William Blake
Awake,
awake, my little boy!
Thou wast thy mother's only joy;
Why dost thou weep in thy gentle sleep?
Awake! thy father does thee keep.
'O, what land is the
What are its mountains, and what are its streams?
O father! I saw my mother there,
Among the lilies by waters fair.
'Among the lambs, clothèd
in white,
She walk'd with her Thomas in sweet delight.
I wept for joy, like a dove I mourn;
O! when shall I return again?'
Dear child, I also by pleasant streams
Have wander'd all night in the
But tho' calm and warm the waters wide,
I could not get to the other side.
'Father, O father! what do we here
In this land of unbelief and fear?
The
Above the light of the morning star'
Source:
http://www.online-literature.com/blake/620/
Reading the title I think of a paradise, where the
dreams and desires could be real, where the dreams can come true.
A place somewhere in the world where people are always happy
and there are no problems for anybody.
Here it is
very important that there are two persons talking, and we do not know if the
poet is one or the other. There are two points of view, the boy and the father,
and we do not realise very well what the poet wants to say, unless you read the
poet a couple of times at least.
I have read the poem three times
and then, I started to analyse it.
The main idea of that poem is
thinking about a better world, and better persons, but this world does not
exist, it is only a dream or a fantasy.
The
vocabulary is easy to understand, and the entire poem is simple.
The structure is simple, too. The poem is divided into five
stanzas, each one formed by four verses.
On the first
stanza the father is waking up his son. We can see marks of Old English, in
line two: “thou” that means “you”, and “thy”; and in line three: “thou”. Here
in this stanza the father is waking up his son from his beautiful dream. In
line four, there are the possessives “thy” and “thee”.
On the second
stanza the boy asks his father what is that land he is talking about. The boy
says he had seen her mother, so we could deduce that she has died and she is in
the land of dreams, where he and his father goes on their dreams at nights.
The little
boy continues talking to his father in the third stanza. He describes the
situation when he watched his mother, and his feelings at that moment.
In fourth stanza, again is the
father talking to his son. He tells his son that he has been in the land of
dreams too, but he cannot stay in there.
Finally, in
the fifth stanza, the boy asks his father what are they doing living in the
real world, and that when they go to sleep and go in their dreams all is better
and they are very happy, because all is better there.
That poem
talks about a better world, some place only in dreams that is the best place of
the world.
The poet, in my opinion, is both
the child and the man. It is the illusion of a better world VS the reason and
knowledge of real life in a real world, with problems, wars and bad people. The
father has his feet on the Earth, and the children are the innocence and dreams
about having a better life, with his mother and with no corruption or fears.
I like this
poem because it has two points of view, two perspectives of life and how to
confront problems of real life. I liked the conversation between father and
son, and their opposition of ideals of life.