William Blake

The Lamb

1789

The LambThe 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 TygerThe 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 ImageryIn 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.

VoltaThe 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.

Sourceshttp://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