Thoughts on “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Shunryu Suzuki.Thoughts on “Tristram Shandy” by Laurence Sterne.Thoughts on “The Two Trees” by William Butler Yeats.“Gypsies on the Road” by Charles Baudelaire.Puck as Trickster Archetype in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare.“Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea” by William Butler Yeats.Introduction to Songs of Experience by William Blake.Unholy Trinity: The Number Three in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”.Do you think that I am searching too deeply for hidden meaning or do you think my questions are valid? Let me know your interpretations. I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts on this poem. The only explanation I can come up with is that the Shepherd recognizes that there is beauty, divinity, and holiness in the flock and seeks to nurture and protect that divinity, and to sing the praises of God’s manifestation in humanity. If that is the case, why would Christ follow and praise the flock? It seems that it would be the opposite, that the flock would follow and praise Christ the Shepherd. The biggest puzzle for me though is that at the end of the first stanza, where it is said that the Shepherd’s “tongue shall be filled with praise.” This seems to contrast the entire second stanza, which to me seems to imply that the Shepherd is Christ watching over his flock. I cannot figure out why Blake chose “strays” instead of “stays.” The shepherd is not straying he is staying with the flock. Then the following line ends with another alliterative: “strays.” Again, something is not sitting right with me about this. He was subtly hinting at something, but I am not making the connection. It could be that Blake was just going for an alliterative effect, but that doesn’t seem right. The first thing that struck me was the repetition of the word “sweet” in the first line. This poem seems very simple, yet something about it puzzles me, and the more I think about it, the more puzzled I become. It was, in its own way, an audacious poem, in its implicit rejection of the ethos behind Beattie’s Minstrel : 1 the reviewers had, some of them, asked for a long poem, but they would not have expected this panoramic view of country life, the combination of humour and compassion, love of seclusion and rage at the evils of enclosure.I was in the mood to read some William Blake today, so I picked up my copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience and read the first poem which I had not yet covered in my blog, which was “The Shepherd.” It is very short, so I am including it here in the post.Īnd his tongue shall be filled with praise.įor they know when their Shepherd is nigh. In the long poem ‘The Village Minstrel’ that headed the 1821 collection Clare had, with some success, been able to place his response to the natural world in a wider context which embraced the whole village community. In his use of the sonnet form, for example, Clare had shown that there was another way of responding to the essentially dramatic qualities of nature than that suggested by the tradition stemming from Thomson: but he could hardly write nothing but sonnets. There were certainly positive achievements to point to, both in Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, and in The Village Minstrel. Much of the criticism was justified, and Taylor and Hessey were aware that something rather different had to be tried if Clare wasn’t going to fade completely from the public eye. Several reviewers had commented on the apparent sameness of all his work, the lack of thinking in the poetry, the tendency to stop at observation. There was the chance to consider and reflect on what he had so far achieved, and what direction his poetry might take. After the publication of his first two collections of poems, Clare’s horizons were widened.
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