Great Works MW 2:55 Spring 2013

As I’m sure you’ve all read William Blake’s “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” I know I cant be the only one who had difficulty in understanding the language used in the poem. I can’t say I was able to fully grasp what was going on 100% of the time, I was still able to establish one central idea—the degradation of women.

“The Argument” found in the beginning of the poem introduces a kind of sexual vibe that I picked up on in the third line. Oothoon, the main character of the poem declares that she is a virgin in love with Theotormon; however her virgin status wasn’t very long lasting. “But the terrible thunders tore,” depicts the pain she felt when losing her virginity, which we only later find out is not the doings of her love, but of a rapist—Bromion. As a woman during this time, Oothoon didn’t have control of many aspects of her life but sexual encounters should have been one of them. Bromion took that away from her and stripped her of her virgin status without her consent. In “Visions,” we discover more details of the rape: “Bromion rent her with his thunders; on his stormy bed – Lay the faint maid.”

Oothoon and the Daughters of Albion look to a land, America, and view it as a place of paradise and freedom away from the awful treatment these women receive in their homeland. When the Daughters of Albion hear the cries of Oothoon, they respond and say, “And they enclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle.” I interpreted this line as the women declaring what men had done to their mindset over time, they had patronized and belittled them to a point that their thoughts and brains were of no more use. There was so much these women could have been, so much they could have done; men took that away from them and denied them of their ability to actually utilize their brains for any substantial and real purpose.

The line “The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, and echo back her sighs,” is repeated various times throughout the poem. Because of her rape, Oothoon not only loses her virginity and dignity, but Theotormon because he is enraged and jealous her no longer possesses power of her. The line signifies the women’s understanding of her pain, because they too experience the degradation.

Hello class,

As you all know this weeks’ assigned reading were on William Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience. After reading a few poems It came pretty clear to me that although they come pretty short and straight forward, that is definitely not the case with most of them (at least for me.) I started by reading “Introduction” in the Songs of Innocence and after reading many of the others, I have chosen to give my insight on that poem.

The poem starts off with a piper (one who plays a pipe), and it also starts very joyous, gleeful and amusing – “Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee”. This poem is also written in first person which gives it a sense of meaning that the author himself is a part of this journey and adventure of just blissfully enjoying what he was doing. He then writes “On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’” and when I read  that he saw a “child” on a cloud I found it interesting that it was worded this way. It’s as if this child is an angelic being or some divine creature. It’s then mentioned that he was laughing and asks the piper to play a song about a “Lamb” which seemed a bit weird that the child would ask him to play a song of a lamb amongst everything else a child could be interested in. After reading this stanza entirely I figured that the child was just an image of innocence and is very affectionate to the passion the piper had playing his music. It was a simple piper who was just enjoying his time but little did he know that someone would actually really enjoy what he was passionate of doing.

In the following stanza, the child was so amused by the songs of the piper that he asked the piper to play the song again and he played with cheer. This again, shows the appreciation the child shows to the piper for his hobby and interest so much so that the child begins to tear from enjoyment. The third stanza begins with child telling the piper to drop his pipe and sing his song instead –  “‘‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer:!’’So I sang the same again, While he wept with joy to hear.”  I found this quite interesting that the child was so fond of the music that he would like to listen to the lyrics as well as opposed to just melody of the song.

As I further read in to the poem, the child, an angelic being, an image of innocence and youth commands the piper to commit to showing everyone his passion. Rather than it being just a pastime and passion for the piper who plays the pipe on his own seldom time, he wishes that he shares it with every child. The piper then agreed to his command as he took the time to write his songs and soon share with other children.

This poem, to me, had a lot of important meanings and displayed it well. I imagined someone who does not get much attention from others and has a hobby and is very passionate about it. He loves what he does and does it for his own enjoyment maybe because he doesn’t think others will appreciate or just had no intention to. When the child appears however, it all changed because he found someone to appreciate what he did and gives his passion a meaning which inspired him to display his work publicly. To relate to our time, I see a talented and shy boy who has a remarkable skill in music and perhaps sings to himself and someone hears and him sing, appreciates him, asks him to pursue his talent and share it with others.

Hey everyone! Let me first start off this blog post by saying that I absolutely LOVED William Blake’s poems from “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”. From this epic collective of poems, the two that caught my eye the most were the poems entitled, “The Chimney-Sweeper”. While reading these poems I noticed three main themes that both poems share. The themes are death, class division (class consciousness), and religion (aka God). The theme that I want to mainly focus on in this post is the theme of religion.

In the first “The Chimney-Sweeper” poem, Tom Dacre has a dream about his fellow chimneysweepers being freed and joining God in heaven. I found this part very interesting because the poem describes the children chimneysweepers in the dream as “locked up in coffins of black”. In my mind, I took this as an inner meaning portraying the life of a chimneysweeper as a life that you can only be freed from by death. I came to this sad conclusion because of clues left by Blake throughout the poem. In the beginning, Tom Dacre is crying because he had to shave his head to make it easier to clean himself. As a chimneysweeper, soot gets everywhere, and since it was expensive to bath during this time period, Tom got his hair shaved off. Blake describes Tom’s hair as “curled like a lamb’s back”. To me, I took this as an inner symbolism for Tom being a sacrificial lamb because chimneysweepers lived very short lives and were worked to death as a sacrifice to the upper class. Later in the poem when Tom is dreaming, he sees his fellow chimneysweepers “Wash in a river, and shine in the sun. Then naked and white, all their bags left behind”. This part of the poem got to me because all Tom really wants to do is bath and play around like a normal child which he cannot do because of his status as a chimneysweeper. Also during the dream in the poem, I found it strange the way Blake wrote the line, “He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.” I don’t really know what to make of this line, but I feel like he meant to say “He’d have God for his father, and never want for joy.” If the line had the word for added to it, it would make sense that God is saving him from his miserable life.

