William Blake.doc

William BlakeThe Glorious Revolution: The Happiness of a governed Society consists in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and freedom of conscience . things which should not be subject to the arbitrary will of one man, but rather formulated in the civil institutions for the common good. This confident assertion concerning the correspondence between the Revolution Settlement (1688-1701) and protestant liberties was congenial to latitudinarian divines like Bishop Hoadly, who accepted readily the necessity of James IIs deposition and the importance of parliament as a check on absolute power. No man had absolute arbitrary power over the civil rights of another. Such sentiments were not shared, however, by his non-juring former brethren who clung rigidly to the absolutist principle of legitimate succession and the consequent duty of unquestioning obedience. Feudalistic absolutism, however, had been dealt a mortal blow and supporters of the revolution looked forward to what they believed would be a better future. But did anything really change from feudalistic times? Were the poor now free from oppression by the rich and powerful? Was the individual now free from the subtle tyranny of the church? As a self-appointed prophet, William Blake uses his special vision to see the reality behind the appearance of eighteenth-century society.Blake lived surrounded by the age of deified reason, the era of the industrial revolution and the apotheosis of the bourgeoisie. He abhorred the newly mechanised, dehumanised society around him. With enclosure and the decline of the agricultural system in the eighteenth century, families flocked to the cities which were poorly prepared to receive this vast influx. Little children were sold to work as chimney sweeps. The rich got richer, and the poor became impoverished. Alienated from the society around him, Blake rebels against tyranny, established social and religious authority, restraints on sexual expression; materialism, corrupted cities, hypocrisy, war and oppression of the poor. Rejecting conventional social and religious authority, Blake re-creates a new kind of religion: the free expression of imagination, inspiration and prophetic vision will be the guiding forces of the world. Sensuous expansion becomes the gateway to a perception of the unknown and the infinite.Blakes sense of Prophecy: By the term prophet Blake did not mean an individual who could see into the future, but one who understood the present. Blake uses the term prophet and poet interchangeably. The Blakean prophet is not limited by the evidence of his five senses; his perception has become infinite. For Blake, prophecy is moral knowledge. The prophet understands the consequences of events (if you go on So, the result is So) and has a duty to explain those consequences to those whose doors of perception have not yet been cleansed. To Blakes mind, organised religion and the state deform the perceptions of the individual, repressing desire and engendering hypocrisy. The innocent Edenic-type love is destroyed by prohibition, the Thou shalt not of institutional religion. Individuals are only apparently free, in reality their minds are imprisoned. The prophets vision can mark what others cannot see, and through his indignation and honesty releases the individual from the mind forgd manacles which he or she bears. Prophecy for Blake is moral vision. It is vision, moreover, in which any honest man can come to share.Prophecy and Social Criticism in London:Blakes Songs of Innocence and of Experience combine prophecy with social criticism of his immediate society. London: The teeming, newly industrialised city, exemplified by London, becomes a symbol of oppressed humanity. In London, men, streets and even the Thames seem enslaved by the social and moral codes. The mind-forgd manacles bind the first, while the street and the river are called charterd. London had a charter granting it certain privileges or liberties, and so did many commercial associations in the City, prominent along the banks of the Thames. The streets are chartered, mainly, by being lined with commercial houses licensed to buy and sell. But partly too by being filled with wanderers marked like slaves by the mercantile city that owns them. Like the streets, the Thames is chartered by being lined with wharves and warehouses. And perhaps as well by having its natural course altered to accommodate the building of new warehouses, streets, etc. Yet one mans charter is another mans mancle; charters are exclusive. The adjective charterd (meaning hired or leased) suggests the monopolistic and exploitive practices of Englands commercial empire. Under this regime all Englishmen are chartered, and the second half of the poem is a litany of typical cases: they are sold into slavery as chimney sweepers by the fathers, impressed into the army or navy for a few shillings, hired for a few hours as harlots, or bought and sold on the London marriage market. London is an account of the various individuals who inhabit the eighteenth-century city. Wandering through the city the prophetic poet marks marks of weakness, marks of woe. The repetition of mark alerts us to the poetic voice as a seeing voice. The speaker is not, however, limited to the evidence of his five senses. His poetic vision can see beyond the purely visible, and can interpret external marks as signs of mind-forgd manacles which the citizens bear. Whereas the uncleansed eye can see only white churches and palace walls, the eye of the prophet can see how such institutions victimise individuals. The poet translates the cry of the chimney sweeper, and the sigh of the soldier, into dramatic images of their suffering the blood running down the palace walls. The duty of the prophet is to expose the consequences of beliefs and actions. The final stanza confronts the effects of the sexual repression and hypocrisy exacted by the church. In this stanza, venereal disease (the youthful Harlots curse) symbolizes the way in which contemporary morality has diseased sexuality. Sexuality, made furtive by repression becomes a force of death not life. That which is denied becomes a blight which transforms the marriage bed into a Marriage hearse. Marriage hearse encapsulates a sense of doomed repetition: the beginning of life and its end, cradle and grave.In the poem, the speaker advances in vision from merely noting a concatenation of marks on faces, to hearing a cause (the mind forgd manacles) in the sound-effects of the city. What do we hear in the sound-effects of the poem (i.e. alliteration, assonance, consonance and onomatopoeia) that suggest such a cause? Alliteration: the repetition of the same consonant sound in neighbouring words, usually at the beginning of words.Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Assonance: the repetition of internal vowel sounds in neighbouring words that do not end the same. sweet dreams / fertile - birthConsonance: the repetition of consonant sounds at the end of neighbouring words which have different vowel sounds. strength - earth birth / home sameOnomatopoeia is the use of words that resemble the sounds they denote, e.g. buzz, quack, hiss.The form of the poem, in sound, syntax, and breakdown of stanzas, enters fully into its meaning. Through its foursquare structure of four tetrameter quatrains wanders a “phonemic tune” of A sounds (wander,Charterd, mark, man,ban, and so forth), as if the speaker finds only one somber vowel color to speak in . The consonants also collect into a few clusters: an onomatopoeic hiss in hapless soldiers sigh is the expiration of the sound spit out in _ and _ forms throughout the poem, and these in the second half alternate with the plosive _ and _ notes which are almost as harsh. In t