A Study Of God, man and nature through William Blake’s work

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A Study Of God, man and nature through William Blake’s work

        William Blake was not respected in his era for his work, but to this day, we respect his work as having been some of the most influential and society-changing ever. He was perhaps the first ever artist to publicly think out of the box at a time when it was risky to do so, and was the first poet of the romantic period. His thoughts were unlike anything previously published- they included advanced psychology that is considered to this day to be relevant. His opinions on religion and our universe were new and socially challenging which was why his works were never accepted during his lifetime.

        To fully understand and appreciate Blake’s work, we must consider the social environment he lived in. It was a period when agriculture and farming was becoming city and stone. Suburbs and cities were being created and the general commercialisation of things around him troubled him greatly. With these changes, attitudes changed and became a lot more financially orientated and complicated. He despaired at what he thought was a becoming a “ruined world” and he turned to art for thought and understanding. People were losing their moral values and Blake’s world became sinister and dark. Also, political revolution internationally was occurring as the French and American revolutions happened during his lifetime. He lived in a learning world and he was confused and challenged by the world around him.

        Blake wrote a compilation of art called “Songs of experience” in 1794. Two of the poems in this collection were “The Tiger” and “The Lamb”. These were both written with the intention of being linked and studied as two different poems to compare and contrast. Blake is said to have believed that in order to reach a higher level of conscience, one needs to have experienced a state of innocence, but also one must experience the darker more sinister aspects of life. The poems according to him, were “two contrary states of the soul”, one, purer more innocent and the other darker and more sinister. They are both on creation from different perspectives. In other words, they are on the same thing- creation from two different perspectives, one, the innocent, pure state of being and the second, darker. However, neither of these perspectives is worse; these two “stages of experience” were vital in becoming more mentally intelligent and wise.

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        Now, looking at these two poems individually, we can see exactly what he meant. Firstly “The Lamb”; it is important that we notice that even though the language used in these poems may be simple and perhaps even similar to a child’s nursery rhyme, the content and perception raised in them was completely revolutionary in terms of how we perceived the human mind and psychology and, indeed, creation itself.         

        The Lamb does not have a third-person narrator; it is written in the second person as if the subject were conversing with the lamb. We can assume that this poem ...

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