Poetry Through the Authors' Eyes

I know I'm not the only one to have struggled with Blake or Wordsworth - and I certainly won't be the last - but while reading a few of their poems, I found it immensely helpful to have an image that somewhat depicted what they were writing about alongside the text. The images I pulled up on each poem added vivid detail to their descriptions (I'm a bit of a visual learner, myself) and led me to a whole different level of understanding while perusing their works.

I would just like to share a few of these pictures for anyone who wanted to read through Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" (both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience versions).

This picture gives a little more feeling to Songs of Innocence's "The Chimney Sweeper." Personally, I saw this and pictured it to be the embodiment of Tom Dacre; in the face of a hard life and certain death, the boy in this picture still has a smile on his face. In "The Chimney Sweeper," Tom was spoken to by an angel who told him to do be a good boy and (implicitly) do his job without complaint. The angel said when he passed on, he'd have God for his father and never be sad.

This picture portrays a completely different spin on chimney sweeps. It gives us a view of chimney sweeps close to Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" in Songs of Experience. In this picture, we're shown how sad and woeful the profession of chimney sweeping was. Note how not a single boy is smiling in the picture. Side by side with Experiences "The Chimney Sweeper," it loans a powerful image to Blake's words; it's as if he's describing any one of these boy's lives. 

An interesting article about the life of chimney sweepers can be found here.

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When reading through Wordsworth's poetry, I definitely had a desire to see with my own eyes what he was describing. I did some searching and pulled up a few images to go alongside with "Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" and "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1803."

This photo is actually a picture of Tintern Abbey from the hills a few miles out - an almost exact representation of what I believe Wordsworth saw and wrote about. It's just a nice accompaniment to have alongside the poem.

Westminster Bridge is a wide bridge that crosses the Thames, connecting Westminster and Lambeth. This is a view of Parliament from the bridge - undoubtedly the part of London Wordsworth was looking back upon - and we can see that it is an early morning, before the bustle of life awakens. Try picturing this to be Wordsworth's picture, and immediately after he took this, he began to write. It's a cool thought.

In any regard, I highly advise trying to find images to accompany many of the Romantic era poems. It's helpful to try to see what the authors were seeing when they wrote, and really leads to a better understanding of the poetry.