Blake’s key themes are religion (verses from his poem Milton furnished the lyrics for the patriotic English hymn ‘ Jerusalem’), poverty and the poor, and the plight of the most downtrodden or oppressed within society. He is not a ‘nature’ poet in the same way that his fellow Romantics are: he seldom writes with the countryside in mind as his principal theme, but draws on, for instance, the rich symbolism of the rose and the worm to create a poem that is symbolically suggestive and clearly about other things (sin, religion, shame, cruelty, evil). The other lines vary somewhat from this base form. The stresses, more often than not, shift places in the lines. For example, the first two syllables of the poem are stressed, creating a spondee. While in the second line, the first two syllables form an iamb. The first is unstressed and the second is stressed. Another interesting example is the fourth line. The line begins with two unstressed syllables and is then followed by one stressed, one unstressed, and one final stressed syllable.

The writing is informative and impeccably researched, delving into the gruesome history of anatomical study in a professional manner that walks the tightrope between sensationalistic indulgence of morbid fascination on the one side, and overly clinical jargon designed to emotionally distance the reader on the other. THE GROTESQUE FACTOR FUNDACIóN MUSEO PICASSO MáLAGA/LEGADO PAUL, CHRISTINE Y BERNARD RUIZ-PICASSO ISBN: 9788494024924Hence, the design expressed by Blake has also been construed as having sexual allusions. Its subject is copulation. Based on Freudian psychoanalysis, the rose can be deemed as the feminine and the worm as male. These representations, or the scheme following them, blend concealed feelings of offensiveness and harsh reprimand, culpability and coercion. These emotions of shyness are in fact associated with sexual understanding particularly in the adolescent psyche. The earliest years of what would become modern medicine were remarkable in the lengths these 'Resurrectionists' went to in obtaining corpses for study. Doctors functioning under the influence of dangerously obsessive desires, be they purely for intellectual enlightenment and eventual renown, or something far more perverse, created a dark and ugly industry... and in 18th and 19th century Europe, that's really saying something. This would tally with the fact that the worm harbours a ‘dark secret love’ for the rose: is the worm guilty of jealous love for the rose, whose beauty and ‘joy’ it envies? Is this a version of Nietzschean ressentiment, or Oscar Wilde’s statement that ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’? Or perhaps the sort of thing we encounter in another William Blake poem, ‘A Poison Tree’? William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the key English poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is sometimes grouped with the Romantics, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, although much of his work stands apart from them and he worked separately from the Lake Poets. This might explain the ‘howling storm’ in which the worm ‘flies’: the turbulent emotions and turmoil generated by resenting and hating that which one loves, conflicted desire and disgust.

The libidinal characters in the juvenile mind are regularly deterred and censored due to social exclusion and fallacy. The worm, to go with this scheme, is appropriately portrayed as ‘invisible’ and it ‘flies in the night’. The worm is animate and dynamic at night: and this allusion to night hints at the confidentiality of the thing as well as its catastrophic brunt.

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It’s hard, maybe impossible at this great remove to truly appreciate a pre-photography world. It’s like trying to imagine a world where the only way to experience music was to hear it live. Blake's prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the language". His visual artistry has led one modern critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced." Although he only once travelled any further than a day's walk outside London over the course of his life, his creative vision engendered a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced 'imagination' as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself". In form and language, Blake’s poetry can appear deceptively simple. He is fond of the quatrain form and short lines (usually tetrameter, i.e., containing four ‘feet’). But his imagery and symbolism are often dense and complex, requiring deeper analysis to penetrate and unravel their manifold meanings.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.The howling storm is an interesting image at this point in the piece. By adding this tidbit about the setting, it is clear Blake wants the reader to know that the worm is able to make it through dangerous conditions. It can find the rose whenever it wants to. Perhaps this has something to do with its invisibility. A feature that is also be linked to its ability to get close to the worm. It might not seem like such danger at first. William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake's work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts. Perhaps, though, the shame is not the result of some evil desire or deed but of Christian indoctrination: especially during Blake’s own time, sexual desire was viewed with suspicion and shame by many, as a result (in large part) of Christian teaching, which taught that it was sinful unless it took place within marriage (and, in many teachings, purely for the purpose of procreation, rather than pleasure).

The poem might be read, slightly differently, as a take on Christian doctrine: ‘worm’ can also be a poetic word for ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’, and this conjures up the Garden of Eden (that bed of roses again?). The Satanic serpent which persuaded Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge is motivated by a desire for revenge against God, and the pure earthly paradise God has established with Adam and Eve.Continue to explore the world of Blake’s poetry with our analysis of ‘The Lamb’, our overview of his poem known as ‘Jerusalem’, and his scathing indictment of poverty and misery in London. If you’re looking for a good edition of Blake’s work, we recommend Selected Poetry (Oxford World’s Classics) . We’ve offered some tips for writing a brilliant English Literature essay here. For a time, condemned criminals were routinely sentenced to death and public dissection, their bodies donated to the Medical Institutes*. This practice was ended in the early 19th Century, but parliament allowed that any person found dead without identification and/or someone willing to claim their body would be fair game for anatomical research. This amounted to depriving the poorest classes of any guarantee that they would be given a decent burial, and many were outraged that poverty alone meant they might be dissected publicly like criminals. 'Burial Insurance' became a popular method of avoiding the indignities that might have been inflicted on their bodies. As test subjects became scarce, members of the nascent medical community were complicit in murder, paying money to the 'Ghouls' that stalked the harbors for departing ships, where they would kill drunken sailors not likely to be missed and deliver them to the Anatomists. The fact that the worm chooses to fly in the night suggests something seeking to travel and do its work under cover of darkness, perhaps because of shame; night also suggests the world of sleep and dreams, when our unconscious comes to the surface in the form of symbols (symbols not unlike those presence in this poem).