William Blake combined the vocation
of engraver, painter, and poet. He produced and published his other works
himself, except those which remained in manuscript at his death, by using his
own unique method of engraving both illustration and text on copper plates and
coloring the printed volumes by hand. He reveals the current events existing in
the society whether optimistic or pessimistic and which he is not apprehensive
to. He proclaimed the primacy of imagination and freedom over reason and law. A
powerful imagination is evident in every aspect of Blake’s work. A deeply
mystical man, claimed he had visionary experiences that prompted him to invent
his own belief system in which the creator of the universe, whom he named
Urizen, wrought vengeance on mankind through Jesus, renamed the Prince of
darkness as Orc. As a poet, Blake performs as a light to men who are unaware though
some of his works basis is of imagination, he turned poetry as a medium to shed
awareness of those who did not see and who do not want to see.
Realistic views are found in the works of Blake since in his travel he
include in his poetry what he saw by which he appreciated or criticized, what
he perceived, and what he sought by which he accepted and withdraw. One of the
travels he had was in Africa, where it convinced him to look always through the
eyes which the South had given him and which bewilderment and fear made him
mute and afraid. But after he had left the South, luck gave him other eyes, new
eyes with which to look at the meaning of what he had lived through. The
actuality of his experience in Africa was included in his poem, ‘The Little
Black Boy’:
My mother bore in the southern wild
And these black bodies in this sun
burnt face
The poem is a revelation on the apartheid existing in the society of
Africa in the earlier periods. He realized that he should express what he
understood and he did it in composing his poems. As expressed in his poem, ‘The
Little Black Boy’, he observed the unfair treatment since according to the
words written in the Bible God made men equal among each other that should be acknowledge
by men themselves. Books that shed light to him in creating his poems are: George
Moore’s ‘Confession of A Young Man’, which described how and English youth
resisted the restrictions of a Victorian environment, Dostoevsky’s ‘The House
of the Dead’, which depicted the lives of exiled prisoners in Siberia, how they
lived in crowded barracks and vented their hostility upon one another, James
Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, which depicted the double
revolt of an Irish youth against the oppressive religious life of Ireland, an
Ireland which England was seeking to strangle, and D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Sons and
Lovers’, which dealt with the experiences of a son of an English coal mining
family, a son who sought to escape the demands of a bleak environment. He
believed that books were the windows through which he looked at the world and
for him reading was a kind of remembering. His poem serves as instrument for
the awareness of mankind, as man reads and understands it.
Horace instill that literature
should instruct by the presentation of something beautiful and useful. Poetry
has been provided with words that will freely follow and the foundation and
source of literary excellence which is known as wisdom. Poets either benefit or
delight us, or, at one and the same time, to speak words that are both pleasing
and useful for our lives.
William Blake created the poem as
entertainment for children to let them know of their innocence and to each
people as an awakening about people who are repressed by a certain majority
that exists in some parts of the world. He represented the poem as delightful for
children are the subject matter of the poem, and they are marked as the gleefully
oriented citizens for they cannot realize the truth in its nature, yet it
instruct about equalities that should be adopted by man.
Blake laments for the blacks in the
South and shed grateful thoughts for answered prayer to the overcoming of racial
discrimination by enclosing it in his unequally paired verses. Blake give life
to his poem as it would function as it is to perform where it stood and serve
useful to the substance as the muse granted the lyre, the task reporting about
gods, the children of the gods, the victorious boxer, and the horse who was
first in the race, as well as to record youthful anguish and wine’s liberating
influence. He acknowledges himself as a poet who have the ability and knowledge
to preserve the variations and shades of literal works and embracing it with
art to be recognized and fully appreciated by men.
Nature first forms man within so as
to respond to every kind of fortune. She delights man or impels him to anger or
knocks him to the ground and torments us with oppressive grief. Afterward she
expresses the emotions of the spirit with language as their interpreter. Nature
talks to Blake and taught him the right path to the solution with what he saw.
She awakened him with some of her developments by which she creates it herself,
made him arouse his anger and expresses her emotions to him about his function
who will overcome the developments.
He distinct himself from other poets by
revealing the truth, being direct, and being a guardian in his poems as the
difference whether a god is speaking or a hero, a mature old man or someone
passionate and still in the full flower of youth, a powerful matron or a
diligent nurse, an itinerant merchant or
the cultivator of a prosperous field, a Colchian or an Assyrian, one raised in
Thebes or in Argos.
He viewed the customs in the
South and empathize on the deprived. He does not take substance on the outcome
but take substance from the foundation so that he would excel himself and teach
as a poet who does not aim to extract smoke from the flaming light but rather
light from the smoke, so that he might describe spectacular marvels, Antiphates and the Scylla and Charybdis along
with the Cyclops.
His lines are not sociably but
obligingly and tolerantly. It is not for mere presentation of art to excite
social classes but it obligated and tolerated its function.
He teach what nurtures and forms himself
through his own ideas from a source based on what he saw and follows what his
function and duty are, what is prosper and what is not and what direction poetic
excellence leads and avoiding directions which failure beckons.
Poets teach lessons their emotions
wants to, let them brief so that receptive spirits will quickly perceive and
faithfully retain what the poet have said. Everything superfluous seeps out of
the well-stocked mind. In order to create pleasure, poetic fictions should
approximate reality that anything it wishes must be believed nor should it
extract a living child. Poet gets every vote who combines the useful with the
pleasant, and who, at the same time he pleases the reader, also instructs him.
William Blake was able to do his
function that is to delight and instruct in his poems that includes the good he
had given to man and achieve excellence by the teachings he taught in his
performance.
Rebecca Rodriguez
Web Rank Solution
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