Il concetto di simbolismo secondo William Blake scritto in inglese.
Blake's Symbolism
Blake’s famous symbols are children, flowers and seasons to symbolize innocence. Meanwhile, urban and industrial landscapes and machines represent oppression and rationalism, as we can see in the poem “London”, a powerful description of suffering brought by the Industrial Revolution.
His longer poems revolve around characters he has invented to represent certain positions towards existence. One of Blake’s most famous dual symbols and the one most closely linked with his reflections on the French Revolution is the Lamb/Tiger.
His “Lamb” is a symbol of the innocence of childhood. The childlike qualities of the Lamb refer also to the God of love and infinite forgiveness as incarnated in the baby Jesus. The figure of the poet can also be compared to that of the Lamb and the child.
The symbolism of Blake’s “Tyger” may refers to a geometrically perfect form. Bu to Blake this symmetry is awful because it embodies the contradictory and complementary forces of good and evil which are impossible to separate. Like the “Tyger”, freedom and revolution are at once glorious, because they are a kind of divine creative energy; and terrible, because they lead to death and horror. Like the Lamb, the Tyger is innocent and in a similar way the violence and destruction of the revolution are also innocent, like the destructive impulses of a child.
Blake did not turn away from the idea of Revolution towards nostalgia for an idyllic world of the past. He had no solutions to the Revolution’s contradictory forces of beauty and horror. For him the contradiction was itself the source of the Revolution’s vital energy. He chose simply to describe these forces without trying to resolve them harmoniously.
A world of imagination and vision
Blake is fundamentally dissatisfied with society, which lacks the power of imagination and uncorrupted feeling. He thinks that the poet possesses these powers. The true poet is a visionary who sees what remains hidden from ordinary mortals. Essentially Blake believes that subjective experience is more important than objective truth. In this he differs from most of the other Romantic poets. He was an opponent of scientific rationalism an of Newton in particular.
Stylistic features
Blake uses very simple syntax an vocabulary. This simplicity is made even more evident by the repetition of certain words and lines, as well as the regularity of stress patterns and rhyme schemes which give his poems a musical rhythm. However, the apparent simplicity of Blake’s verse is often misleading and masks complex argument and reflection, especially in the way the poems are interrelated.
Blake's Symbolism
Blake’s famous symbols are children, flowers and seasons to symbolize innocence. Meanwhile, urban and industrial landscapes and machines represent oppression and rationalism, as we can see in the poem “London”, a powerful description of suffering brought by the Industrial Revolution.
His longer poems revolve around characters he has invented to represent certain positions towards existence. One of Blake’s most famous dual symbols and the one most closely linked with his reflections on the French Revolution is the Lamb/Tiger.
His “Lamb” is a symbol of the innocence of childhood. The childlike qualities of the Lamb refer also to the God of love and infinite forgiveness as incarnated in the baby Jesus. The figure of the poet can also be compared to that of the Lamb and the child.
The symbolism of Blake’s “Tyger” may refers to a geometrically perfect form. Bu to Blake this symmetry is awful because it embodies the contradictory and complementary forces of good and evil which are impossible to separate. Like the “Tyger”, freedom and revolution are at once glorious, because they are a kind of divine creative energy; and terrible, because they lead to death and horror. Like the Lamb, the Tyger is innocent and in a similar way the violence and destruction of the revolution are also innocent, like the destructive impulses of a child.
Blake did not turn away from the idea of Revolution towards nostalgia for an idyllic world of the past. He had no solutions to the Revolution’s contradictory forces of beauty and horror. For him the contradiction was itself the source of the Revolution’s vital energy. He chose simply to describe these forces without trying to resolve them harmoniously.
A world of imagination and vision
Blake is fundamentally dissatisfied with society, which lacks the power of imagination and uncorrupted feeling. He thinks that the poet possesses these powers. The true poet is a visionary who sees what remains hidden from ordinary mortals. Essentially Blake believes that subjective experience is more important than objective truth. In this he differs from most of the other Romantic poets. He was an opponent of scientific rationalism an of Newton in particular.
Stylistic features
Blake uses very simple syntax an vocabulary. This simplicity is made even more evident by the repetition of certain words and lines, as well as the regularity of stress patterns and rhyme schemes which give his poems a musical rhythm. However, the apparent simplicity of Blake’s verse is often misleading and masks complex argument and reflection, especially in the way the poems are interrelated.
