In this paper I’m going to compare two poems from two different authors. One poem is from William Blake “The Chimney Sweeper” and the other is from Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring and Fall - to a young child”.

First of all, we have to point out that these two authors belong to different periods, William Blake is grouped with the Romantics and Gerard Manley Hopkins with the Victorians. So, we are going to show a bit of their life and the period they lived in.

William Blake (1757-1827) was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century. He joined for a time the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in London and considered Newtonian science to be superstitious nonsense. Misunderstanding shadowed his career as a writer and artist and it was left to later generations to recognize his importance.

William Blake was born in London, where he spent most of his life.

At the age of 14 Blake was apprenticed for seven years to the engraver James Basire. Gothic art and architecture influenced him deeply. After studies at the Royal Academy School, Blake started to produce watercolors and engrave illustrations for magazines.

However, being early apprenticed to a manual occupation, journalistic-social career was not open to him. In 1789 Blake wrote “The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Innocence).

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wblake.htm

As an intellectual and aesthetic phenomenon, Romanticism dominated cultural thought from the last decade of the 18th century well into the first decades of the 20th century.

Romanticism, more than anything else, is the cult of the individual--the cultural and psychological nativity of the I--the Self--the inner spark of divinity that links one human being to another and all human beings to the Larger Truth. In poetry, visual art, and music, artists became increasingly preoccupied with articulating the personal experience that becomes, in turn, a representative one. The Poet--the artist in all his various incarnations--takes on quasi-religious status not only as prophet and moral leader, but also as a divinely inspired vehicle through which Nature and the common man find their voices.

Concern for the common man, for the Romantics, evolved not only from the democratic ideologies of the Age of Revolution, but also from a renewed interest in folk culture. While the search to preserve the stories, songs, legends, and verse was born, in part, from a nationalistic impulse, the Folk Movement conversely became the conduit for an international language of human commonality, at whose center stood the images of home and the heart.

In aesthetic terms this individuality translated into the revolution of feeling against form--the rejection of classical equipoise in favor of Romantic asymmetry. Romantic poets, painters, and musicians ceased struggling to make the expression fit conventional forms and boldly carved out new forms to encase their expression and thought. Ever-striving, ever in flux, the Romantic Soul required an equally dynamic new language to make itself understood.

For the Romantic, Nature was, indeed, a constant companion and teacher--both benign and tyrannical. She became the stage on which the human drama was played, the context in which man came to understand his place in the universe, the transforming agent which harmonized the individual soul with what the Transcendentalists would call the Over-Soul. Throughout all of Romantic literature, music, and art, Nature is a dynamic presence, a character who speaks in a language of symbols at once mysterious and anthropomorphic. who engages man in a dialogue with the life-force, itself.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/icon/romanticism.html

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins is regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets.

In 1864, Hopkins first read John Henry Newman's Apologia pro via sua, which discussed the author's reasons for converting to Catholicism. Two years later, Newman himself received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church. Hopkins soon decided to become a priest himself, and in 1867 he entered a Jesuit novitiate near London. At that time, he vowed to "write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors." Hopkins burnt all of the poetry he had written to date and would not write poems again until 1875.

He died from typhoid fever. Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet Robert Bridges edited a volume of Hopkins' Poems that first appeared in 1918.

In addition to developing new rhythmic effects, Hopkins was also very interested in ways of rejuvenating poetic language. He regularly placed familiar words into new and surprising contexts. He also often employed compound and unusual word combinations. As he wrote to in a letter to Burns, "No doubt, my poetry errs on the side of oddness…" Twentieth century poets such as W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Charles Wright have enthusiastically turned to his work for its inventiveness and rich aural patterning.

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/284

For much of this century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed connotations of "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that was a second English Renaissance. Victorian England saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture.

The Victorians invented the modern idea of invention -- the notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new means of bettering himself and his environment and it was a great age of doubt, the first that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale.

The Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist and they created astonishing innovation and change: democracy, feminism, unionization of workers, socialism, Marxism and other modern movements took form. In fact, this age of Darwin, Marx, and Freud appears to be not only the first that experienced modern problems but also the first that attempted modern solutions. Victorian, in other words, can be taken to mean parent of the modern -- and like most powerful parents, it provoked a powerful reaction against itself.

The Victorian age was not one, not single, simple, or unified, only in part because Victoria's reign lasted so long that it comprised several periods. Above all, it was an age of paradox and power. The Catholicism of the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical movement, the spread of the Broad Church, and the rise of Utilitarianism, socialism, Darwinism, and scientific Agnosticism, were all in their own ways characteristically Victorian; as were the prophetic writings of Carlyle and Ruskin, the criticism of Arnold, and the empirical prose of Darwin and Huxley; as were the fantasy of George MacDonald and the realism of George Eliot and George Bernard Shaw.

More than anything else what makes Victorians Victorian is their sense of social responsibility, a basic attitude that differentiates them from their immediate predecessors, the Romantics.

http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/victorian/vn/victor4.html

Now, we are going to study Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “ Spring and Fall – to a young child” and we are going to compare it too with William Blake’s poem “The Chimney Sweeper”.

Spring and Fall:

to a Young Child

   Margaret, are you grieving
   Over Goldengrove unleaving?
   Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
   Ah! as the heart grows older
   It will come to such sights colder
   By and by, nor spare a sigh
   Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
   And yet you will weep and know why.
   Now no matter, child, the name:
   Sorrow's springs are the same.
   Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
   It is the blight man was born for,
   It is Margaret you mourn for.

