William Blake - Infant Sorrow

"Infant Sorrow"

In William Blake's "Infant Sorrow," represents the disowning and denial at the birth of an unwanted child born into a dangerous world. Though the poem describes the mother and father, Blake also used many poetic devices and structure to bring out the meaning of his poem. The child is then born and change takes place when the baby enters the world. In the poem the speaker use past tense, therefore; the speaker is not an infant anymore. The poem documents a moment of birth, a historical moment in the revolutionary present when the inherited classified tradition. Blake refuses to choose between the text and the design, instead it presents a new imaginary possibility associated with the French Revolutionary era. It also, presents the hypothetical possibility of the non- dependency and no unification of the spoken and visual evidence.

In "Infant Sorrow," Blake explores the possibility that the two art forms may neither conflict either interact a possibility so radical of his own dialectic. Blake places the visual and verbal arts beyond relationship, and extends his creative range further than his critics have acknowledged. Blake's piece displays every plan available to the poet-painter. From a clear agreement between the text and design, through all the encounters of that dialectic Blake used.

No visual figure was equivalent to the verbal text, but Blake had devised a plate in which picture and text were equally selected. Each line delivered information would lead us not to expect. The infant is the only angry speaker of this poem. In "Infant Sorrow," "My mother groand! My father wept" (1), justifies that the father cried at the sight of his child because he know he will have to work harder to be able to support the child. The world "dangerous" (2) is being referred to the world, which was brought to the reader's attention because the infant was letting the reader know he was born into a cold and unfeeling world. The infant makes it very clear throughout the poem that the world is not comforting him, because now that the speaker is older, he had some experience with how dangerous the world actually is. "Into the dangerous world I leapt" (2) explains how the child pushed from his mother's womb as the infant leaped into the world. "Helpless, naked, piping loud" (3), he says before he explains why he the world weeps for him, but doesn't offer a comforting embrace and "Like a fiend hid in a cloud" (4) is saying the only comfort he found in this world was a cloud to hide behind. No one was there; the infant was invisible to the mother and father. The tone is very gloomy and malicious, because it contributes to a sense of hopelessness and misery the infant is going through. No one will ever hear the infants cry because the infant existence will only be included of unhappiness.

Throughout the first stanza of the poem, the infant refers to the world and reiterates the fact that the comforting embrace is not naturally meant to exist. The child is being neglected by the parents. The word choice made-up a depressing existence that caused the poem to have tension. The words chosen such as dangerous, helpless, loud, and naked were all used to describe the way the infant felt about being in the world. The birth of the infant was not a predicted birth, so therefore; he received an unwelcoming embrace from his parents. This text has been read as describing the fall of innocence into