Study Note about William Blake

        William Blake is an earliest pre-romantic poet, mystic poet, and also a painter. He draws the cover of his book like “Song of Innocence and of Experience” which is his most famous and impressive poetry collection. The other works such as “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” contains many well-known proverbs, and it also a prose collection. “The Book of Thel” is Blake’s seldom mystic work in the later period of him. In

        In “Song of Innocence and of Experience” he writes two poems as a contrast, “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” use different imagery and tone to make intense comparison. The speaker in “The Lamb” is a naïve child who has full of confident to believe that the whole world still has a hope, and the only way to contribute to this goal is using imagination and creativity. But in “The Tyger” the speaker is doubtful, uncertain, and fearful to the world. Biblical and mythological allusion adds to this poem like Prometheus, God of Smith, and the story of Dedlaus and Icarus:

             What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

“The Chimney Sweeper” and “The Sick Rose” in “Song of Experience” still uses the two diverse elements to emphasize the comparisons. “The Chimney Sweeper” describing a never realize dream of a miserable child worker who is a chimney sweeper, Blake uses black and white, dark and light to set off the pity life of the child. Rose and worm in “The Sick Rose” is also momentous imagery which have contrastive meaning. The rose represents the ignoring, innocence, perfect things but the worm is means the negative, destructive secular forces.

Some well-known proverbs are including in this prose collection “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. “Without contraries is no progression” are usually to be encouraged people; “Energy is eternal delight”, “Where man is not, nature is barren” are all the renowned sayings. Blake emphasizes the binary confrontation in this book just like the title “heaven” and “hell”, so it’s a work full of revolution of thinking.