William Blake; The schoolboy

        The poem uses strong themes of nature throughout; the first verse describes a sense of harmony between the schoolboy and nature through a positive description of the sounds of the birds which the schoolboy awakes to hear. Pathetic fallacy is used relating the ‘summer’ morn to the schoolboy’s joy for being awoken in this way. The second verse starts with the conjunction ‘but’ to link the two verses, yet show the contrast in mood between them. This negative verse outlines the child’s dread of school and brings the reader back to reality after the dream-like feel to the first stanza. The line ‘under a cruel eye outworn’ suggests that the children are exhausted by school, personification in the phrase ‘cruel eye’ represents the nature of the teachers, and the post modifier to this ‘outworn’ symbolises the way the children feel after having the teachers watching intensively all day. The word ‘sighing’ in the last line of this verse relates it back to the first as it could be referring to the child thinking about what he could be doing instead of school.

        The third stanza is negative again, showing the way the child feels by describing his body language whilst at school; ‘I drooping sit’, and the line ‘and spend many an anxious hour’ shows how the boy is permanently feeling nervous and in fear whilst at school. Blake then goes on to show the effect this would have on the pupil ‘nor in my book can I take delight, nor sit in learning’s bower’, this demonstrates his theory that school represses the child and stops learning being fun for them. These lines imply that if the boy were not at school he would be choosing to read and learn off his own accord.

        The fourth stanza marks a change in the poem as the narrative shifts from first to third person. This is where Blake addresses the parents and teachers showing that he unlike most other adults agrees with the children when they say they shouldn’t have to go to school. The way the verse is structured into two rhetorical questions makes the reader stop and think about the matter in hand. Blake provokes sympathy for the schoolboy by comparing him to a ‘bird that is born for joy’ and saying that sending the boy to school when his natural right is to be free and happy, is as bad as locking the bird in a cage. The phrase ‘forget his youthful spring’ implies that schools expect children to forget how to have fun.

        Blake’s opinions that children are manipulated by schooling is portrayed in the line ‘if buds are nipped and blossoms blown away’ the children are compared to unopened flowers; innocent and undeveloped. In the way that flower buds can be pruned and altered the children are being repressed and raised into the people they are wanted to be as opposed to what they would have naturally grown into without interference. Blake believes this is the influence formal schooling will have on a child. The sixth stanza acts as a warning to the reader. The purpose of it is to make the reader think of the consequences of the previous verses; if children are suppressed and are not allowed to endure happiness in their childhood then they will not be fully prepared for their lives ahead of them and will have regrets in their later lives. A metaphor is used throughout the poem referring to the stages of a person’s life as the seasons in the year, the last stanza uses this metaphor to insinuate that a persons childhood is the most important time because if they don’t learn how to have fun in the spring of their life they will not know how to enjoy themselves in the summer of life. This makes the last line of the poem particularly effective ‘when the blasts of winter appear’ as people rarely think about how the way they live their childhood will effect their later lives, this rhetorical question makes the reader contemplate whether a formal education in an early life is worth facing the regrets it will cause them to live with in later life looking back upon few happy memories. And maybe learning the joys of life and how to live to the fullest is the most important lesson to be learned within childhood.