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The heart is at rest,
everything is easy and still, laugh fulfilled the world. However, the
Nurse’s Song in Songs of Experience is completely different. The
mood becomes heavy and gloomy:
“When the voice of children are heard on the green
And whisperings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.
Then come home my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.”
Spring— the hope, has gone; face turns pale, lost the
alive; everything is cold and dead: the dews, winter, night. Everything that
could be hope “ is gone down” and “ are wasted”.
As getting older and older, Blake grew more and more
mystical, religious and concentrated on his inner self, the outer world
seems does not exist for him at all. Even on the deathbed, he was claiming
that he saw visions. Therefore, he called his later poems
Prophetic books.
They are highly symbolic, and sometimes hard to understand. But just because
of this, he absorbed and fascinated more and more musing scholars, thus make
him to be one of the six greatest poets in British literary history for its
mystery.
Blake’s diction is simple, lucid, but profound in
meaning. The rhyme is musical and powerful. The images are rich, attractive,
but because of the elaborately fabricated mythology, they are often
difficult to follow. For example, in his Tiger,
“And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of the heart?
And when they heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?”
Language is simple, rhyme is musical, but the
image is impressive and meaning is complex. The tiger may be the symbol of
wild, evil, violent, but also can be the symbol of power, strength, etc.
Therefore, it can be said that Blake’s poetry is a due mixture of simplicity
with profundity, innocence with experience.
Blake was strongly opposed to the classical tradition
of his age. His work was unusual for the time: he never attempted a sonnet,
and he never showed well his talent in couplets, which all of his
contemporaries considered the only good form of poetry. This difference made
him ignored for a long time. In addition, he criticized the classicalists as
“ knew enough of artifice, but little of art.” His lyric poetry shows the
features of the romantic spirit: natural sentiment, individual originality
and imagination. For all these features, he became really unwelcome by his
contemporaries, but just right because of these features, Blake is
considered as the forerunner of the Romantic poetry of the 19th century—that
is, he is called the pre-Romantic poet.
Nowadays, as a symbolist and mystic, Blake has
influenced the modern writers profoundly. His oddness of thought and
imaginative vision fit the taste of
modernists more than his contemporaries
in various ways.
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