English Literature Commentary

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Stephanie Hung

Wendel

English Literature (IB6)

21 September, 2007

‘The Crystal Cabinet’ is an outstanding example of Blake’s use of an alternative reality to evoke readers to contemplate the boundaries of their society in light of knowledge about another world where these boundaries do not exist. Through the poem which was written just after the French Revolution, Blake offers the extreme of human experiences; as the central metaphor of the poem symbolizes a deep human truth which can be adopted with his poem, ‘London’. The poem’s simple goal is to tell a story and share a wisdom.

The poem contains seven stanzas, several stanzas containing a different world and a different boundary; within each stanza one is able to find a rhyme scheme which closely follows a broken dactylic tetrameter. The Crystal Cabinet’s seven stanzas forms a superstructure upon which the story elements can be intertwined, and imagination can be overlaid as deeper themes of Blake’s philosophy can be also be embedded. The first stanza is the main and central metaphor which one should focus on as it unfolds line by line before connecting with the second stanza to further evoke readers on the different dimensions and boundaries. The first two lines in the first stanza seemingly represent’s a form of innocence, a new born into a new world that deserved a celebration which is where and why Blake uses the term “merrily”. However, one notices the semi-colon after the “merrily” as it drifts further away from the supposed celebration, as the narrator’s ‘Maiden’ puts the persona into a cabinet and “lock’d me up with a golden key”; the poems happiness and joy thus comes to a dramatic halt. The broken dactylic meter in the first stanza seems to be contradicting, as ‘merrily’ representing a form of happiness and freedom, is partnered with ‘key’ which in terms symbolizes a place where freedom is lacked and limited, where one is locked.

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The cabinet in which the narrator/Blake finds himself in is “form’d of gold, and pearl and crystal shining bright”, a contrast to the large and dull world of nineteenth century London. The second stanza, from lines 5-9, Blake is using the cabinet for which the narrator is locked in to emphasize an escape to a different world as opposed to a world for which he lives in, a dull and fearful nineteenth century world, in London. The second stanza contains two broken rhymes/dactylic meters as Blake rhymes “gold” and “world”, and “bright” and “night” together.  Inside the cabinet is where ...

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