Blake’s “The Song of Innocence and Experience” is based on the theme of the innocent pastoral world of childhood against the adult world of repression and corruption. In this poem, Blake stands outside innocence and experience and pits himself against restrictive morality, despotic authority, sexual repression, and institutionalized religion. The Songs of Innocence and Experience dramatizes the naïve fears and hopes that trace the children’s transformation from childhood to adulthood. Blake’s work beautifully contrasts with how adulthood’s harsh experiences destroy the good in the innocence of childhood. He has explained in his rhythmic song how the child’s ignorance of the night or the social evil is his innocence and when he begins to realize the things and the evils, happening in the surroundings, his innocence vanishes.
Blake’s work is perhaps of a radically different nature. However, Romanticism influenced his work; thus, he explained the beauty of childhood with the help of different rhythmic words. By highlighting the cheerful, joy, and smile of childhood, Blake has somewhere connected childhood with innocence in a most romantic way and finally, he has then shown the harsh experience of adulthood which has killed the innocence of childhood. This shows that Blake wants to convey how life changes when the child moves to adulthood and how the dark evils in terms of social evils affect his innocence. He has somehow used this song as a dual message. At one end, he has conveyed to the children how their innocence can be affected and how they can protect them. On the other hand, he conveys to adults that night can negatively impact their innocence, so they need to protect themselves from the evils of life.
Day 2:
Blake’s poem, Songs of Innocence and Experience, is a great work that uses different literary values. Most poets are more concerned with Romanticism, but Blake’s work differs greatly. Blake’s work includes questions about different aspects, such as the primacy of nature, the city, and the country, the quality of enlightenment achievement, the centrality of the child, the industrial revolution, and so on. In fact, concerning with the poem Songs of Innocence and Experience is also divided into two clear ambits: one part consists of a 19-poem collection based on Innocence and the second part consists of his work about the Experience. Both parts of this poem are interconnected. He picked up different elements from the Innocence part and then those elements were replied to in the Experience part of the poem.
Moreover, the first part of the poem, Innocence, was published before the French Revolution, whereas, the part, Experience, was published after the Terror Reign. Blake started his poem with a soft theme and rapidly converted it into violence, reflecting his shift from pessimism to optimism. The poems, “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” are his works, which represent his shift from innocence to ambiguity. Bake was basically living in an era when the British Industrial Revolution was at its peak and the children were used as a workforce. He was against this action and thus followed the ideals of the French Revolution in his poem. He basically wanted the people of his country to follow the same French revolutionary ideals and to stand against those who are destroying the innocence of children for their personal benefit.
Day 3:
Mary Wollstonecraft had done a great job for women’s rights; thus, she can be considered the mother of feminism. She was a groundbreaking novelist, philosopher, social critic, advocate of the Rights of Women, and travel writer in Britain. She stood for the Rights of Women and argued that men and women have equal access to education opportunities. She also participated in different debates to speak for the rights of women. She was the lady who also participated in the French Revolution and various education reforms.
In the 18th century, when men were treated with more love than women, Mary Wollstonecraft was the first to write for women’s rights and equality. This can also be seen in her writing because her insistence on men’s and women’s equality was the most persistent and controversial topic of her writing. It wouldn’t be wrong to consider her the rock star of the 18th century who wished to see women active and educated but she was not against men rather she just wanted to make women strong and educated and equal to men.
Day 4 Quiz:
Points:
Words 600
Day 5:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a great poet as well as a philosopher. He believed that strong imagination plays a vital role in transcending unpleasant circumstances. He also used the power of imagination in his poems, by which the speaker forgets about his surroundings and imagines the new fabricated experience. An example of Coleridge’s imaginative work is “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” In this poem, he discusses a poetic mind representing an imaginative journey that cannot be physically possible. Through this poem, he shows that imagination is a great strength no matter the circumstances. In the poem, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, the prisoner imagines the journey in which he enjoys the tree, shadows, and leaves, and by imagination, he completely forgets about his prison.
