditions, child

labour, prostitution, sexual disease,
religion and poverty are just some
of the topics that Blake explores in
these poems.

Songs of Innocence and Experience - Introduction

This poem literally ‘introduces’ the
Songs of Innocence and it also
introduces us to a certain kind of
‘innocent’ writing.

This ‘innocent’ writing is symbolised

by the pipe which is a common
symbol for 18th century pastoral
writing. Pastoral writing idealises
rural life and criticises modernity and
change.
The speaker plays his simple and
innocent music, which attracts the
attention of a spirit that appears as a
child on a cloud.

The child encourages him to play a

song about a “Lamb,” and then asks
him to drop his pipe and write a book
“that all may read”.

The narrator makes a reed into a pen

and writes down his happy songs for
everyone to enjoy.
Blake appears to be present as the narrator or the ‘I’ in
the poem. Therefore the child/spirit appears to be
asking Blake to share his ideas and inspiration with a
wider audience so they may hear songs with ‘merry
chear’ (5-6) or happy songs.

The poem’s rhyme and rhythm suggest that it is an

example this type of song. It has a simple ‘abab’ rhyme,
so the rhythm is simple and appeals to children and
reminds us of the simple childhood nursery rhymes.
Blake also uses repetition and variation on the words
“pipe and piping”, which provides a memorable
alliteration.

For example, there is variation on ‘pipe’ 5 times (lines 5

to 8). This captures the reader’s attention.
The poem also introduces the
image of ‘the Lamb’ (L5) as both
a symbol of innocent happiness
and as a religious image.

‘The Lamb’ is a symbol for Jesus

i.e. the Lamb of God. Thus, it
hints towards the complicated
religious arguments that appear
later in the volume of poems.
However, the most interesting part of the poem is the
reaction of the child in the 2nd stanza. When the song
about a lamb is first piped the piper has ‘merry chear.’
But when he pipes again, the child ‘wept…to hear’ (L12).

Why is the child crying? Later we are told they are tears
of “joy,” (L12) but this may not be the only answer.
Perhaps the child is crying about the fragility of the lamb,
suggesting that the world of innocence may be more
complicated than we think and we need to be prepared
to look at a different understanding of the world.
Also, in this apparently innocent song there is one word
which sounds strange. In line 18, Blake says “And I
stained the water clear” which can refer to the act of
ink or paint being placed into water so he can write.

However, this could also refer to the fact that by talking

or writing about innocence it inevitably taints or stains
the subject matter itself. Innocence inevitably will be
lost.
William Blake and Politics
The speaker wanders through the
streets of London and comments on
his observations. He sees despair in
the faces of the people he meets
and hears fear and repression in
their voices.

The woeful cry of the chimney-

sweeper is a criticsm to the Church,
and the blood of a soldier stains the
outer walls of the King’s palace. At
night the cursing of a prostitute
(Harlot) corrupts an infant and
dirties the “Marriage hearse.”
The poem has four quatrains (a four
line stanza), with alternate lines
rhyming. There is a strict ‘abab’
rhyme scheme in the four stanzas.

Repetition is the most striking feature

of the poem, and it serves to
emphasize the prevalence of the
horrors the speaker describes.
The image of wandering, the focus on sound and the
images of stains in this poem’s first lines recall The
Introduction to Songs of Innocence, but with a
difference.

We are now far from the pastoral ideal of the earlier

poem - we are in the city. Unlike many of the other
poems in the collection, this poem’s title denotes a
specific geographic space.
The tone of the poem is Biblical, reflecting Blake's
strong interest in religion. It is as if the speaker is
offering a prophesy of the terrible consequences
unless changes are made in the city.

In the first stanza, Blake uses repetition twice, firstly

using the word "charter'd". This is a reference to the
charters that allocated property ownership to specific
people. Many, including Blake, saw this as robbing
ordinary people of their rights and freedoms.
The poem suggests the rapid urbanization in Britain at
the time was a dangerous force. Children are no
longer free to enjoy childhood, instead they work in
dangerous conditions. Charters restrict freedoms
which ultimately results in the restriction of thinking.

In stanza two, the speaker says that every sound he

hears is evidence of the "mind-forg'd manacles".
Manacles are like handcuffs. The speaker suggests
that people's minds are restricted and confined –
their minds are literally being handcuffed – by the
city and institutions like government and the Church.
Curiously, all the speaker’s subjects, - infants,
chimney-sweeper, soldier, harlots, are known only
through the traces they leave behind: the cries, the
stains and the blood. They never appear as bodies.

In the 3rd stanza the cry of the chimney-sweep and

the sigh of the soldier change into soot and blood on
palace and church walls. Likewise, institutions of
power—the clergy, the government—are expressed
only through the symbolism of their residences
(Palace/Church).
Why does Blake do this? This device suggests that
Blake does not simply blame a set of institutions or a
system for people’s and the city’s problems.

