英美文学：部分作家介绍和评论—William Blake

　　London

　　Taken from Songs of Experience.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.

　　It gives a comprehensive picture of the many miseries, physical and spiritual, in the English capital.

　　1. chartered--- to hire or rent for exclusive use A chartered street is a street that is rented out to some private company for exclusive use, or monopolized by it. Everything in this urban space--even the natural River Thames--submits to being "charter'd,".

　　2. the church and the palace--- institutions of power--the clergy, the government--are rendered by synecdoche, by mention of the places in which they reside.

　　3. "mind-forg'd manacles," ---more powerful than material chains could ever be.

　　4. . "Marriage hearse," ---a vehicle in which love and desire combine with death and destruction. Sexual and marital union--the place of possible regeneration and rebirth--are tainted by the blight of venereal disease. Thus the wedding is turned into a funeral.

　　The poem is written in quatrains, with alternate lines rhyming. Repetition is the most striking formal feature of the poem, and it serves to emphasize the prevalence of the horrors the speaker describes.

　　The Tiger

　　"The Tyger" consists entirely of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to awe at the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God's power, and the mysteriousness of divine will.

　　The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror?

　　Blake's tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world.

　　The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets. The meter is regular and rhythmic, its hammering beat suggestive of the smithy that is the poem's central image.

　　Questions:

　　1. What are the differences of The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience?

　　2. What are the characteristic of Blake’s poetry?

　　帖子地址：http://bbs.kaoyan.com/t2909456p1 转载请注明本帖地址。

　　※ 来源：考研论坛 bbs.kaoyan.com