User talk:Real World

The invention of the steam engine by the great engineers of the eighteenth century heralded the coming of the industrial age and with it child labour and pollution, it is the age of production even when there are no consumers. It is the age of the false choice and fake freedom; where men and women receive pay unproportional to their work, because their effort is stolen from them.

In this time the poets dreamed of better days and brighter skies. They saw the joyful child and wondered why the he was not sad. The poet sees innocence in the child and he sees his salvation. “What is joy? What is laughter? When the world is ever burning” cried the Awakened; the romantics did not know the answer but they believed it was good.

They concluded that at birth the child has already achieved perfection; the rest of his life is a great fall into darkness. When he is old and too weak to work he begins to live again. He sees that he has fallen into a pit and tries to claw his way out, but after being told for his life that he is meaningless he cannot reach the top. And so he falls once more into the pit and into death.

The life of a romantic poet is a search for a flower in the desert, which he finds just when he is running out of water. He knows he will thirst before he can get back to the world and as a poet he gives his last water to the flower, so beauty may remain in the world – even if he – even if no one can experience it no more.

The poem Auguries of Innocence by William Blake Below is a cry of despair from a determined man. He struggles to portray the beauty that can be seen in the world if one is able to let their mind go free from the rigid constructs of a soulless society. In a crescendous conclusion he declares that the story of a life is decided on whether a child is born in ‘night’ or ‘light’; and yet, he seems to feel that only those born in night can truly see the ‘Beams of Light’ emanating from God’s creations. Below is an excerpt:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

What perfection cried the clockmaker to the night! Upon this he leapt for his hammer, for what would he have to live for if his work was complete? “It is done” he cried amidst the absence of the light, his safety was found in the rubble of destruction.

Blake lived during the height of the industrial revolution, when society seemed to have lost all connection to the lofty goals of achieving happiness. He looked and saw innocence in the eyes of the child who is yet to be caught by the Great Hunter; an innocence he could not find in the eyes of the captured.

Lord Byron, another romantic, also lived in this age. He was affected in a similar manner to Blake and on several occasions publicly defended the Luddites; a group who were opposed to the continued advancement of technology. Byron was a widely recognized opponent to the industrial age and an advocate of returning to a life of innocence and purity. This attitude can be seen in the following excerpt from the poem entitled “She Walks in Beauty”:

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow, But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent!

The poem tells of a young woman, who seems to be uncorrupted by the misery that would have surrounded her life. Byron clearly sees this as a very desirable state of being, as shown by lines such as “A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent!”

References

Lord Byron, (April 1815), The Hebrew Melodies

William Blake, (1789), Songs of Innocence