summary of the school boy in english class 8
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Summary
'The School Boy" is a 1789 poem by William Blake and published as a part of his poetry collection entitled Songs of Experience. These poems were later added with Blake's Songs of Innocence to create the entire collection entitled "Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul". This collection included poems such as "The Tyger", "The Little Boy Lost", "Infant Joy" and "The Shepherd". These poems are illustrated with colorful artwork created by Blake first in 1789. The first printing in 1789 consisted of sixteen copies.None of the copies of Songs of Innocence are exactly alike as some of them are incomplete or were colored in posthumously "in imitation of" other copies.
Themes and critical analysis.
This poem highlights Blake's affinity for alternative methods of education. Consistently repeated is the draining element of schoolroom education and how it causes students to contribute poor learning and retention for students. Blake instead promotes learning outside the classroom, specifically he believes spontaneous and natural creativity flourishes. Furthermore, this desire to remove oneself from the classroom (a metaphor for society) is in reference to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury's idea of retirement. In this instance, retirement means to remove oneself from society and return to nature in order to rejuvenate the soul and the imagination from the weary doggedness of society. Cooper believed that remaining in society for a long period of time would result in the soul becoming worn down and that nature was the only relief as it helped redevelop the idea of community and benevolence.
In this poem, a school boy speaks. He is an unhappy child. His childhood is crushed in the name of learning and teaching.
Happy Morning
The boy likes the morning. He is pleased to see the trees and the birds. The distant sound of the huntsman’s horn is pleasant. He wants to sing with the skylark. In brief the nature seems to offer a sweet company.
Unhappy Morning
However, his morning hours pass unhap¬pily. He lives a worrisome life in the school. Neither the books nor the teacher’s lecture interest him.
Childhood
The pleasure of childhood is in being free and happy like a bird. But a child is put in the school just as a bird is put in the cage. So the child is as unhappy as a caged bird.
The Parents
The parents should understand their fault. Depriving the child of joy and freedom means depriving the world of its spring. It is like nipping the buds and flowers from the plants. The world is a sorrowful place without happy childhood.
The Summer of Joy
In the absence of a happy childhood, we shall have winter of sorrow. The summer (heat) of joy will never be there.
Or..
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. He was born in 28 November 1757 Soho, London. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.
The poet raises a sensitive issue. A happy childhood helps to build a confident young man who could serve the society in a productive way. In the poem, the boy loves to wake up to see the summer mornings.
The sound of the birds singing and the huntsman’s horn are both pleasant. The school, however, took away with it the joy that summer mornings carried. He would spend his days in anxiety, depriving him of pleasure which is neither in books nor in lectures.
A child like a caged bird who cannot be happy by living in constant fear. Depriving the children of the joy would be to doom them to a life of everlasting sorrow.
The School Boy Summary of the Poem in English
It is the poem about a schoolboy who is not a happy child; he compares himself with the bird that lives in a cage. The schoolboy loves to rise in summer morning and to enjoy the singing of chirping bird.
Boy loves to entertain himself by the company of hunter who blows his clarion from a distance field and sweet lullabies of the skylark. According to the boy, a school is a place where all his happiness and joy pulls away.
He got tired with the rules of teachers and direct supervision on him. He has to control himself to enjoy the pleasure of summer and to spend hours in the garden where he can learn new things in better ways because he has to spend his whole hours in schooling.
In the cage, a bird cannot sing a sweet song, similarly, a child if remained under the umbrella of annoying fear and tension, the skepticism of his teacher can never enjoy the natural instincts of joy and playfulness.
In the last stanza, he tried to make understand his parents that if a child is picked up and he can’t get proper care then he could not grow in nature plant. The parent should also understand their fault. Depriving the child of joy and freedom means a world without spring. In the absence of a happy child, we shall have a winter of sorrow.