M.A English (Literature and Linguistic)

1. BLAKE AS A SYMBOLIC POET
Blake is a highly symbolic poet and his poetry is rich in symbols
and allusions. Almost each and every other word in his poems is
symbolic. A symbol is an object which stands for something else
as dove symbolizes peace. Similarly, Blake’s tiger symbolizes
creative energy; Shelley’s wind symbolizes inspiration; Ted
Hughes’s Hawk symbolizes terrible destructiveness at the heart of
nature. Blake’s symbols usually have a wide range of meaning
and more obvious. Few critics would now wish to call Blake a
symbolist poet, since his handling of symbols is markedly different
from that of the French symbolistes’, but the world inhabited by
his mythical figures is defined through quasi-allegorical images of
complex significance, and such images are no less important in
his lyrical poetry. The use of symbols is one of the most striking
features of Blake’s poetry. There is hardly any poem in the
“Songs of Innocence and of Experience” which does not possess
a symbolic or allegorical meaning, besides its apparent or surface
meaning. If these poems are written in the simplest possible
language, that fact does not deprive them of a depth of meaning.
The language of these poems is like that of the Bible—at once
simple and profound as the following lines read: “O Rose, thou art
sick!” When Blake talks of the sick rose, he is really telling us how
mysterious evil attacks the soul. Flower-symbolism is of particular
importance in Songs of Innocence and Experience, being
connected with the Fall by the motif of the garden; and its
traditional links with sexuality inform the text of ‘The Blossom’ and
the design for ‘Infant Joy’, which are taken up in Experience by
the plate for ‘The Sick Rose’. ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’ is a more symbolic
text, and has evoked a greater variety of responses. Declaring
this to be one of ‘Blake’s supreme poems’, we can interpret the
flower as a man who ‘is bound to the flesh’ but ‘yearns after the
liberty of Eternity”. Harper claims that it describes the aspiration of
all ‘natural things’ to ‘the sun’s eternality’. Identifying the speaker
as ‘Blake himself. Blake travels from flower-symbolism to animal

2. symbols as in the ‘Tyger’: “Did he smile his work to see Did he
who made the Lamb make thee!” If the lamb symbolizes
innocence and gentleness, the tiger is to Blake a symbol of the
violent and terrifying forces within the individual man. The lamb,
innocent and pretty, seems the work of a kindly Creator. The
splendid but terrifying tiger makes us realize that God’s purposes
are not so easily understood, and that is why the question arises
“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” At the same time, the
tiger is symbolic of the Creator’s masterly skill which enabled Him
to frame the “fearful symmetry” of the tiger. But the lion described
in the poem Night (in the “Songs of Innocence”) offers an
interesting contrary to the tiger of the “Songs of Experience”. Both
the beasts seem dreadful, but the lion, like the beast of the fairy
tale, can be magically transformed into a good and gentle
creature: the tiger cannot. In the world of Experience the violent
and destructive elements in Creation must be faced and
accepted, and even admired. The tiger is also symbolic of the
Energy and the Imagination of man, as opposed to the Reason.
Blake was a great believer in natural impulses and hated all
restraints. Consequently he condemns all those who exercise
restraints upon others. He states in Holy Thursday II: “And their
ways are fill’d with thorns It is eternal winter there” The eternal
winter are symbolic of total destruction of the country and the
perpetual devastation and ‘Grey-headed beadles’ in ‘Holy
Thursday I’ are symbolic of authority and it is they exploit children
for their own material interests. In the poem London, oppression
and tyranny are symbolised by the king (who is responsible for
the soldier’s blood being shed), social institutions like (loveless)
marriage, and ‘”he mind-forged manacles”. Even further, personal
and social relationships have been symbolised as: “In the morning
glad I see My foe outstretched beneath the tree” A Poison Tree is
another allegory. The tree here represents repressed wrath; the
water represents fear; the apple is symbolic of the fruit of the
deceit which results from repression. This deceit gives rise to the
speaker’s action in laying a death-trap for his enemy. The deeper

3. meaning of the poem is that aggressive feelings, if suppressed,
almost certainly destroy personal relationships. On the surface,
however, the poem is a simple, ordinary story. Thus symbolism is
crucial to understanding Blake as poet of earlier romanticism.
What can be more symbolic than the following lines from,
‘Auguries of Innocence’? “To see a world in a grain of sand, And a
heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And
eternity in an hour” Thus, Blake’s poetry is charged with symbols.
He has depicted nature and human nature; animals and plants as
simple but profound symbols of powerful forces; “contrary states
of the human soul” – for example, good and evil, or innocence
and experience throughout his poetry. What is different in Blake is
that he is not modeling after any symbols but his own. The
symbols always have an inner relatedness that leads us from the
outer world to the inner man. The symbols live in the ordered
existence of his vision; the vision itself is entirely personal, in
theme and in the logic that sustains it. Blake is difficult not
because he invented symbols of his own; he created his symbols
to show that the existence of any natural object and the value
man’s mind places on it were one and the same. He was fighting
the acceptance of reality in the light of science as much as he
was fighting the suppression of human nature by ethical dogmas.
He fought on two fronts, and shifted his arms from one to the
other without letting us know—more exactly, he did not let himself
know. He created for himself a personality, in life and in art, that
was the image of the thing he sought. In short, it is established
that William Blake is a highly symbolic and even allegorical poet.
His use of symbolism is unique and cinematic. It paints a lively
and pulsating picture of dynamic life before us. Especially, the
symbolic use of ‘Sun-flower’ gets so much stamped on the mind
of the reader that it is difficult to forget it. He mentions a tiger it
becomes a symbol of God’s power in creation, his lamb turns out
to be a symbol of suffering innocence and Jesus Christ and his
tree is symbolic of anger and desire to triumph over enemies; the
dark side of human nature. Symbolism is the main trait of William

4. Blake as a dramatist as a poet and this has been well-crystallized
in his legendary work, ‘The Songs of Innocence and Experience’.