poem

Mad Libs Feedback

~ stuartl1 ~ Leave a comment

I have very mixed feelings about the mad libs assignment because I do think it was fun, but I do think it stirs you away from what the author originally wanted the reader to discover from their work. Yet, it has taught me that substituting the original word out with another word can change the entire meaning of the poem and it can even give you a different perspective of what your initial analysis was, which I think is pretty cool.

The two words that really stuck out to me in the poem was “were” and “so”, they are the only two words to repeat throughout the entire poem and I believe the author intended to use them as a way to brag. The author uses the word “so” in order to emphasis how good the plums were, and he uses the word “were” in order to remind the person that the plums are gone and have been eaten. The poem’s purpose is really to be about a person who is snobby and bragging about the delicious plums someone was saving.

Deformance is helpful to people who struggle with looking deeper into a poem. Breaking down the structure and words allows the reader come up with their own interpretation of the poem. I was able to really catch the author’s dark sarcasm and it made it funny to see how unsympathetic he felt for eating the plums on the person. One thing I would like to do with deformance is to read a poem backwards and see if the meaning is different from what I once thought.

“The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Experience)

~ Danielle Koppie ~ Leave a comment

The Songs of Experience version of William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” more blatantly points out the horrors that came with being a chimney sweeper during the late 18th century. The profession was extremely dangerous, and almost always employed young boys because they would fit inside the chimneys. In this poem, the companion to the Songs of Innocence poem by the same title, Blake argues that parents and the church completely ignore the terrible conditions that these boys had to deal with, because they are devoting all of their attention to praising God.

First, the parents/church start the boy at work as a chimney sweeper because he is happy being outside in the snow. Then, once he starts the job, they believe that since the boy acts happy, he is completely fine, while he is actually singing the “notes of woe” (9).

The boy narrates this poem, and in the first line he refers to himself as “A little black thing among the snow.” This immediately depicts the boy’s view of himself: nameless, useless, hurt. Additionally, the “clothes of death” (8) that Blake refers to later in the poem are supposed to be the chimney sweeper uniform. The entire poem basically shows how the boys felt when they were forced into dangerous environments and entirely neglected by all of the adult figures in their life, because they were so concentrated on getting into Heaven. In the end of the poem, the boy says that these people ” praise God & his Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery” (12-13). While the word “heaven” usually has a positive connotation, the boy is stating that since church is taking the focus off of the horrible conditions of the chimney sweeping profession, the adults’ “heaven” is actually the sweepers’ place of despair.

The engravings of this text significantly add to its emotional impact. In the images, the boy is walking in the snow to his job. Most of the engravings look messy and dirty, which immediately made me think of sadness and gloom (and of course chimney sweeping). I think Copy N and Copy T illustrate the poem best, because the boy almost blends into the background, and the pictures look like someone just threw soot all over them. The images definitely succeed in evoking feelings of grief and sympathy that add to the emotions from the text.