Monthly Archives: March 2021
An illustration for “The Lamb”
I think this illustration helps me understand “The Lamb” more by William Blake because this sort of picture was in my head while reading it. The picture is obviously a lamb in a meadow and I feel like this picture connects to the poem. The two lambs symbolize the children of god and the beautiful meadow shows god’s creation of the world. The poem talks about the beauty of god’s creation and I feel like in this image it shows similar features.
The Lamb of God holds a lamb
I chose this picture to compliment the poem “The Lamb” by William Blake because it helps me to better understand the “Lamb” (Jesus Christ) that Blake alludes to and mentions directly. This picture functions in that way because Blake uses a lot of comparison to explain who the Creator of the Little Lamb is, and that symbolism leads the audience to understand the Creator’s person in terms of the traits of the Little Lamb in the poem. When describing the Lamb and the Creator, Blake writes, “Softest clothing wooly bright, Gave thee such a tender voice…For He calls Himself a Lamb: He is meek and he is mild.” This picture comes into play because after describing the Lamb and Jesus in that way, it helps me to visualize how Jesus would relate to a lamb He created by seeing Him hold the lamb so loving and tenderly.
Assignment #6
I choose this picture because it tells me very directly about the Chimney Sweeper. A child walking alone on the street in the rain(or the ash?). The picture corresponds to the poem “When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue”. The boy doesn’t have parents and without a guardian but needs to sweep the chimney to survive. However, “That thousands of sweepers were all of them locked up in coffins of black”. His friends are dead because of the brutal work environment. But he still hopes that the angels would take them to heaven. Children in 8 to 10 ages should stay in school and protected from their parents and all society. Children suppose to be the future, but Chimney Sweeper can only choose to be a “tool”. I feel very sad about this poem because the brutal reality happened before.
Assignment #6 Part 2
I have chosen the second “The Chimney Sweepers” and its illustration counterpart as my focal point. The poem sets a sad and ominous mood for the readers. Blake tells us that even though the little boy is dancing and singing, if we were to look a little deeper we can see the “misery” that they are going through. The illustration compliments it well, we see how pitch black the kid is from cleaning chimneys but it also the opposite of white. The black color of the kid in the illustration represents impurity and the loss of innocence through working in the adult world. This is a stark contrast to the white snow that is falling, this can mean that however perfect it may seem on the outside, its just a facade.
William Wordsworth – Discussion Questions
Please respond to any two of the following discussion questions by Friday, March 19th. Share your responses as comments to this post, being sure to refer to specific details in the poems to illustrate your ideas. Feel free to share your thoughts as responses to your classmates’ posts.
–Wordworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey”has been described as offering readers a “religion of nature.” What do you think that term means? Where do you see evidence of this in the poem?
–Why do you think Wordsworth gives “Tintern Abbey” such a precise and detailed sub-title? What is the significance of this poem’s full title?
–In the final portion of “Tintern Abbey,” the speaker turns to his “dear friend.” Who is this friend and what role does he/she play in the poem?
–“Composed upon Westminster Bridge” and “The World Is Too Much with Us” are both sonnets. Why do you think a poet might choose to work with such a highly structured form?
–Consider the first four lines of “The World Is Too Much with Us”: “The world is too much with us; late and soon/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” What do they mean to you? How do these lines resonate with your own lived experience?
–Describe some of the ways in which Wordsworth’s poetry conforms to the features of Romanticism that we’ve discussed. What evidence can you find to illustrate this?
Assignments – Week #7
- Office Hours – Monday, March 15th. I will be holding an open office hour from 3-4pm to discuss your essay assignment. Please come if you are struggling with getting started, you have questions about the assignment, or you want to run your ideas by me or by your peers.
- This Week’s Reading – William Wordsworth. We are continuing our readings in Romanticism with William Wordsworth. Please read “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” and “The World is Too Much with Us.” You can find these poems in Vol. E of the Norton Anthology. Be sure to have the texts available during our call on Wednesday.
- Hypothes.is. In preparation for Wednesday’s class, we will be annotating “Tintern Abbey” using the annotation tool Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is is an application that will allow us to annotate a text virtually in the same way we might if we were making notes in the margins of a physical text, but with the added bonus of being able to see and respond to one another’s notations. Please use this Guide to Getting Started with Hypothes.is to walk you through the process of setting up a free Hypothes.is account, adding the Hypothes.is extension to your web browser (ideally Chrome), and joining our ENG2850 Hypothes.is group using this link.
