William Blake's Poetry Collections

William Blake's triumvirate of collective poems, Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell come together to create the portrait of man and life stages. Throughout each collection, nature is used in different ways to accentuate the images Blake's poems were meant to evoke.

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are two works that are defined by their names. In Songs of Innocence, the reader is taken back to childhood, where everything was a discovery, full of the beauty of nature. The animals in the collection are friendly and it is natural for the narrator to praise them, or even engage in conversation with them, "Pretty, pretty robin/ under leaves so green/ a happy blossom/ hears you sobbing, sobbing," (Greenblatt et al, 2006). 

Another example of the use of nature in Songs of Innocence would be the poem "The Flute", "Little lamb/ here I am/ come and lick/ my white neck," (Greenblatt et al, 2006). Questions of childhood, such as acceptance and the love of a mother and father are explored in a few of the poems, always circling back to nature as it pertains to a child's outlook. Even the introduction is harmonious with nature, "Piping down the valleys wild [...]/ On a cloud I saw a laughing child," (Greenblatt et al, 2006).

The introduction of the Innocence collection set the tone, just as the introduction of Songs of Experience sets the tone.

From brightness, innocence, and childhood, the reader is taken down darker, more adult avenues in Songs of Experience, "Hear the voice of the Bard! [...]/ whose ears have heard/ The Holy Word/ That walked among the ancient trees," (Greenblatt et al, 2006). Both collections depict nature and God, just in opposing fashions. New ideas are presented in this set of poems, like love, jealousy, misery, and poverty.

While Songs of Innocence and Experience are obviously complements to one another, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell could be considered the final piece of the trilogy. In connection, the two works could be allegories for childhood and adulthood, whereas The Marriage of Heaven and Hell could be the spiritual stage man takes in death and the afterlife; "The man kept his course along/ the vale of death," (Greenblatt et al, 2006).

References:

Greenblatt et al [Eds]. (2006). The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period Through the Twentieth Century [vol. 2].

Elements of Poetry

Symbolism and allegory are two intricately linked aspects of poetry. Symbolism is a tangible object that represents another aspect beyond its literal meaning, (DiYanni, 2008, p. 536). Allegory is when the events, characters, and places in the narrative contain a symbolic meaning, (DiYanni, 2008, p. 537). Emily Dickinson’s poem Because I could not Stop for Death is an example of an allegorical poem. It has plenty of instances of symbolism, but the places described in the poem and the personification of death are the two important symbols to consider, therefore setting it apart as an allegorical work of literature.

Lines 9-13 of the poem could be a representation of the narrator seeing all the central events of her life or human life in general before she dies, or before the narrator and death pass “the Setting Sun/Or rather—He passed Us.” One more example of the allegorical nature of Dickinson’s poem would be lines 17-20, when she describes “The cornice—in the Ground.” The cornice could represent her own grave.

Syntax is the grammatical way in which the words come together to create a feeling, (DiYanni, 2008, p. 542). Towhomitmayconcern by Sonia Sanchez is a poem brought to life because of the use of syntax. The words are spelled out how the narrator would sound them out; in effect the reader ‘hears’ the voice of the narrator with lines like “ima gonna stake you out”.

Rhythm and meter are two elements of poetry that both describe the flow and measure it as well. The prevailing meter in Her Kind is iambic pentameter. Most of the poem's lines contain ten syllables, with two syllables per foot. To keep the poem moving, the author Anne Sexton variegates from ten syllables per line, to eight, nine, and five. Altogether, the poem has a lilting quality to it, primarily due to the author's use of caesura and enjambment. The run-on lines pull the reader’s eye down to read more the poem, and each pause sets the necessary rhythm for the poem to follow.

Langston Hughes accents his poem I Too to create a pattern and tone in each line. Every line seems a proclamation and every important as the one the precedes it: “But I laugh/And eat well/And grow strong.”

DiYanni, R. (2008). Literature approaches to fiction, poetry, and drama [2nd Ed.]. New York: McGraw Hill