Instead, it is people/victims that help to make their

own “mind-forg’d manacles.” People have willlingly
accepted these restraints and restrictions, and have
become victims of their own exploitation.
The poem climaxes in the form of a new human
being starting life: a baby is born into poverty, to a
cursing, prostitute mother. Sexual and marital
union (the place of possible regeneration and
rebirth) are tainted by disease.

Thus Blake’s final image of the “Marriage hearse,”

is shocking. Marriage should be a celebration of
love and the beginning of new life. But a hearse is
a vehicle associated with funerals/death. Therefore
here it is combined with "hearse“ to show how love
and desire can combine with death and destruction.
"The Chimney Sweeper" was published in
Songs of Innocence and there is another
version of the poem in Songs of
Experience.

It is set against the background of child

labour in England 18th and 19th century.
At the age of 7, boys were sold like slaves
to clean chimneys due to their small size.

In this poem a young chimney

sweeper recounts a dream by one of his
fellow chimney sweepers Tom Dacre.

The Chimney Sweeper – Introduction

Chimney sweepers were sold to
their masters because their
families were too poor to look
after them. They endured
terrible conditions. They were
not fed, clothed and washed
properly.

While sweeping there was

danger of suffocation, burning
and cancer from the soot.
When they became too big,
they were left on the street.

The Chimney Sweeper

In the first stanza, the sweeper tells how he became a
chimney sweeper. His mother died and he was sold as
an apprentice by his father. He was so young that all
he could do was cry and weep in protest.

His present life includes working and sleeping in soot,

a realistic detail since the boys did sleep on bags of
the soot they had swept from chimneys.

The Chimney Sweeper - Content

The second stanza introduces Tom Dacre, who joins
the workers and is introduced to his new life by a
haircut. Note Tom’s hair is like the innocent lamb’s.

Tom cries when his head is shaved, but the speaker

comforts him with the thought that if his hair is cut it
cannot be spoiled by the soot. The consolation is
totally inadequate, but for Tom it is effective. He falls
asleep and dreams happily.

The Chimney Sweeper - Content

The next three stanzas tell us about the dream. Tom
dreams that thousands of chimney sweepers locked in
coffins are released by an angel.

They find themselves in a pastoral/rural landscape,

where they are free and bathe in a river and rise up to
the clouds. The angel tells Tom, “if he’d be a good
boy,/ He’d have God for his father & never want joy.”
So if you a good you will have God and never need
anything else to be happy.

The Chimney Sweeper - Content

The last stanza opens with a brutal contrast. Having
dreamed of playing in the sun, Tom awakes and the
sweepers begin their day’s work - a day to be spent in
the total darkness of the cramped chimneys.

Yet, restored by his dream, Tom is happy and the poem

ends with the pious moral, similar to the angel’s speech,
“So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.”

The Chimney Sweeper - Content

So Blake presents us with this terrible scene and we
must think about our response as readers. One
unavoidable response is pity because we pity the child’s
awful situation and job.

But what do we think about the narrator’s advice to Tom

Dacre? He says we should simply do what we are told
(do our duty) and everything will be fine. Do we agree
with this idea?

The Chimney Sweeper - Analysis

Or does the poem say we must look through this
ideology of repression and see the narrator as a victim.
Is the narrator a victim of innocence who needs to be
enlightened about the issues of exploitation?

Blake does not appear to answer this question. Indeed

the poem itself is a question. Is innocence a valuable
perspective on the world, or is it just at the service of
manipulation and greed?

The Chimney Sweeper - Analysis

This question continues into Tom Dacre’s dream. For
example, can naïve, simple religious belief compensate
us for our sufferings in life?

Or are we meant to see “So if all do their duty, they

need not fear harm” ironically? It this highlighting how
religion offers us false forms of pleasure which serve to
ensure that we do not challenge our masters?

The Chimney Sweeper - Analysis

William Blake grew up in the Dissenter tradition
instead of traditional Anglican Christianity. This
means that he was a Christian but he was strongly
opposed to the hierarchical structure of the Church
and the financial ties between it and the English
government.

William Blake rejected established religion for

various reasons. But one of the main reasons was the
failure of the established Church to help children
and the poor in London. He thought they had
hypocritical attitudes towards wealth and sexuality.
The poem begins with the question,
“Little Lamb, who made thee?” The
speaker is a child who asks the
lamb about its origins:

How it came be alive, how it

acquired its way of feeding, its
“clothing” of wool and its “tender
voice.”
In the next stanza, the speaker
creates a riddle to answer his own
question: the lamb was made by the
one who “calls himself a Lamb.”

Someone who resembles the

gentleness of the child and the lamb.
This is Jesus. The poem ends with
the child giving a blessing to the
lamb.
‘The Lamb’ has two stanzas, each containing five
rhymed couplets. The repetition in the first and last
couplet of each stanza helps to give the poem a
song-like quality.

The flowing l’s and soft vowel sounds contribute to

this effect and also suggest the bleating of a lamb.
The poem is a child’s song, in the form of a question
and answer. The first stanza is rural and descriptive,
while the second focuses on abstract spiritual issues.

