The tyger

[JCamilo]

Another reason many have said that he picked a Tiger is because he was apparently one of the first people to ever see it, but I feel that its a weak interpretation....logically the Tyger is the direct opposite of a Lamb - In the sense one is "meek and mild" and one is "fearful" and so the two would act as good contraries.

do you think that the poem has any sort of political or a social message?

I think that reason is clearly a mistake. I mean, there was Marco Polo, the tyger was one of the zodiacal chinese signs and looking quickly over the net Lineaus gave the scientific classification of the tiger back in 1758...
Yeah, I remember the whole Songs of Inocence and Songs of Experience are not meant to be interpretated as isolated poems but as a whole work. I remember I read there is an short of pedagogical intention from Blake with those works, which are supposed to be read by the youth. This make up for some short of social message on his work and If it is not true, I prefer to think it is because will make his message and intention to reach the "Innocence" and protect them be a bit like his actions.
I like The Angel, A Divine Image, A Dream, Love's Secret, Mock On Voltaire and Rosseau, The Sick Rose, Silent Silent Night... others, Blake is among my favorite writers.

[whiteangel]

I think that reason is clearly a mistake. I mean, there was Marco Polo, the tyger was one of the zodiacal chinese signs and looking quickly over the net Lineaus gave the scientific classification of the tiger back in 1758...
Yeah, I remember the whole Songs of Inocence and Songs of Experience are not meant to be interpretated as isolated poems but as a whole work. I remember I read there is an short of pedagogical intention from Blake with those works, which are supposed to be read by the youth. This make up for some short of social message on his work and If it is not true, I prefer to think it is because will make his message and intention to reach the "Innocence" and protect them be a bit like his actions.
I like The Angel, A Divine Image, A Dream, Love's Secret, Mock On Voltaire and Rosseau, The Sick Rose, Silent Silent Night... others, Blake is among my favorite writers.

I mean i like Him, [I am studying him for an exam ...which is sooo very soon and I have very little understanding of him and his works i think, i struggle on meter and verse a lot ...
I mean He is highly complex and all this poetry is insane because there is just SOOO much to it! argh i am stressing now

[JCamilo]

I dunno about exams, I glad that english literature is not taught in Brazil, anyways, just imagine how he complained that his illustrations are meant to be published with the poems so they would help the understantment. Tell your teacher he was the inventor of comic books

[whiteangel]

LOl the infernal method just a way for him to preach democracy to be honest---

[JCamilo]

yeah, it is no wonder that XIX century had such awesome book illustrators. It was a great help to give impulse for romances and novels. (And comic books are pretty much democratic ) But the funny part is Blake believing he is actually helping anyone to understand anything and in the end, he just managed to add complexity to the interpretations of his works since everyone is always looking to his works as they try to find the secret message on persian carpets.
But you see, form and substance in this social message in Blake's work.

[whiteangel]

yeah, it is no wonder that XIX century had such awesome book illustrators. It was a great help to give impulse for romances and novels. (And comic books are pretty much democratic ) But the funny part is Blake believing he is actually helping anyone to understand anything and in the end, he just managed to add complexity to the interpretations of his works since everyone is always looking to his works as they try to find the secret message on persian carpets.
But you see, form and substance in this social message in Blake's work.

I mean if there was no interpretation to his poetry, it would literarly be a load of muble-jumble.....so I mean it NEEDS to have a literary meaning or else it is not literature but a puzzle.

[JCamilo]

Puzzles are literature also, do you know the Green Snake and Lili by Goethe? A joke he pulled, a faery tale using the massonary codes and all. He never explained it, just laughed. Or we have Lewis Carroll, Mallarmé and Joyce. Because in the end, interpretations does not mean understandment.

