How do you respond to the view that, in Songs of Innocence and of Experience love is always presented as pure and natural.
In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake employs natural imagery throughout his poems and in many of them love can be seen as being pure and natural. In Blake’s poem ‘My Pretty Rose Tree’ natural imagery runs all the way through the poem yet he has also expressed the jealousy and complications in love. Poems such as London and The Clod and the Pebble show how love is tainted by corruption, which conveys to the reader the epitome of love and how its reality can show its hidden immorality.
In My Pretty Rose Tree different manifestations of love are shown as individual plants are personified. The repetition of ‘flower’ instead of the word ‘rose’ in the first stanza acts as a symbol to represent love and experiences and because of the use of a general term instead of the specific rose it can be perceived as the flower depicting love that’s being given to another woman. The speaker is presented with a flower ‘as may never bore’ yet returns it in loyalty, to the rose tree, then looks to ‘tend to her by day and by night’ nevertheless the rose ‘turn[s] away with jealousy’ portraying love with the imagery of experience as the expectations of light romance come forth. For his affection he is returned with ‘thorns’ suggesting the speaker may be willing to pay the price for a continued relationship as the thorns represent the protection he may hold over her from other lovers and therefore he is ‘delighted’ and reckons them as a symbol of love. In addition to this the speaker may find he is compelled to be in delight with the rose despite its thorns, as he has rejected the flower and the pain of the thorns may be infinitely preferable to his fear of the unknown, just as Adam and Eve with the fruit of knowledge, the flower takes the place of the fruit which offers experience yet comes with tempting propositions.
In contrast to the jealousy portrayed in My Pretty Rose Tree, the Clod and the Pebble begins by displaying how love can be selfless by giving us two different
In My Pretty Rose Tree different manifestations of love are shown as individual plants are personified. The repetition of ‘flower’ instead of the word ‘rose’ in the first stanza acts as a symbol to represent love and experiences and because of the use of a general term instead of the specific rose it can be perceived as the flower depicting love that’s being given to another woman. The speaker is presented with a flower ‘as may never bore’ yet returns it in loyalty, to the rose tree, then looks to ‘tend to her by day and by night’ nevertheless the rose ‘turn[s] away with jealousy’ portraying love with the imagery of experience as the expectations of light romance come forth. For his affection he is returned with ‘thorns’ suggesting the speaker may be willing to pay the price for a continued relationship as the thorns represent the protection he may hold over her from other lovers and therefore he is ‘delighted’ and reckons them as a symbol of love. In addition to this the speaker may find he is compelled to be in delight with the rose despite its thorns, as he has rejected the flower and the pain of the thorns may be infinitely preferable to his fear of the unknown, just as Adam and Eve with the fruit of knowledge, the flower takes the place of the fruit which offers experience yet comes with tempting propositions.
In contrast to the jealousy portrayed in My Pretty Rose Tree, the Clod and the Pebble begins by displaying how love can be selfless by giving us two different