According to Coleridge, imagination is the strength of the poems, but imagination and fancy are two different things. Fancy is not creative rather imagination is creative in which the person imagines different things and then comes back to reality. Coleridge was fascinated by his works; thus, his work differed from the fancy he described as shaping power. He also invented the influential notion of “willing suspension of disbelief” which is related to the Romantics’ fascination with children because somewhere some children do not understand the realities and thus they love to remain in their imagination. This is the main theme in Coleridge’s poems, where he shows how children are imaginative rather than adults are realistic.
I believe Coleridge’s definition of a great poet is correct because, without imagination, one cannot use great words or feelings.
Day 6:
William Wordsworth was the great and famous poet of the English Romantic Revolution. His work was based on threefold. Firstly, he formulated a new attitude towards nature in his literature. He used to introduce the nature of his poetic verses in an amazing way that the connection between the human mind and nature, in his poetry, was appreciable. Secondly, he probed deeply into the sensibility, and the evidence of his fine work is his poem, The Prelude, which was an autobiographical poem. Thirdly, he created the greatest English poetry by placing human experience at the center. Thus, he did an incredible job in British literature and stood beside William Shakespeare. William’s work was based on memory, describing nature, the human mind, and sensibility, but his work was entirely different from the work of Coleridge who used imagination as the tool of his poetry. Most of his poems were imaginative and were far away from reality. However, both had done a great job in British Literature.
William Wordsworth did his best in British literature and worked with his fellows, Lord Byron, Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They all worked together because they lived in a Lake District of Cumbria in the 19th century. The Lake Poets used a similar theme in their poetry, especially towards children, and to Romanticism, they all had the same approach of radical political convictions and love of liberty. After the French Revolution, their love of liberty was converted into nationalism because they realized that the Church’s guiding forces and the constitutional monarchy of England were the only guarantors of freedom.
William Wordsworth was so simple in his poetic accent, and thus, he implied that any reader exposed to nature can understand the world’s secrets. His poetry used very simple sonnet forms to express his ideas, such as, “ I wandered lonely as a Cloud.” Simply Lake Poets were amazing in their ways.
Day 7:
William Most’s work was based on memory, and he was considered a writer with a simple accent. Most of his work was about nature and his childhood memories of trees, leaves, etc. However, when we go deep into his work and biography, it becomes clear that most of the work is based on his memories with his sister, Dorothy William. In his work, “Tintern Abbey,” he uses several phrases that clarify that Dorothy, his sister, is the main part of his memories. Dorothy was an excellent social worker, and thus, she posted several entries. When we compare Dorothy’s work with William’s work, it becomes clear that William reflects Dorothy’s work in his poems. His lines, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” are a clear indication of Dorothy’s lines that she saw daffodils near the river bed.
Then William married Mary Hutchinson and had a complete life. According to Mary, William Wordsworth and Dorothy, both, had writing work in the same direction. Both were working in a similar direction; thus, Dorothy had an entirely complicated personality. According to Mary, Dorothy was a woman who was an all-rounder, and she was the one who had helped her brother by all means.
Day 8:
Blake’s work is of different literary values. Concerning the poem Songs of Innocence and Experience, he has picked up different elements from the Innocence part, and then those elements were replied to in the Experience part. Blake’s poem, “The Lamb,” is his work, and it represents his shift from innocence to ambiguity. Bake lived when the British Industrial Revolution peaked, and the children were used as a workforce. He was against this action, and thus, he followed the ideals of the French Revolution in his poem. He wanted the people of his country to follow the same French Revolution ideals and to stand against those who are destroying the innocence of children for their benefit. Thus, in his work, a political message was hidden for the public to save innocent labor and give back the innocence to the children.