In the second poem, which for me was even sadder and harder to read, the child chimneysweeper is crying in the snow. His parents are assumed to be (if they are not dead) in the church praying. The theme of religion is carried through with the parents, and with the last two lines of the poem that are complexly worded. Blake writes:

“And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,

Who make up a heaven of our misery.”

These two lines are interesting because they can be taken two ways. Either that God, priest, and king create a heaven built upon the misery of people or they literally make up heaven to make us think there is a better place for us so we are content with our misery. Whichever way Blake wanted us to take in this line, it is still a sad sentiment connected with class division during this time period. Overall, I found both these poems to be very insightful into the lives of child laborers who sadly continue to exist worldwide, and lured me into reading more poems by William Blake.

Anson

Please read from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience, the following poems:

From Innocence:

The Introduction, The Lamb, The Little Black Boy, The Chimney-Sweeper, Divine Image, Infant Joy, and On Another’s Sorrow.

From Experience:

The Introduction, The Chimney-Sweeper, The Tiger, The Sick Rose, London, Human Abstract, and A Poison Tree.

Of course, you may read all of the poems, or the ones that seem to correspond with others, etc.

Melissa Hacken: Tartuffe Blog Post

Hi everyone!

So, after reading the final acts in Tartuffe, I noticed some common themes within the play. Among many obvious themes, I became intrigued that foolishness played a major role, and had a heavy relation on the outcome of some of the characters’ lives. More specifically, I believe that Orgon and Tartuffe’s foolishness lead to their disfavor.

Moliere made it pretty easy to see Orgon’s foolishness. From the very beginning of the play, Orgon’s admiration of Tartuffe is so intense that Tartuffe’s clear hypocrisy couldn’t be proved. It was made clear that Tartuffe’s obvious manipulation caused Orgon to see Tartuffe as a loyal, trustworthy, devout man of God. Orgon was foolish for blindly believing everything that Tartuffe said, and believing he was a virtuous man. Not just his children, and his own wife attempted to convince him otherwise, to no avail. The audience witnesses Tartuffe’s betrayal through his incessant advances towards Elmire. His son Damis had witnessed this disloyalty first hand, and although he was being truthful, Orgon’s adoration of Tartuffe fooled him to distrust Damis. His blind support of Tartuffe led him to disinherit his son, while making Tartuffe the sole heir of his estate, and entrusted him with the lockbox. These fateful actions caused Tartuffe to be able to attempt to drive Orgon and his family from their estate and cause legal issues with the King.

It was Tartuffe’s own foolishness that eventually saved Orgon, although it made things worse for himself. Tartuffe proves to be a man that cunningly captures the weakness of people, using it to his advantage. I personally believe it was foolish that Tartuffe hit on Elmire. Orgon had given him shelter, food, and constant gifts. Even so, Tartuffe was far too foolish to accept that. By hitting on Elmire, he started the inevitable downward spiral of his defeat. I find it even more foolish that when she was attempting to prove his hypocrite ways to Orgon in Act 4, Scene 5, he even suspected her advances of being a trick. His foolishness caused him to allow his desire for her to prove himself untrustworthy – right in front of Orgon. It was this specific act that showed Orgon his true hypocrisy eventually leading to his arrest.

Tartuffe Blog Post

“I do not deny God, and in no way I want to hurt the believers”

When I started to read Tartuffe I thought that Moliere’s goal is to instruct the reader to think wisely, to teach not to get under influence of a bad type person. However, reading further I realized that Moliere’s true aim is to criticize Catholic Church.

The author revealed hypocrisy and criminality of the church ideology which claims to guide the spiritual life of people. Moliere has shown by the example of Tartuffe that Christian morality allows a person to be totally irresponsible for his actions. He showed how Church comes to our life, sets own rules and principles and deprive believers of their rights. If we take a closer look at Act I, Scene 5th, we see how Moliere shows us the way Tartuffe, read Church, used to gain the Orgon’s trust:

He’d draw the eyes of everybody there /
And when I rose to go, he’d run before, To offer me holy-water at the door /
“I don’t deserve it. The half Sir, would be sufficient.” /
He’d share half of it with the poor, right then and there /

All these Tartuffe’s acts compel attention and make the victim to believe in his good intentions. Furthermore, Tartuffe explained to the others that his moves are just the Lord’s will. This is usually how priests explain when their prayers do not help believers. Isn’t familiar? Further, when Orgon gives him his estates, Tartuffe says, “In all things, let the will of Heaven be done” (Act III, Scene 7, line 42). Priests’ commitment to religion is considered the better, the more their believers disavowal themselves. Tartuffe does the same; he is turning Orgon into a spiritual slave. Thus, Tartuffe becomes the master of the house. Even more, he is intruding into personal life of its habitants.

Thus, Moliere shows Tartuffe as embodiment of the Church. In the end, Tartuffe’s goal was to give to Orgon’s family two options: be evicted, read excommunicated, or serve and obey.