Extremely detailed A* essay plan page/summary for Blake's 'Songs of Experience: Holy Thursday'
Contains perceptive and nuanced assertions of high level context, language analysis, arguments and themes.
Undergraduate level analysis for A-Level English Literature Unit 3: Poetry, The Romantic Poets
Topic: Songs of Experience – William Blake
- Blake presents a speaker’s frustration and intolerance for unnaturally induced poverty
Themes/Context Literary/Dramatic Devices Techniques
of whole
poem
Malthuianism – ‘rich and fruitful’ – illusions to holy/biblical – they are also antithetical pairings like ‘cold and usurous’ - interrogative
‘reduc’d’ – diminishing verb in past participle, reverses natural growth of life poem
same year as lyrical
‘usurious hand?’ – meronymic – hand represents corruption of loaning money sleazily, implies something dishonest, feeding the babes only to - ballad (song-
ballads, huge fear like) quatrains
take something back later
populations would - Iambic
‘termbling’ – polysyllabic active adverb – echoes tremble literally, reproduces emotion tetrametre (also
starve ‘?’x3 – hermeneutics, trying to aestheticise/force positives onto the poor, tries to salvage/ compensate the grim reality song like)
Rousseau; ‘The ‘and their’x3 – anaphora compounding, catalogued misery, also shows it to be a universal experience, effecting countless people (condition - deceptively
Social Contract’ – cannot be endured anywhere) simple w/
“man is born free ‘does never shine’ – oxymoronic, creates sense of loss childish rhyme
and is everywhere ‘sun/shine’, ‘bleak/bare’ – alliteration of harsh plosives undermines potential harmony of sun and shine’s sibilance quality,
‘there.’ – fullstop indicates eternity, deliberately unspecific, void that constantly exists contrasted by a
in chains” – disconcerting,
society corrupts us ‘for where-e’er the sun does shine,/ and where-e’er the rain does fall:’ – natural bounty, plenitude, you can’t have babies starving in a resource
complex content
rich country so there has to be something unnaturally, institutionally wrong… The Social Contract
‘fall/ appall’ – (fall of man) – post-lapserian rhyme shows cause and effect/ action and consequence
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