Blake Desire: Desire in Blake\'s

¶ … Blake

Desire:

Desire in Blake's poetry can range from pure innocence, as in "Infant Joy" ("Sweet joy befall thee" is repeated at the end of each stanza) to the dark and sinister desire for power seen in "The Tyger," with the speaker awed and wondering "On what wings dare he aspire," the "dare" reflecting the speaker's desire to be that daring, to the purely destructive and consumptive, as in "A Divine Image" where the human heart is called a "hungry gorge." It is the object of desire in Blake's poetry that determines its qualities.

Authority:

Blake also deals a lot with authority in his poems. He is concerned with the unjust authority that the strong impose on the weak; this shows up in the "Proverbs of Hell" section in a cynical, almost sarcastic way that seems uncharacteristic of Blake: "The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion," meaning the lion, through his might, is automatically taken care of. A clearer and less symbolic instance of this abuse of authority occurs in "The Chimney Sweeper:" "And my father sold me while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry 'Weep! weep! weep! weep!'" for Blake, the only authority should be compassionate treatment and love for our fellows; any other is necessarily evil.

There are many other themes in Blake's poems as well. He deals with the idea of love a lot more than just in its relation to authority, and with equality and religion. His poems generally seem ultra-simplistic and at the same time totally inaccessible. The words are beautiful and easy to understand, but the ideas would take a lifetime of pondering to fully figure out. I was surprised by a lot of the darker imagery in a lot of his work, especially in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." I knew that his religious views were controversial, but in his day it would not have been too surprising if he ended up in some sort of legal trouble over what almost appear to be Satanistic statements.

A really like Blake's style, however, the way his images seem to blend together without clear boundary, like his concept of Heaven and Hell and what I could understand of the rest of his philosophy. The fact that he manages to kind of confuse the reader's mind using only the black and white of ink and paper is a truly astounding testament to his skill as a poet, and as an artists (with the use of color).

Wordsworth's Sonnets

The World is Too Much with Us"

1) We waste too much time worrying about material affairs; paganism is better than Christian capitalism.