Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The atheism debate, 1780–1800
- 2 Masters of the universe: Lucretius, Sir William Jones, Richard Payne Knight and Erasmus Darwin
- 3 And did those feet? Blake in the 1790s
- 4 The tribes of mind: the Coleridge circle in the 1790s
- 5 Whatsoe'er is dim and vast: Wordsworth in the 1790s
- 6 Temples of reason: atheist strategies, 1800—1830
- 7 Pretty paganism: the Shelley generation in the 1810s
- Conclusion
- Glossary of theological and other terms
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
3 - And did those feet? Blake in the 1790s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The atheism debate, 1780–1800
- 2 Masters of the universe: Lucretius, Sir William Jones, Richard Payne Knight and Erasmus Darwin
- 3 And did those feet? Blake in the 1790s
- 4 The tribes of mind: the Coleridge circle in the 1790s
- 5 Whatsoe'er is dim and vast: Wordsworth in the 1790s
- 6 Temples of reason: atheist strategies, 1800—1830
- 7 Pretty paganism: the Shelley generation in the 1810s
- Conclusion
- Glossary of theological and other terms
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
The openings of William Blake's two best-known poems seem to affirm his strong religious belief in an all-powerful creator-God and a universally redeeming Christ respectively. And yet grammatically these openings are questions, which remain unanswered throughout the remainders of their respective poems. ‘The Tyger’ simply piles up further questions, bringing out the apparent impossibility of creating the terrifyingly alive tiger as if it were some piece of machinery, and the lyric best known as ‘Jerusalem’ only answers its opening questions by resolving to realize their vision in a future when we will indeed have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.
Repeatedly with Blake's poetry, passages which sound and feel direct and simple instantly develop complexities of this or other kinds when we ask ourselves either what they literally mean or what he means by saying them. In current language, his poetry is immensely ‘dialogic’: engaged in often impassioned debate with positions we can only glimpse via the stance Blake adopts towards them.
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- Information
- Romantic AtheismPoetry and Freethought, 1780–1830, pp. 80 - 121Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000