O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
by William Blake
Analysis
The sick rose is about Blake’s belief about the city. City life corrupts human being, makes them become artificial and at the same time brings about moral decay. The rose here is a symbolic. It represents pride, artificial beauty which means people who are living in city are artificially sophisticated. It is because if we live in the city, we become sophisticated which is not nature and people behave artificially. The city represents corruption and materialism, exploitation and commercialization.
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 Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
by William Blake
Analysis
The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his observations. He sees despair in the faces of the people he meets and hears fear and repression in their voices. According to this poem, people living in the city happen to be corrupted. City life corrupts human being for example moral decay, prostitution, marriage institution, child labor, racism. People in the city acquire several characteristics that are not natural. Marriage is doomed because people are going out to look for sex. In the last stanza of the poem, the institution of marriage corrupts due to the prostitution, illegal affairs and the joy of parenthood also corrupted because of the broke down of family institution.
SONG OF INNOCENCE by WILLIAM BLAKE
HOLY THURSDAY
’Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walk’d before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow
O what a multitude they seem’d these flowers of London town
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among
Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door
ANALYSIS
The poem refer to a traditional Charity School service at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Ascension Day, celebrating the fortieth day after the resurrection of Christ. These Charity Schools were publicly funded institutions established to care for and educate the thousands of orphaned and abandoned children in London. The first stanza captures the movement of the children from the schools to the church, likening the lines of children to the Thames River, which flows through the heart of London: the children are carried along by the current of their innocent faith. It emphasizes their beauty and fragility and on the assumption that these innocence children are the city’s refuse and burden. Next the children are described as resembling lambs in their innocence, as well as in the sound of their little voices. As the children begin to sing in the third stanza, they are no longer just weak and mild; the strength of their combined voices raised toward God evokes something more powerful and puts them in direct contact with heaven.
The poem calls upon the reader to be more critical than the speaker is. We are asked to contemplate the true meaning of Christian pity. Moreover, the visual picture given in the first two stanzas contains a number of unsettling aspects: the mention of the children’s clean faces suggests that they have been tidied up for this public occasion; that their usual state is quite different. The public display of love and charity conceals the cruelty to which impoverished children were often subjected. Lastly, the tempestuousness of the children’s song, as the poem transitions from visual to aural imagery, carries a suggestion of divine wrath and vengeance.
SONG OF EXPERIENCE by WILLIAM BLAKE
HOLY THURSDAY
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine.
And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill’d with thorns.
It is eternal winter there.
ANALYSIS
In the poem “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence, Blake described the public appearance of charity school children in St. Paul’s Cathedral on Ascension Day. In this “experienced” version, however, he critiques rather than praises the charity of the institutions responsible for hapless children. The speaker entertains questions about the children as victims of cruelty and injustice, some of which the earlier poem implied. The rhetorical technique of the poem is to pose a number of suspicious questions that receive indirect, yet quite censoriously toned answers. This is one of the poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience that best show Blake’s incisiveness as a social critic.
In the first stanza, we learn that whatever care these children receive is minimal and grudgingly bestowed. The entire city has a civic responsibility to these most helpless members of their society, yet it denies this obligation. Here the children must participate in a public display of joy that poorly reflects their actual circumstances. In the first poem, the parade of children found natural symbolization in London’s mighty river. Here, however, the children and the natural world conceptually connect by a strikingly different set of images. The failing crops and sunless fields symbolize the wasting of a nation’s resources and the public’s neglect of the future. The thorns, which line their paths, link their suffering to that of Christ. They live in an eternal winter, where they experience neither physical comfort nor the warmth of love. In the last stanza, prosperity is defined in its most basic form: sun and rain and food are enough to sustain life, and social intervention into natural processes, which ought to improve on these basic necessities, in fact reduce people to poverty while others enjoy plenitude.
SONG OF INNOCENCE by WILLIAM BLAKE
The Chimney Sweeper
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so I said,
"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."
And so he was quiet; and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight, -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.
And by came an angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.
Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.
SONG OF EXPERIENCE by WILLIAM BLAKE
The Chimney Sweeper
A little black thing in the snow,
Crying "'weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father and mother? Say!"--
"They are both gone up to the church to pray.
"Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
"And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,
Who make up a heaven of our misery."
Islamic perspectives
Social problems or social issues are the crucial things that we are facing today. Due to the modernization, people becoming more materialistic. As a Muslim, it is good to be modern but there are some limitations in Islam which is called balance and propriety. Propriety means proper in terms of manner and the right things to do or to wear. In Islam, we must be moderate because Islam is a moderate religion where everything must be on balance (tawazun). Balance in Islam observes the balance between life and value, wealth and enjoyment, knowledge and action, and relation to Allah swt and to human.
Allah swt created us as a khalifah according to His purposes on this earth as a Muslim and we have a freedom to choose whether to be good or bad. With the ‘Aqal given by Allah swt, we can think our niyyah’ and the consequences of our action before committing something.
Modernity is a product advocating Western values including individualism, secularism and materialism. The global culture is chaotic rather than orderly culture because of self empowerment, sexuality, music, money, freedom, drugs, and rejection of heritage. Unlike culture in Islam, the Western culture is not governed by social and religious constraints. As a Muslim, we should focused and chased on the knowledge that Allah swt has encouraged us to seek because the balance is also observed between the demands of this life and the preparations for the Hereafter as in Allah swt said in Surah Al-Qasas : 77
“But seek, with that (wealth) which Allah has bestowed on you, the home of the Hereafter, and forget not your portion of lawful enjoyment in this world.”