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw29.html

The chimney-sweeper
William Blake (1757-1827)

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 let 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

http://poemaseningles.blogspot.com/2006/04/william-blake-chimney-sweeper.html

In the poem we see that the autor asks a question to a child called Margaret and he says: “Margaret, are you grieving? – Over Goldengrove unleaving?”. What the author wants to reflect is that the little girl is saddened because winter has come and the forest is dying, and as she is still a child she doesn’t understand that these things happen. She is so innocent that she is worried about the leaves and about “the things of man”: (the appurtenances of man become the exemplar for nature) because of her “fresh thoughts” (innocent thoughts). She is in a very hard moment because of the falling leaves (that represent the death), a moment that all people have to understand because all of us have to experience it. Then, her father tells to her daughter that as soon as she gets older she will continue to experience such griefs but not of this type. Here he is talking about mortality, he is giving her daughter the lesson of life. What is reflected is that people are born to die and that when she would have more knowledge, then she would still experience more horrible things like death. But now she is saddened for her innocence lost.

This poem has a lyrical rhythm, which is appropriate to address to a child.

In "Spring and Fall", Hopkins demonstrates a separation between humanity and nature and a separation between humanity and God. His use of imagery and his sympathetic tone allows the readers to make both distinctions and similarities between adult and child, nature and man, and conscious and intuitive knowledge.

http://courses.wcupa.edu/fletcher/britlitweb/aabramsb.htm

If we compare this topic with Blake, we see that for Blake God only has meaning because of our humanity, for him is an allusive fabrication of the human mind. For him, we see God as our relationship with our parents: parents say “don’t do this” and we do the same with God.

So, the reality that we see is only a mental construction ,we see what we believe. Only were our imaginations would act in a free way, then we would see the divinity.

The distinction and similarity between child and adult is quite clear in this poem. Both make the point that there is no spiritual spring of innocence. "Fall" has been the only season from birth, and will remain so until the final fall of death. Also, both are subject to fall, but in nature’s seasons spring will come again. His sympathetic tone portrays his priesthood, and his imagery portrays his poetic abilities.

http://courses.wcupa.edu/fletcher/britlitweb/aabramsb.htm

Comparing it, for Blake the world of child-like people is the world of ”Innocence”, and he is interested in the mental state of these people, the way they look at the world. So, for him, what makes something a world of innocence is the point of view.

Adulthood may bring an end to the grief of nature’s autumns, but it will not bring an end to tears and sorrow. "A’h! a’s the heart grows o’lder / It will come to such insights colder / By and By, nor spare a sigh / Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; / And yet you will weep and know why" (lines 5-9). The use of alliteration helps to emphasize the ultimate reality of this child’s pain. The tone becomes stronger and less sympathetic. …"yet you will weep and know why"(line 9), is both the child’s and Hopkins's recognition of mortality.

There is a big contrast between Hopkin’s poem and Blake’s poem because the child in “Songs of Innocence” lives in a world of innocence, he thinks that God and the angels protect him if he does his duty, he doesn,t faces the real world, and in Hopkin’s poem little Margaret experiments a phase of the development of human beings, she understands death and loss, and this is represented with the falling leaves. We are seeing the Victorian sense of social responsibility. For Hopkins, humans can approach God and learn about him.

Blake is showing the benefits and limitations of the world of Innocence, and it’s all about point of view, about a state of mind. It’s a world of spontaneity, of imaginative children where people are linked to protective figures that protect them. They are imaginative but they imagine what they have been taught. But as this world has some limitations, it’s not Blake’s ideal. In Hopkin’s poem “ Spring and Fall” we see the same situation, a child that is in the world of Inocence too, but she is beginning to understand a stage that all the people has to pass, loss and mortality. Hopkins sees the environmental crisis of the Victorian period linked to the spiritual crisis of that era.

http://courses.wcupa.edu/fletcher/britlitweb/aabramsb.htm

The final couplets offer an accurate depiction of the poem’s true meaning. "It is’ the bli’ght ma’n was bo’rn for, / It is Margaret you mourn for" (lines 14-15 Norton). Nature’s silent eloquence of death has caused Margaret to intuitively realize that there are other sources of death and grief, not life. (153 Ellis) It is almost as though she comes to terms with her spirit of adulthood and fate. This could also be a way of Hopkins coming to terms with his mortality.

http://courses.wcupa.edu/fletcher/britlitweb/aabramsb.htm

What makes Hopkins in the poem “Spring and Fall” is to “confer a mask” of mortality upon the face of a young child’s sorrows”. The paradoxical result is that speaker threatens to make himself into a ghost haunting Margaret’s life — one who overreaches in his attempt to have Margaret realize what only he can express: death is all. The force of the speaker’s final verdict indicates how it is his outlook, rather than Margaret’s, that is no more alive than “wanwood leafmeal.” In doing so, the poem gets further and further away from an immediate response to nature, and closer and closer to the reflexive tropes of self-consciousness. Hopkins offers a striking verdict on this movement: the mind which takes itself as an object of though ultimately becomes its own ghost. By contrast, the figurative turning of phrases like “Goldengrove unleaving” or “Sorrow’s springs” points to the ever-present potential for language to regenerate the formative contradiction between hope and despair, and in doing so refurbish the possibility of a spiritual Spring after the physical Fall.

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/block.html

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/block.html

http://courses.wcupa.edu/fletcher/britlitweb/aabramsb.htm

http://poemaseningles.blogspot.com/2006/04/william-blake-chimney-sweeper.htm

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw29.html

http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/victorian/vn/victor4.html

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/284

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wblake.htm

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/icon/romanticism.html

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/hopkins12.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_era

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_blake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins