Avram Razvan DE-EN

The little boy lost by William Blake

A Little Boy Lost" is a poem of six heroic quatrains. The first stanza is a sort of
prologue or meditation on the nature of love, particularly of the self and Thought.
The second stanza continues this meditation, but the inclusion of "Father"
addressed here indicates to the reader that this is a prayer. The speaker of this
prayer is a child, himself in turn overheard by a priest. Unfortunately, the priest
disapproves of the boy's prayer and from this point on the poem becomes the
harrowing tale of the boys' punishment at the hands of a narrow-minded, vindictive
clergyman.

While the actual burning alive of a blasphemous boy may never have taken place
in the England of Blakes day, the poet witnessed the abuse of Innocence by those
with religious authority. In continuing the themes taken up in The Garden of
Love, The Little Vagabond, and The Human Abstract, Blake questions a
religious system that would denounce human reason as inadequate for
apprehending spiritual truth. Blake explains his philosophy that extols human
rationality as a means of understanding spiritual matters, but simultaneously rejects
reason as a more powerful force than imagination. The little boy exemplifies both:
he is thinking through his beliefs, but dares to ask his imagined questions of this
seemingly unknowable heavenly Father. That the boy addresses God with his
questions, rather than the earth-bound church authority of the priest, shows that
Blake seeks to relate to God outside the confines of the intellectually and
emotionally repressive religious institutions of his day.
 The Garden of Love

The Garden of Love" is a deceptively simple three-stanza poem made up of

quatrains. The first two quatrains follow Blake's typical ABCB rhyme scheme,
with the final stanza breaking the rhyme to ABCD. The lack of rhyme in the last
stanza, which also contains the longest lines, serves to emphasize the death and
decay that have overtaken a place that once used to hold such life and beauty for
the speaker.

Following the specific examples of flowers representing types of love, this poem
paints a broader picture of flowers in a garden as the joys and desires of youth.
When the speaker returns to the Garden of Love, he finds a chapel built there with
the words, Thou shalt not, written overhead. The implication is that organized
religion is intentionally forbidding people from enjoying their natural desires and
pleasures.

The speaker also finds the garden given over to the graves of his pleasures while a
black-clad priest binds his joys and desires in thorns. This not-so-subtle critique
shows Blakes frustration at a religious system that would deny men the pleasures
of nature and their own instinctive desires. He sees religion as an arm of modern
society in general, with its demand that human beings reject their created selves to
conform to a more mechanistic and materialistic world.

Kubla Khan

Perhaps the most fantastical world created by Coleridge lies in Kubla Khan. The
legendary story behind the poem is that Coleridge wrote the poem following an
opium-influenced dream. In this particular poem, Coleridge seems to explore the
depths of dreams and creates landscapes that could not exist in reality. The sunny
pleasure-dome with caves of ice exemplifies the extreme fantasy of the world in
which Kubla Khan lives.
Similar to several of Coleridges other poems, the speakers admiration of the
wonders of nature is present in Kubla Khan. Yet what is striking and somewhat
different about the portrayal of nature in this particular poem is the depiction of the
dangerous and threatening aspects of nature.

Lawder notes that the male force of the sacred river literally interrupts, and puts
an end to, the seven successive feminine endings that begin the second verse
paragraph (80). This juxtaposition of female forces versus male forces parallels
the juxtaposition of Coleridges typical pleasant descriptions of nature versus this
poems unpleasant descriptions. In most of Coleridges works, nature represents a
nurturing presence. However, in Kubla Khan, nature is characterized by a rough,
dangerous terrain that can only be tamed by a male explorer such as Kubla Khan.

The last stanza of the poem was added later, and is not a direct product of
Coleridge's opium-dream. In it the speaker longs to re-create the pleasured-dome
of Kubla Khan "in air," perhaps either in poetry, or in a way surpassing the
miraculous work of Kubla Khan himself. The speaker's identity melds with that of
Kubla Khan, as he envisions himself being spoken of by everyone around, warning
one another to "Beware! Beware!/His flashing eyes, his floating hair!" Kubla
Khan/the speaker becomes a figure of superstition, around whom those who would
remain safe should "Weave a circle[...] thrice" to ward off his power. Coleridge
conflates the near-mythic figure of Kubla Khan manipulating the natural world
physically, with the figure of the poet manipulating the world "in air" through the
power of his words. In either case, the creative figure becomes a source of awe,
wonder, and terror combined.