Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake, the Lamb and the tyger.

Hie thee home wailing wights,

Here comes William Blakes

Put y’all in woe,

The shepherd’s sweet loot

Thy tongues shall fill with praise

Beware not to fall in his fiery blaze

Nineteen poems about innocence, full of glee and joy, talks about the birds and their songs, and how spring surely comes, heavenly delights awaits for he who remains in God’s pious lights, which burn bright even in darkest night.

So, done with the rhymes it is not easy, even the tiger breaks its own poem symmetry with that of its own fearful one. Twenty-six poems about experience with this of the tiger being the most iconic of all of Blake´s poems, in it he asks this question about God in regards of the tiger:

Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Innocence and Experience, the soul’s mythic contrasting states, Infant Joy in one, Infant Sorrow in the other, The Lamb and The Tyger.

wight (waɪt ):
noun
(archaic) a human being

hie (haɪ ): 
verb
Word forms: hies, hieing, hying, hied
(archaic or poetic) to hurry; hasten; speed

woe (wəʊ )
noun
(literary) intense grief or misery
(often plural) affliction or misfortune

wailing (ˈweɪlɪŋ)
noun
prolonged high-pitched cries, as of grief or misery

Archaic English in Songs of Innocence, William Blake

A DREAM

Once a dream did weave a shade
O’er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:

"Oh my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me."

Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, "What wailing wight 
Calls the watchman of the night?

"I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle’s hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!"


emmet (ˈɛmɪt )
noun
(British) an archaic or dialect word for ant
methinks (mɪˈθɪŋks ) or methinketh (mɪˈθɪŋkɪθ):
verb
Word forms: past tense methought
(transitive; takes a clause as object) (archaic) it seems to me

wight (waɪt ):
noun
(archaic) a human being

hie (haɪ ): 
verb
Word forms: hies, hieing, hying, hied
(archaic or poetic) to hurry; hasten; speed

this one is not archaic but I like it, so...

forlorn (fəˈlɔːn ):
adjective
1. miserable, wretched, or cheerless; desolate
2. deserted; forsaken
3. (postpositive) foll by of destitute; bereft ⇒ forlorn of hope

http://www.collinsdictionary.com/

Limerick in Slaughterhouse Five

Limerick, I have often heard this word and I know it was a poem of some sort, so today I found it again, looking for a book to read I read the first pages of Slaughterhouse Five, one of the banned books, which just caught my attention becuase it was once banned, and decided to record what this word really means, so here it goes.

Full Definition of limerick from Merriam-Webster

1. :  a light or humorous verse form of five chiefly anapestic verses of which lines 1, 2, and 5 are of three feet and lines 3 and 4 are of two feet with a rhyme scheme of aabba

so here is the limerick in Slaughterhouse Five

There was a young man from Stamboul,

Who soliloquized thus to his tool,

'You took all my wealth
And you ruined my health,

And now you won't pee, you old fool’

The writer tells about the writing of this book, how it costs him money, anxiety and time, thus, the parallel with this limmerick and the tools reference..

And since we are at it..

Full Definition of soliloquy from Merriam-Webster

1. 1:  the act of talking to oneself
2. 2:  a dramatic monologue that represents a series of unspoken reflections

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

   Poems are vehicles for grand thoughts in short lines, one does not need to read pages of scribbled lines to found oneself in awe, wondering deep and mysterious thoughts from a few simple stanzas, such is the power of poetry, and Blake’s prophetic style transports us through Heaven and Hell in this little yet charged book.

   He introduces the book by stating that without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. He claims this is The Voice of the Devil, and the Devil says that “Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body, and that Reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul this is an error, Man has no Body distinct from his Soul and those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer, or Reason, usurps its place and governs the unwilling”.

   The book is divided into nine small chapter, two poems and a few “Memorable Fancy´s” as he calls them, little histories where he remembers things like walking through Hell to collect the “Proverbs from Hell”, being in a Printing house there and seeing the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation, talking to angels and dining with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, where he asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them, to which Isaiah answered: ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discovered the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded, and remain confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.’ Then Blake asked: ‘Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?’ Isaiah replied: ‘All poets that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains’.

   So from this we can clearly see in a paradoxical way how Blake feels about writing as if he himself had walked through Hell, talked to Angels or Prophets from the Bible and such, because for him when it comes to poetry, poets should not bound their inspiration to a mere image of reality, because existence to them is infinite and thus so should be poetry.

   William Blake (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.

   If you want to get wiser read the Proverbs of Hell or hear a Declmation of it in spanish I recommend both at the same time.

Hello World... of Literature

Simple Definition of maneuver from Merriam-Webster

• : a clever or skillful action or movement
• : a planned movement of soldiers or ships