But in Blake case, yes, I agree. There is strong allegoric motifs on his work, which means he had reasons behind everything. I think the easier/nursery diction and rhyme is indeed to acess the so called youth or at least, represent his intention towards inocence. I compare with a later work - with someone who indeed had more capacity to address to kids (and to think that in Blake time, pedagogy was just starting, so it was not in their mindset the psychological difference between kids and adults, or at least, not in the degree we have today) - that is Stevenson Children Garden of Verse. He also works with nursery rhymes but the themes are much less metaphysical than Blake.
Blake was not gratuitous, but in his own complexity - Dr.Blake and Mr.Blake - there is a different between his intent and accomplishment. Good for us, because the complexity from such apparently clear symbolism is what make his poetry so strong. He is better read where the light is dim and the darkness just a shroud.

[whiteangel]

literary puzzles are no longer puzzles when interpretations have been applied to them....hmm interesting are they? i mean surely once you decipher it, than its no longer a puzzle....

His complexity definitely makes his poetry much more interesting, i suppose there it is always fun deciphering a puzzle and that is what analysis of Blake's work quite literally is.
Im looking at the Lamb now, and just concluded that there is no innocence in the world of innocence in Blakes "Songs of innocence" because there so much hidden experience in this apparently innocent world - making it far from innocent. He uses so many literary techniques to cover this up, i.e. he uses pastoral imagery, liberal use of repetition luring the reader into this sense of comfort only to find on a close reading that there is a complex rhyme scheme within this simplistically appeared poem [although the first stanza is adheres to a ABAB patter, this does not follow in stanza's 2 and 3, but appears again in for, only to disappear in 5 - very irregular, and luring don't you think?]. Hence his world of innocence is if anything, more dangerous than his world of experience for at least in that world one actually is aware of complexity, the diction is harsher, the verse more complex.....but that is all expected....making it less surprising and thus more innocent...

[JCamilo]

literary puzzles are no longer puzzles when interpretations have been applied to them....hmm interesting are they? i mean surely once you decipher it, than its no longer a puzzle....

There is those who enjoy the traval as much as the vacation, or even more, no?

His complexity definitely makes his poetry much more interesting, i suppose there it is always fun deciphering a puzzle and that is what analysis of Blake's work quite literally is.
Im looking at the Lamb now, and just concluded that there is no innocence in the world of innocence in Blakes "Songs of innocence" because there so much hidden experience in this apparently innocent world - making it far from innocent. He uses so many literary techniques to cover this up, i.e. he uses pastoral imagery, liberal use of repetition luring the reader into this sense of comfort only to find on a close reading that there is a complex rhyme scheme within this simplistically appeared poem [although the first stanza is adheres to a ABAB patter, this does not follow in stanza's 2 and 3, but appears again in for, only to disappear in 5 - very irregular, and luring don't you think?]. Hence his world of innocence is if anything, more dangerous than his world of experience for at least in that world one actually is aware of complexity, the diction is harsher, the verse more complex.....but that is all expected....making it less surprising and thus more innocent...

Makes you think how a big challege to write to children is the language. If you render it to make it less complex, you have a dated and maybe, not lasting work, less artistic. It is necessary something else to be atractive and when it happens, the work no longers is just for children... like the experience hidden in Blake poems. He certainly wanted to reach those with less developed vocabulary but no intention to turn into one of them, hence he is bit like his own notion of evil, hiding the poetry as a form of corruption while using apparently simple forms, or a worm inside an apple, eating slowly from inside. No wonder he was not well understood by the other romantic poets, it takes time to reach the surface of the apple.

[whiteangel]

[QUOTE=JCamilo;653196]There is those who enjoy the traval as much as the vacation, or even more, no? [QUOTE]


yes there are those i suppose just not me eh...

Makes you think how a big challege to write to children is the language. If you render it to make it less complex, you have a dated and maybe, not lasting work, less artistic. It is necessary something else to be atractive and when it happens, the work no longers is just for children... like the experience hidden in Blake poems. He certainly wanted to reach those with less developed vocabulary but no intention to turn into one of them, hence he is bit like his own notion of evil, hiding the poetry as a form of corruption while using apparently simple forms, or a worm inside an apple, eating slowly from inside. No wonder he was not well understood by the other romantic poets, it takes time to reach the surface of the apple.

