Two Poems by William Blake

"The School-Boy" evokes an image of carefree youth in summer right at the beginning of the poem:

And the sky-lark sings with me (1-3).

In this poem, the speaker identifies with the school-boy living in his time and reacting to his youthful life:

But to go to school in a summer morn,

Yet this speaker is an older man, for he talks of how "the little ones spend the day" (8), while he tells the reader that he (the poet) spends that time sitting and reading, unable to take delight in what he reads because he is thinking always of what the young

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s childhood, and his face turns "green and pale." The poem divides into two parts, with the first being an evocation of childhood in the day, while the second stanza turns to night. Again, the change from day to night brings out a sense of loss and the change from the innocence of childhood to the weariness and experience of old age. The voices of the children call to the poet and remind him of his youth--his face turns green and pale, as if that moment took him back to his own childhood and the time when he would have been playing on the green and whispering in the dale: The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, My face turns green and pale (3-4). In the second stanza, the poet seems to come to his senses and realize that time has passed. The sun has gone down, and he is calling the children home, calling back to himself the child that he once was. There is a bitter-sweet aspect to the admonishment he gives them in the last two lines: Your spring & your day are wasted in play, And your winter and night in disguise (7-8). The internal rhyme of line 7 links "day" with "play," and the spring of life is presented in this poem and in the other poem as a season of day. Winter is a season of night. The course of a year a
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Song School-Boy, Song Blake, Summer School-Boy, Play Blake, sense loss, summer morn, life cycle, green pale, , sweet company, regret lost, lost opportunities, childhood innocence, play spring, lost youth, Nurse's Song,
Approximate Word count = 1388
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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