- Once you have set this up, go to this digital version of “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, click on the Hypothes.is icon in your toolbar, select ENG2850 and begin making annotations on the text. This could mean sharing definitions of the words you look up, asking questions about the text, or identifying parts of the poem that seem particularly interesting to you and adding your own thoughts. Please make three annotations to the text in advance of our Zoom session on Wednesday. Be sure that you have selected “ENG2850” from the pull-down menu, rather than “public”. This will keep our annotations visible only to members of our class.
- Wordsworth Discussion Questions. Please respond to any two of the discussion questions I’ve posted about Wordsworth’s poems (see separate post for the questions.). As usual, you can either answer the questions directly or respond to your classmates’ comments. Please share your responses by Friday, March 19th.
- Reminder – Email me at [email protected] with the question you plan to explore in your essay. I should hear from you by Sunday, March 14th.
“Chimney Sweepers”- Assignment 6
I chose “The Chimney sweepers” by William Blake, the image gives a representation of how hard and depressive the lives of children were. I saw this image and it helped me understand the poem completely, a little boy is shown walking alone as to how his mother died and the father sold him as told in the first stanza of the poem. As a kid he could barely say “weep” and now he cries in the rain, so no one witnesses, because to him his tears held no value as he wasn’t heard as a child and was unwillingly forced into being a sweeper and the image portrays that. Cleaning chimney’s all day, they would get covered in soot and the image represents how the soot is being fallen everywhere. In the fourth stanza tom dreams about the angel coming and setting them free and, in the image, shows how the little boy is looking towards the sky waiting for the angel to come so that he can be set free, now everyday he goes to work looking at the sky wondering if the angels would come for his rescue.
Assignment #6
The poem I went with was “London” by William Blake. What drew me to this poem was that William Blake actually talks about a society we live in today. In the first stanza, the poem reads “I wander thro’ each charter’d street, “and in the picture we can see the old man is being guided by someone down a street because he is not familiar with the area which is why he uses the word wander in the line, fits perfectly with the picture. As he keeps walking, he looks around and sorrow follows. He talks about manacles which is a metal band or a chain that keeps someone tied down. He says in the second stanza “The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” and I think he means that if people stop following the same hard routine, they fear they might not have a successful or a comfortable future and that they might be destroyed, and in the picture above we can see a man trying to put out fire. This to me seems like that the man thinks if he keeps on the manacles tied onto him by society, only then will he be able to put out that fire and continue to live by. This poem is a part of songs of experience because throughout every stanza, he talks about a society when everywhere he looks, he sees the innocence of men, women and children being destroyed right before his eyes, the old man in the picture has closed eyes and the guy is looking at him wondering if he is exhausted from all the walking but little does he know that the old man has been withered down and can’t look into the place any further.
Assignment #6
I choose this picture because I can more clear differentiate the lamb and tiger, because for both poem the author use animal to represent in him poem, because when we think about lamb, we know lamb is milk, howevere when we think about tiger we know tiger is making people fear about tiger, in the poem lamb we know that you are lamb yu are the kids, make me feel really tender, however in tiger poem “What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” we can know that the different between the lamb and the tiger, tiger make people scare of it, but lamb make people feel tender.
The Lamb
: a)explain what drew you to select this poem b) identify a line, pair of lines, or stanza that seems to you to be particularly meaningful or perplexing c) offer some analysis or explanation of your selected passage and d) connect it to the overall theme of the poem. Please post your work before our Zoom call
I chose The Lamb because it gave me an understanding of Blake’s faith, and helped me to understand his perception of who God is. A pair of lines that was particularly exciting and enjoyable, yet slightly perplexing, for me to read was in stanza 15, where Blake describes Jesus as the lamb, meek, mild, and a child. This was enjoyable because I could understand that the author perceived Jesus as being humble, kind, and meek, and it was also perplexing to me because although that is a prevailing characteristic in the scripture, I believe Blake left out a lot Jesus’ more authoritative side, in having describe himself in scripture as a king, and also in facing life or death situations with no fear or compromise whatsoever, when he was in danger after sharing the truth and giving people his beautitudes and commands. I think Blake’s description of Jesus connects to the overall theme of the poem because it was a means to expound upon how gentle and meek Jesus is, by comparing the Lamb of God (Jesus) to the Lamb that He created.