Not only Blake but also Lamb has done his work in the best way to motivate people to protect children’s innocence. In his poems, he also showed that children cannot carry the burden of earning and working like elders. The children are smaller and more innocent than we think. The people have considered them animals and have been using them as labor, which is quite unethical. So Lamb and Blake both were concerned about the innocence of the children and wanted to convey a political message to the public to save children and not use them as labor.
Day 9:
Shelley was not just a poet but a revolutionist who wanted to see everyone free from power. He discusses both the power of seen and unseen nature in his poetry. In his poetry work, there exist many stanzas which highlight his concern for power, such as;
“Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes Whatever it touches.”
According to him, power pollutes the environment and increases sins and evils, so no person has the right to act like a king, or as a powerful man rather everyone has the right to live his life with his wishes and style.
When reading “Prometheus Unbound,” Shelley unbounded the humanity and King, the God. In this work, he considered himself asking who has all the powers, from God, and stated,
“King of Kings Ozymandias am I.”
This line makes it clear that Shelley has represented himself as power. This reading is about the philosophy of life in which Shelly has considered himself as power and discussed that his works and power are perfect just like the Almighty God. Simply in his work, he wanted to convey to his reader that power does not make a man powerful rather it is an initiative of evil.
Quiz:
10 questions total (5 MCQs and 5 short questions)
Wrote 600 words.
Day 10:
Mary Shelly was a famous writer who had faced so many tragedies in her life. Especially she spent her life without her biological mother and thus she could understand the importance of creatures for the creation. Her reflections on her life experiences can also be seen in her writing. Her writing, Frankenstein, is so popular because of her concept of creation and creation. In this poem, Shelly discusses a mad scientist who invented a ghost-like creation. The creation felt lonely because it was different than the humans thus it demanded the scientist to create another creation like it. The scientist understood that creation does evils, and if the creation has a partner then reproduction may happen and this will become a threat to the society. In short, the theme is about science fiction in which the end reveals that creation is nothing with the creator and that is why, after the death of a scientist, creation disappeared because it considered that with the creator it cannot survive.
The main hero of this book, Frankenstein, is the scientist Victor because he is the one who invented a ghost creation, and then he controls the creation of evil for society. Also, he is the book’s hero because with Victor’s death, creation disappears, and the story ends.
Day 11
Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley, was a strong woman and a famous writer in the nineteenth century. She believed that females had a dominant role in society. However, she died exactly a few days after Mary’s birth so she could not transfer her thinking to Mary and this is what can be observed easily from her writing. Mary spent her life with her biological mother, which is why she was unable to understand the importance of the female role in her life thus in her novel, Frankenstein, she did not discuss the role of feminism in a highlighted way. Many female roles, such as Elizabeth Mrs. Saville, Justine, and Sadie, were discussed in the novel but no character played a prominent character. All the feminist roles were the passive characters, and the primary roles were Victor and his creation. Thus, in her writing, Mary did not believe in discussing women as a dominant character.
In the novel, Victor refuses to create a female monster just because he is aware of the evil actions of the monster and knows that if he creates any female monster then the creations will reproduce and this will greatly harm humanity.
Day 12
When reading the novel, Frankenstein, it is difficult to give the title of Hero to any character of the novel. Victor and his Creation are the two main characters of the novel. The creation cannot be titled a hero because it is an evil threat to humanity. A hero may be called an ideal personality, who guides something and does something a normal person cannot do. In this way, we can call Victor a Hero. No doubt he had been selfish and isolated, with no concern for the people around him, but the novel’s end has shown him as a hero.
Victor was the one who created a monster, which was his different invention. Later, when the monster demanded the female creation and started harming people, Victor understood that it was essential to stop the monster. Victor could create a female monster and could ruin humanity, but he took a step and thought that he would not do anything harmful to human beings. Somewhere, he knew that if he created a female monster, both creations would reproduce new monsters, creating evil in society. Thus, he went against the monster and finally died. Moreover, with his death, the creation disappeared which shows that creation was basically because of Victor thus he was the actual Hero of the Novel.
