protest against education and mental control

• blake criticises way education suppresses creativity + forces children into obedience, linking

  it to wider systems of control
• key poems

  the schoolboy

  infant sorrow

  infant joy
• ’i am but two days old’

  ‘i happy am,

  Joy is my name’

  assertion of identity paradoxically juxtaposed to lack of identity

  self-realisation + awareness of reality

  child can’t imagine sadness due to lack of experience + innocent views

  false sense of timelessness

  identifies happiness, indicates emergence of consciousness

  wishes for name to imitate it

  consciousness links to free will
• ’pretty joy!

  sweet joy’

  ‘sweet joy befall thee’

  joyful, innocent relationship

  caregiver singing to child= positive, idyllic image

  defined by name

  life denying selfishness of destructive act

  now bound to joy, not allowed to flourish
• ’my mother groaned, my father wept!

  into the dangerous world i leapt,

  helpless, naked, piping loud’

  realities of childbirth, pain

  father’s tears of joy? fear? inability to support family financially? for wife?

  still innocent, doesn’t know born into world of suffering

  vulnerable, defenceless

  link child to music
• ‘striving against my swaddling bands’

  feels oppressed

  vulnerability in inability to fight back due to lack of strength

  free movement restricted

  advocates for freedom

  bound to family + struggles
• infants protests

  burdened by circumstance

  pessimistic + realistic

  idealisation of parenthood

  can’t protect child form all, disempowering child

  things that comfort + protect also chain + trap us

  link to tiger + lamb

  those trying to protest eventually overwhelmed + shut down

  oppressed and constrained