The Schoolboy — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
The Schoolboy
The poems
What you need to know
A child who loves summer mornings outdoors but is made miserable by school, ending in an appeal to his parents.
How Blake's Romantic ideas about childhood, nature and education shape the poem, and how its imagery, stanzas and rhyme work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I love to rise in a summer morn', 'O! what sweet company', 'O! it drives all joy away', 'Under a cruel eye outworn', 'In sighing and dismay', 'Ah! then at times I drooping sit', 'How can the bird that is born for joy, / Sit in a cage and sing', 'But droop his tender wing', 'if buds are nip’d, / And blossoms blown away', 'When the blasts of winter appear'.
Form: six five-line stanzas rhyming ABABB, the turn from the summer morning to the school day, the caged bird, and the last two stanzas addressed to his parents in an extended metaphor of buds, blossom, summer fruit and winter.
Context: a poem of 1789 that Blake placed among the Songs of Innocence and later among the Songs of Experience (1794); Blake left school at 10 and was taught at home by his mother; Romantic ideas of childhood, nature and freedom.
Compares well with: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud on joy in nature; Blackberry Picking on childhood joy that is lost; Catrin and Kamikaze on parents and children; Disabled on youth that is wasted.