I personally don't think he was catering to children at all - his works are far to political, democratic, social to serve that purpose....Issac watts does- similarly structured like Blake for childeren.

yes the worm is exactly how Blake eats away his own created innocence in his songs. However, you cannot Blame the other Romantics [if we classify Blake as one that is] because Blake begins with a red apple, and by the time one looks again, it is green.....the difference is big...even though it seems small.

[JCamilo]

I do not think he did either, it was just a nice way to think it. He aims as you point to a class of readers yet to be "Instructed", maybe the youth (as his nature towards change would lead him) and not exactly kids. Altough he goes for language that could be what we would latter link to it. Of course, when Blake wrote there was no children literature yet as we know, so, he would not know the difference. It is just us rewriting the past.

Yeah, I do not blame the others - Coleridge and Wordsworth are clearly walking to a different path and theme, altough we could say that the search for a simple daily language could entice Blake. Keats was lost (and much latter) on his own world and aesthetic dream in search of the small and sublime and not the impact of Blake. Shelley too skeptic and Byron, who could maybe like the individualist fight of Blake, was too different to get with him. But they should have reckoniged Blake efforts towards a new diction and metric.

[whiteangel]

Children In Blake's times were not viewed as children; they were workers of the industrial revolution, they were victims of chimney sweeping, rascal attacks, basically treated like adults...arguable in Blake's times the child never existed, unless you were affluent --- i mean this is what frustrates me, the fact that the child didin't exist in his era, and he as a social reformist- omits the child as well.....for he too presents them like adults in much of his poetry and the adult like the child....very confusing i do not understand why, mockery? sarcasm? if so there is not enough evidence to prove from the text.
I mean I don't even consider Blake as a Romantic....the rest well clearly THEY fall into the batch.

[JCamilo]

There is many reasons. People lived less, so they had to mature quicker. Also, the children mortality was too big, they could not care so much for all growing phase if it could end that fast. Among poor, as long it was possible to work or marry, children have to move foward and act like addults.
It was necessary the social changes caused by the Revolution, Enlightment and even guys like Blake. When Rousseau start to deal with education, he starts to see the children with a different light - Blake is hinting at it, but far from having the philosophical capacity to develop it (only with the german nationalism they would really start to move foward), plus the raising of the burgoise class, created a new class of individuals that needed a new education: they are educated for liberal professions, not for politics or handwork, and better alimentation and the build of the family with more time with the mother (plus the feminism giving them this power), raizing life expectation changed the notion of what is a children and they could start to see also the psychological differences between one and addult.
Do not blame Blake for being a man of his time; using children as tiny addults as the form to notice them.
(I am not bothered by genre definitions, I can fit Blake on definitions of romantics, but it is really pointless. So I wont discuss this unless it is for fun).

[whiteangel]

Ha, well I really cannot fit him in that "Romantic" category personally.....well unless we say that he was the FIRST romantic and the LAST, for the rest do not follow his extremism....one only has to read Marriage of Heaven and Hell and then compare it to Shelly, Keats, Byron, Coleridge etc for that.



Yes Blake was a man of his time, but his views were not of his time, he was a supporter of democracy and of the French revolution, he hated the church and all other institutions, from what i could deduce of M of H+H, he "was of the devils party" without knowing it -[exactly what he himself said about Milton]. His priority is social realism rather than the imagination and to focus on how society can be improved.....and clearly childeren and the harsh way in which they live is one of his targets - which is why he gives the Child a voice in his poetry- shockingly radical for his times... yet the voice he gives them is of an adult....well perhaps to show that the child can never escape the world of experience just as the adult can never escape innocence, for they are like he concluded ; "two contrary states....necessary for human progression"

Perhaps is all I can conclude with. Darn!

[whiteangel]

But.. Hmm what do you make of Blake's presentation of adults in his poetry?
I always got the impression that are the darkness in innocence....
They are separated by allegorical figures i think, of the father and the mother but they never dominate either world...they are just used by Blake to portray his themes...but is that not the purpose of all characters?