William Blake came just before the romantic poets and many consider him to be the first romantic poet. There is a debate whether he was a romantic or not, but there is no doubt that he used nature a lot in his poetry. In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, we can see the natural setting in many of the poems. He even used natural symbols to convey his message.
In Songs of Innocence poems, nature is mild or subdued. Nature is not evil there but is friendly and somewhat beautiful. It is the creation of God and God helps people with nature.
In Songs of Experience, we find perhaps the opposite concept. There, nature is not so friendly and sometimes it is frightening. Here, it should be stated that Blake was also an engraver and he had a good hand in painting. So, he was good at painting pictures, and thus, he had a good understanding of nature and natural objects. He had the mind to see deeper into nature and had the imagination of both a poet and a painter or artist. This imagination is important because when he tried to write about nature we can find that he could write more than the five senses of humans can comprehend.
The concept of God is important in William Blake’s poetry. He tried to search for God. So, his poems and nature are the expressions of God. So, we can find that God created lamb and at the same time God created tiger. There is beauty and harmony in nature. But there is also cruelty and evil in nature.
To Blake, nature is a part of the world and part of good and evil. Nature is sometimes violent and cruel but at the same time nature is beautiful and nature can bring harmony to the mind of people. By looking at nature, we come closer to God and we can get nearness to God.
We know that the romantic poets also used nature as the central theme. If we look at Songs of Innocence and of Experience, we can perhaps say that nature is the central theme of these poems rather than childhood and social justice is. Blake is more concerned with the suffering of children and also the suffering of people in society. However, Blake does not run away from nature or totally avoids nature. Instead, he finds that there is a lot of need for people to be closed to nature because there is beauty and harmony in nature. From this point of view, some people may think that Blake was almost a romantic poet.
On the other hand, Blake had some anti-romantic elements in his treatment of nature. As I have already said that Blake’s central theme was social justice and the suffering of the children, not nature. He is not in love or he is not a worshiper of nature like Wordsworth is. He just showed that nature is a part of human life but perhaps not the most important part. Sometimes, it is confusing because, on the one hand, Blake does not seem to have given too much emphasis on nature in the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience. But on the other hand, he has frequently used natural symbols over and again.
In conclusion, we can say that Blake was fond of nature, but like Wordsworth or other romantic poets, he was not totally fond of it. He realized the importance of nature in human life, but he stopped well short of other romantic poets in depicting the value of nature in human life.
No comments:
Post a Comment