universal suffering + social decay

• blake shows how everyone suffers

  all of society is spiritually + emotionally degraded by oppression
• key poems

  london

  human abstract

  earth’s answer
• human abstract key ideas

  humanity is good

  spoiled by society + experience

  man hands on misery to man

  concept of original sin, humans are flawed from beginning

  see pain in all poems

  lack of certainty for future
• ’pity would be no more

  if we did not make somebody poor’

  critique of church + social hierarchy

  no need for charity or to pity others if we were all equal in terms of money + status

  comparison is they thief of joy

  can’t be happy in no one is less happy than you
• ’and mercy no more could be

  if all were happy as we’

  no need for charity if not poverty

  no need for mercy if people are happy

  idea of equal in power, no one indebted

  debt= forced gratitude

  form of power
• ’mutual fear brings peace,

  till the selfish loves increase’

  mutually assured destruction

  annihilation of both sides ensures no war

  true peace can’t be bred out of fear

  should be love + understanding

  climate of fear

  disrupted by selfishness
• ‘cruelty knits a snare’

  affinity for humanity to fall into trap of cruelty due to selfishness

  idea of temptation leading to damnation
• ’with holy fears,

  and waters the ground with tears’

  ‘humility takes root’

  upper class’ inauthenticity

  christian idea of charity

  entrap people w/ cruelty, humility as bait

  wrong type of humility as grew from fear due to cruelty

  undermining, false humility

  those oppressed must be humble
• ’bears the fruit of deceit’

  ‘raven his nest has made in its thickest shade’

  garden of eden

  tempting yet poisonous fruit grown from sin

  symbolically fruit of humility is a lie

  oppressive view of tree bearing fruit w/ shade produced

  bird of ill-omen lurks ominously in shade of tree

  associated w/ death
• ‘there grows one in the human brain’

  tree sought out by gods, impossible to find as it’s bred by humanity

  evil that man creates takes root in own brain

  springs from humility but watered by cruelty after falling into its snare

  humility= suppressing onself
• human abstract protest

  society oppresses people but it’s nurtured by human nature

  creat + perpetuate oppression + suffering by charitable organisations

  how structures of society destroy individuals
• ’earth rais’d up her head

  from the darkness dread and drear…

  and her locks cover’d with grey despair’

  earth personified, as woman

  becomes part of darkness

  shows age, distress + ’stony’ nature

  equates to death
• ‘break this heavy chain…

  selfish! vain!

  eternal bane!

  that free love with bondage bound’

  wrong to place strictures on love

  love seen as evil + is repressed

  physical + mental constraint
• ‘starry jealousy does keep my den’

  god as tyrant

  image of repression

  imprisoned earth, unable to awaken

  imprisonment represents something of nature of mortality
• ’selfish father of men…

  can delight

  chain’d in night

  the virgins of youth and morning bear’

  god as creator controlling humans opposed to earth as inherently sinful, dominates feminine

  system= jealous/fearful of what humans can become when free