Loss of Innocence in Willam Blake and Yusef Komunyakaa Poem

In spite of the work of the work and the cold morning, "Tom was happy and warm; So if all do their duty they need non railroad care harm".

So in Blake pureness is really not lost at all if man's faith in God's erudition as revealed by the angel is fully understood.

Yusef Komunyakaa could not be father from Blake in history and origin, yet he shares a similar poetic perspective about childish passage of innocence. The main difference in the two poets treatment of the root word is that while Blake's vision starts with gloom and ends with optimism, Komunyakaa's follows the opposite development, from joy and innocence to vulnerability.

Komunyakaa is an Afri poop-American poet who teaches creative writing at Princeton University (Ploughshares 1). Raised in Louisiana, his book Neon Vernacular:New and Selected Poems won the 1994 Pulitzer assess (Beckman 1). Growing up black in the American entropy and working as a correspondent in Vietnam would bleed to dispel anyone's innocence, but his poem "Blackberries" is anything but harsh and bitter.

On the surface it is a sensitive depiction of how a presumptively black boy's joy in pick out blackberries is shattered when he is greeted by the cold mockery of white kids his age "smirking" at him from the back seat of a "big blue car" from which "wintertime crawled out of the windows" (www.ibiblio.org).

But the blackberries are also a figure of his blackness

Cohen, Martin N. "Sketching God?from Life." perspicacity on the News, June 3rd 1996, p. 33.

Komunyakaa use of blackness is as uncertain as the black experience of living in the joined States.

It has positive elements represented by the boy's joy in picking and eating this pleasureable bounty of the earth, but when his protagonist crosses the line " among worlds" his positive view of blackness becomes a source of twinge and vulnerability.

Beckman, Charles. The Gazette Online: The Newspaper of the Johns Hopkins University. April 30, 2001. Vol. 30, No. 32.

"Blake, William". The New Grolier Multimedia cyclopaedia Release 6, 1993.

Furthermore, both poets employ the metaphor of blackness. But for Blake it represents a kind of occupational slavery, death (the coffins of the sweeps in Tom's dream), or sin, which can only be wiped clean with the help of religion (as embody by the angel's key, which sets them free "to wash in a river"). The symbol of the key is also used elsewhere in Blake's Songs of purity and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794), where he writes that after death "the Soule awakes; and wond'ring sees/ in her mild Hand the booming Key" (Johnson 237). This prophetic tendency reflects his belief that the "Divine arts of Imagination" supersede rational philosophical systems (Insight 37).

Bindman, David, ed. "Blake's Illustrated Books". Princeton, NJ. 1991.

Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.