William Blake
The Lamb
1789
The Lamb
The famous companion poems "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" are written on the same subject:
the human conception of God.
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild;
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb.
The speaker sees God in terms he can understand. God is gentle and kind and very much like
us. The close association between the "I," "child," and "lamb" suggests that all humanity shares
in the same spiritual brotherhood.
Tone of “The Lamb”
-soft, light
The Tyger
1794
The Tyger
The speaker in "The Tyger" also sees God in terms he can understand, but he sees God
from a different perspective. The raging violence of the animal forces him to ask what
kind of God could create such terror:
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
The answer, of course, is never given, but the reader should be able to perceive more
than the speaker of the poem. God did make both the lamb and the tyger, and his nature
contains both the gentleness of the lamb and the violence of the tyger. Neither
perspective is true by itself; both have to be understood.
Tone of “The Tyger”
Alliteration: Tiger, tiger, burning bright (line 1); frame thy fearful symmetry? (line 4)
Metaphor: Comparison of the tiger and his eyes to fire.
Anaphora: Repetition of what at the beginning of sentences or clauses. Example: What dread hand
and what dread feet? / What the hammer? what the chain?
Allusion: Distant deeps or skies: hell or heaven
These poetic devices work together to create a dangerous and foreboding tone.
The Chimney Sweeper
(1789)
Color Imagery
In both of the first two verses Blake employs basic colour
imagery to contrast the ‘little black thing’ with the white of the
snow, which represents the purity of the childhood that the
sweep has had taken away from him.
Volta
The greatest shock of the poem comes in the second verse,
where the boy says it was ‘Because I was happy’ that his
parents condemned him to this early death. Blake has
deliberately given us a sentence which doesn’t make sense in
order to show us how totally wrong it is to violate the purity of
the child.
The Chimney Sweeper
(1794)
Repetition/anaphora serve to augment the narrative tale of this little
sweep; they increase the sense that this is a child speaking.
‘Weep’ sounds very like ‘sweep’. This is a poetic strategy with
which Blake suggests that as there is little difference in the way the
words sound to our ears, so there is little difference in what the
words mean to the child. But the child’s language is not adequate to
make sense of his sorrow. He does not know that he has been
taught a false language, which makes him believe that sadness
must be a fact of everyday life.
The little child who narrates the Song from Innocence is, therefore,
unable to comprehend the world in which he finds himself. This
makes innocence a much more frightening state than experience.
The chimney sweeper of Experience knows his position is one of
‘misery’ and angrily berates society for it.
Sources
http://myweb.dal.ca/waue/Trans/Blake-Lamb-Trans292.jpg
http://mrslux.pbworks.com/f/1245886744/theTyger.jpg
https://stuffjeffreads.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/chimneysweeper.jpg
http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/william-blake/songs-innocence-and-experience/songs-experience-chimney-sweeper
http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/blakes-two-chimney-sweepers