![]() He is sometimes grouped with the Romantics, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, although much of his work stands apart from them and he worked separately from the Lake Poets.īlake’s key themes are religion (verses from his poem Milton furnished the lyrics for the patriotic English hymn ‘ Jerusalem’), poverty and the poor, and the plight of the most downtrodden or oppressed within society. William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the key English poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In one manuscript version of the poem, the first line actually reads ‘Never pain to tell thy love’, but many subsequent editors have altered ‘pain’ to ‘seek’. The poem suggests that sometimes it’s best not to confess one’s love but to keep it secret. This untitled poem, written in around 1793, would have to wait 70 years to see publication, when the Pre-Raphaelite poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti included it in his edition of Blake’s poems in 1863. See the link above to read the full poem (and learn more about it). This idea of love starting out as a land of liberty and promise but ending up a world of death and restriction is expressed very powerfully through the image of the garden: ![]() The garden has become a graveyard, its flowers replaced by tombstones. The gates of the chapel are shut, and commandments and prohibitions are written over the door. In this poem, Blake’s speaker goes into the Garden of Love and finds a chapel built on the spot where he used to play as a child. The composer John Tavener set ‘The Lamb’ to music. the Lamb of God) who made the lamb, along with all living things. The lamb is a well-known symbol for Jesus Christ, and Blake draws on this association in this poem, telling the lamb that it was its namesake, the Lamb (i.e. So begins the counterpoint poem to ‘The Tyger’, or rather, ‘The Tyger’ is the ‘experience’ version of this ‘innocence’ poem. ‘White’ here suggests purity and innocence, that central theme in Blake’s poems of 1789. Blake’s poem gives a voice to a black boy born into slavery, whose skin is black but, he maintains, his soul is white. This poem is about two contrasting ideas of love – the ‘clod’ of clay representing a selfless and innocent kind of love and the ‘pebble’ in a brook symbolising love’s more pragmatic, selfish side.īlake published ‘The Little Black Boy’ in 1789 and the poem can be seen in part as an indictment of slavery. Don’t get too close to the tiger, Blake’s poem seems to say, otherwise you’ll get burnt. The fiery imagery used throughout the poem conjures the tiger’s aura of danger: fire equates to fear. The Songs of Experience was designed to complement Blake’s earlier collection, Songs of Innocence (1789), and ‘The Tyger’ should be seen as the later volume’s answer to ‘The Lamb’ (see below).įramed as a series of questions, ‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright’ (as the poem is also often known) sees Blake’s speaker wondering about the creator responsible for such a fearsome creature as the tiger. Accompanied by a painting of an altogether cuddlier tiger than the ‘Tyger’ depicted by the poem itself, ‘The Tyger’ first appeared in the 1794 collection Songs of Experience, which contains many of Blake’s most celebrated poems. The opening line of this poem, ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright’, is among the most famous lines in all of William Blake’s poetry.
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