In "The Chimney Sweeper" from Songs of Innocence, the narrator, a little boy who is in his innocence and youth, is unaware of how difficult his life is. ... The boy's belief that "if all do their duty, they need not fear harm" (Line 24), even though he has been abandoned by his father and is forced to work in such degrading conditions, reveals his innocence and naivety about the "harm" he is exposed to on a daily basis. ... The rest of the poem is the little boy's response – they are in "praising God & his Priest & King" (Line 11) in chur...

• Word Count: 1939
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The poem talks about the narrator's life in the house where he and his family lived and kept "pre-war Europe alive" for nineteen years. ... In this poem the narrator speaks about his perspective of his father, and his lack of understanding of him and his polish culture. ... Cats in the cradle is a story about a father who sees his son grow up the way he wanted to, like him, only to realise that all the tome he spent at work and not with his son has made his son not want to spend time with him. ... The responder can see there that the father is blind to the boys needs, he can only see that...

• Word Count: 1417
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In the second stanza "by furthest rosses" we are introduced to more detail about this other world. ... No longer will the boy be able to delight in the positive aspects of normal life as reflected by the pleasant imagery and landscape of "calves on the warm hillside," as it has literally been snatched away from the child. ...

• Word Count: 1144
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Whitman got a job as an office boy for a prominent group of lawyers, who rewarded him with a subscription to a circulating library, with which he could further his self-education. ... Contrarily, when he was twelve, Walt's first printed article in the Patriot was about New York City before its urbanization, and it chronicled the detailed accounts of early residents' descriptions of the city when it was first formed. ... This section incorporates popular Whitman themes such as transcendentalism (the desire and ability of the women to observe allows her to fantasize about the men an...

• Word Count: 1470
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

A point to make about the apparent simplicity of Blake's poems is that they are deliberate (in an attempt to simplify the moral dilemmas of the time and present them in a form which could be understood). Ironically, the Songs of Experience are somewhat simpler in the way that the speaker of the poem is the voice of experience, warning the innocence about the futility of life. ... In the Songs of Experience version, the narrator introduces the boy chimney sweep as no more than a 'little black thing'. ... is a simple one, and yet the child is also tapping into the deep and timele...

• Word Count: 1564
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate