Poets Poetry

Blake
Byron
Dickison
Jonson
Ralegh
Shelley

William Blake

1757-1827

Blake was a splendid graphic artist as well as a literary genius. After an early period of relatively unsophisticated lyrics, he produced visionary poems of remarkable scope and originality. His influence has increased steadily since his death, and among his literary descendants can be counted D. G. Rossetti, W. B. Yeats, and Allen Ginsberg.

Tiger

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when the heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

"The Tiger," from the celebrated Songs of Experience (1794), is indeed, a song of experience, vividly and memorably. Its powerful rhythm seems pounded out on an instrument of percussion, something that beats like a heart or a hammer, both of which are named in the poem. The mighty beast is the whole world of experience outside ourselves, a world of igneous creation and destruction. Faced with such terrifying beauty, the poet can only ask; the poem is nothing but one wondering question after another.

London

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls, 

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

from Songs of Experience "The Tiger" contains no "I" and no statements; "London" centers on an "I" and is nothing but statements in a strikingly original idiom that foreshadows surrealist combinations of sensory images.

Hear the Voice of the Bard

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past and Future, sees
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word,
That walk'd among the ancient trees. Calling the lapsed Soul
And weeping in the evening dew;
That might control
The starry pole;
And fallen, fallen light renew!

O Earth, O Earth, return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the Morn
Rises from the slumberous mass.

Turn away no more:
Why wilt thou turn away
The starry floor
The wat'ry shore
Is giv'n thee till the break of day.

-from Songs of Experience..Blake, recalling the ancient attribution of vatic powers and public duties to the bard-a specialized term retaining a Celtic dignity well into the nineteenth century, thanks to Thomas Gray's "The Bard" (1757) - placed this invocation at the beginning of Songs of Experience
 

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