DUALISM: God and Evil/ male and female/ reason and imagination
Without contraries there is no progression -> the dualism are necessary for life.
IMAGINATION: such as best human sense, Blake not considered sense perceptions
The divine vision -> see beyond the material reality. The poet became a sort of prophet who can see more deeply into reality.
THE LAMB - Songs of Innocence
The symbolism of the poem is based on the image of Christ, the Lamb of God, who was born into the world as a human child. The purity and innocence of Christ are stressed, as are the purity and innocence of the child-speaker. The three protagonists also have something in common: lambs were traditionally used for sacrifice, Christ was sacrificed to expiate the sins of the world and children, especially in Blake’s time, were often the innocence victims of society.
THE TYGER – Songs of Experience
The Lamb and The Tyger correspond because they have the same subject: the creation. The power, the magnificence and perfection of this terrible creature can only be the result of the creation by God, yet it is the same God who also created the docile lamb, and it is this contrast that explains the many questions that the poet arises in the course of the opera. Once again, then this is the contrast between the innocence of human infants and myths and the wickedness of human adults and aggressive, often recurring theme in the poetry of Blake (London). God created the lamb but also the tiger. There is no light without darkness, life without death.
THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER
Is the title of two poems by William Blake, published in Songs of Innocence in 1789 and Songs of Experience in 1794. The poem "The Chimney Sweeper" is set against the dark background of child labor that was prominent in England in the late 18th and 19th century. At the age of four and five, boys were sold to clean chimneys, due to their small size. These children were oppressed and had a diminutive existence that was socially accepted at the time. In the earlier poem, a young chimney sweeper recounts a dream had by one of his fellows, in which an angel rescues the boys from coffins and takes them to a sunny meadow; in the later poem, an apparently adult speaker encounters a child chimney sweeper abandoned in the snow while his parents are at church or possibly even suffered death where church is referring to being with God.
LONDON
The poem was published during the French Revolution, and the city of London was suffering political and social unrest, due to the marked social and working inequalities of the time. The City of London was a town that was shackled to landlords and owners that controlled and demeaned the majority of the lower and middle classes. Blake describes 18th century London as a urban city with people who understood, with wisdom and depression, both the hopelessness and misery of their situation.
