The Romantic Era was an interesting time in regards to British Literature.
Romanticism represented conflict between nature and science during the age of the
Enlightenment. Poets like William Blake, helped expose issues among scientific and
technical advances in regards to the natural world.
Ultimately, Blake tries to tell the audience that with the growth of science and reason,
nature and innocence is lost itself. Blake also attempts to illustrate the importance and
connection of innocence in comparison to scientific reasoning. Other romantic poets such as
William Wordsworth used his literary gift to expose the same beliefs: humans should not try and
simplify nature thus destroying the beauty and mysterious aspects of it. The goal of the
Romantics was to stop the influx of reasoning since it blocked creativity
and emotion. Religion was also broken down and frowned upon by rationalists as well.
In his Auguries of Innocence, Blake attempts to show the the correlation between nature
and the new world of reasoning. He begins the poem with religious imagery as we see in lines
one and two , “To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower” . Of course we
can not actually view the world in such a way or see heaven in any type of flower, but, his goal
here is to force the reader to think creatively without humanizing the beauty of the world.
Blake illustrates the paradox of humanity throughout the mid section of the poem. He
places everything in an equal playing field, “The Prince’s robes and beggar’s rags are toadstools
on the miser’s bags” (51,52). Part of humanity is dealing with the ups and downs of life, and if
you break down life itself, and analyze every part of it, what you are left with is a very robotic
and heartless conclusion about the world, as he states in lines fifty six fifty seven and fifty eight,
“Man was made for joy and woe; and when this we rightfully know, thro' the world we safley go.
Most poets during the romantic era were in love, and in this case, Blake was in love with nature
and life itself.
Blake’s choice of using paradoxes was very effective in that, it would have gotten the
radical thinker to see things in a different light. For example, in lines ten and eleven, ‘ dog
starv’d at his masters gate predicts the ruin of the state”. when one reads about a starved dog
in such context their natural humanistic response is to feel bad for the animal. However, what
Blake is actually trying to do is create feeling which new thinkers of the Enlightenment
suppressed. When someone thinks of a starved dog they automatically feel sympathy for the
animal. Although, here, Blake is not actually talking about a dog, that dog is in fact a person of
lower class rank and their employer, landlord, etc, is the state refusing to have human empathy
upon them.
To Blake everything has a cause an effect, and fate ultimately has control over human
lives. His beliefs are almost similar to Buddha’s Eye for an Eye; “The wanton boy that kills the
fly shall feel he spider’s enmity” (33, 34). I do agree with Blake in that there should be some
things left for the imagination and not everything must have a logical background. life is all
about learning, we all have our good days and bad days, and usually we learn an important life
lesson that a book of reasoning could not have taught us. This makes more than enough sense in
my contemporary life, for example, one can’t be so serious all the time. There is time for
education and reality, but, one must not forget their emotional needs. One of the biggest
paradoxes I have seen when it comes to human life is in regards to love. love can be either the
greatest joy in life or the most painful. We torture ourselves with such pain and sorrow because we are emotional creatures.
In William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, he bring up a lot of valid arguments through his use of imagery. One can not suppress their feelings, thus, meaning scientific reason won’t satisfy the human soul.
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