William Blake; The schoolboy Essay -- English Literature

William Blake; The schoolboy William Blake believed in freedom of speech, democracy and ‘free love’, for these reasons he disagreed strongly with formal education and conventional teaching in both schools and churches. He believed that this constrained people stopping them from having their own thoughts. Blake believed that children who were not given a formal education would want to learn off their own accord making learning more fun and enjoyable for the child. Blake portrays these opinions in the poem ‘The schoolboy’; which he chose to write in the voice of ‘the schoolboy’ himself, to stand up for children who’s views on schooling are rarely acknowledged. Blake’s decision to use a definite article in the title; ‘The schoolboy’ shows that the poem is a biographical piece about a specific schoolboy, and allows Blake to voice his own opinions as if they were that of a school child provoking more sympathy from the reader than would simply expressing his own views, therefore making his opinions on formal education more persuasive. The poem uses strong themes of nature throughout; the first verse describes a sense of harmony between the schoolboy and nature through a positive description of the sounds of the birds which the schoolboy awakes to hear. Pathetic fallacy is used relating the ‘summer’ morn to the schoolboy’s joy for being awoken in this way. The second verse starts with the conjunction ‘but’ to link the two verses, yet show the contrast in mood between them. This negative verse outlines the child’s dread of school and brings the reader back to reality after the dream-like feel to the first stanza. The line ‘under a cruel eye outworn’ suggests that the children are exhausted by school, personif... ...is used throughout the poem referring to the stages of a person’s life as the seasons in the year, the last stanza uses this metaphor to insinuate that a persons childhood is the most important time because if they don’t learn how to have fun in the spring of their life they will not know how to enjoy themselves in the summer of life. This makes the last line of the poem particularly effective ‘when the blasts of winter appear’ as people rarely think about how the way they live their childhood will effect their later lives, this rhetorical question makes the reader contemplate whether a formal education in an early life is worth facing the regrets it will cause them to live with in later life looking back upon few happy memories. And maybe learning the joys of life and how to live to the fullest is the most important lesson to be learned within childhood.