The child’s question is both naïve and profound. The

question (“who made thee?”) is a simple one, yet the
child is also asking the timeless question that all
humans have - about their origins and the nature of
creation.
However, the child answers his own question making
it a rhetorical question, thus ending the initial naïve
feeling of the poem.

The answer is presented as a riddle, and this

contributes to an underlying sense of ironic
knowingness or pretense in the poem. The child’s
answer reveals his confidence in his simple Christian
faith and his innocent acceptance of its teachings.
The lamb symbolizes Jesus. The image of Jesus as a
lamb is meant to represent the Christian values of
gentleness and meekness. The image of the child is
also associated with Jesus: Jesus shows special
concern for children and in Jesus’ childhood he was
shown to be naïve and vulnerable.

This innocence and naivety is how the child

approaches the ideas of nature and God. This poem
appears to be a celebration of the more positive
aspects of conventional Christian belief.
However, this does not provide an adequate religious
doctrine, because it fails to account for the
presence of suffering and evil in nature and creation.

‘The Lamb’s’ companion poem is ‘The Tyger’ and the

2 poems give a perspective on religion that includes
the good as well as ‘the bad.’ Thus these poems
work together to produce a fuller account of religion
and spirituality that neither offers independently.
Stanza 1: The poem begins with
the speaker asking a scary tiger
what kind of divine being/God
could have created it: “What
immortal hand or eye/ Could
frame they fearful symmetry?”

Each subsequent stanza contains

further questions, all of which
expand on this first one.
Stanza 3: From what part of the
universe could the tiger’s eyes
come from and who would have
dared to make them? What kind of
physical presence and expertise
would have been required to “twist
the sinews” of the tiger’s heart?

The speaker wonders how, once

that horrible heart “began to beat,”
its creator would have had the
courage to continue the job.
Stanza 4: Comparing this creator
to a blacksmith, he ponders about
the anvil and the furnace that the
project would have required and
the person who used them.

Stanza 5: It begins by suggesting

that the ‘stars’ threw down their
weapons and cried when the tiger
was created.
Stanza 5: The speaker wonders,
how would the creator have felt
when it made the tiger? “Did he
smile his work to see?” Could this
possibly be the same being who
made the mild lamb?

Stanza 6: This stanza repeats the

first stanzas question: Who made
the tiger and its fearful symmetry?
The poem is comprised of six quatrains (4 lines in a
stanza) in rhymed couplets. The metre is regular
and rhythmic, its hammering beat suggests the
smithy (the blacksmith’s workshop) that is the
poem’s central image.

The simplicity of the poem’s form perfectly suit its

regular structure, in which a lot of questions all
contribute to the expression of one central idea.
The poem asks a question about creation: How can
we understand a God who is capable of creating the
innocence of the lamb and the fury of the tiger?

Let’s remember that Blake was from a time when

Darwin’s theory of evolution did not exist so he sees
creation in spiritual terms. However, as modern
readers we can still appreciate the philosophical
questions about the nature of good and evil.
The opening question represents the whole idea of
the poem and each stanza elaborates on this concept.
Blake is using the idea that nature, like a work of art,
must in some way contain a reflection of its creator.

The tiger is beautiful, yet also capable of terrible

violence. So what kind of a God could or would make
such a terrifying, dangerous beast? Or what does the
existence of evil and violence tell us about the nature
of God, and what does it mean to live in a world
where something can contain both beauty and horror?
The tiger becomes a symbolic character and embodies
the spiritual and moral problem the poem explores.
Blake’s tiger becomes a way to investigate the
presence of evil in the world.

The speaker’s questions about the tiger’s origins

includes both physical and moral aspects. The poem’s
series of questions ask what type of being has the
creative capacity to make a tiger - surely only a very
strong and powerful being could make such a creation?
The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic
creation and Blake applies it to the divine creation of
the natural world. The “forging” of the tiger suggests
a very physical and deliberate kind of creation.

It emphasizes the huge physical presence of the tiger

and suggests that such a creation could not have been
accidentally produced. In the smithy there is also the
imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations of
creation, purification and destruction.
The image of the smithy also suggests a connection
between divine creation and the human creation of
the artist/poet.

Blake, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, believed there

was no difference: The activity of the human
creator is a version of divine creativity. Thus the
artist must be daring and take risks in order to
produce images of supreme importance to humanity.
The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza
reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been
created by the same being and raises questions about
the implications of this creation.

It also invites a contrast between the perspectives of

“experience” and “innocence” represented here and
in the poem ’The Lamb.’
‘The Tyger’ consists entirely of unanswered questions
and the poet leaves us to wonder at the complexity of
creation and the mystery of divine will.

The poem acknowledges that things are sometimes

unexplainable in the universe. For example, evil is
something that is real, but cannot be easily explained.
Again ‘The Tyger’ contrasts with ‘The Lamb’ which shows
a child’s innocent faith in a compassionate universe.
1. Please answer all the questions. Remember
this is practice for the exam!!!

2. Please ask if you don’t understand a word or

if you do not understand any spellings.