Symbolises innocence Essay Example

Symbolises innocence Essay Example Symbolises innocence Essay Symbolises innocence Essay Write about the use Blake makes of childrens voices in at least two other poems.  I am using the innocence poems The Lamb and Infant Joy in order to compare the way Blake uses childrens voices with the experienced poem Infant Sorrow  The Lamb is written like a religious hymn and is narrated by a small child. The Little Lamb in the poem symbolises Jesus. The structure of The Lamb is two simple stanzas each of ten lines. The first half of the poem represents the child talking to The Lamb the second half shows the Lamb replying to the small child. The first half of the poem also acts as a chorus, like in a religious hymn, the simple structure reflects the simplicity of the poem and the child. Infant Joy shows the joys of a child being born and the choosing of names. The poem is narrated by a two day old baby throughout. The poem shows the celebration of child birth and a child. The structure of Infant Joy is two simple stanzas, each of six lines, the structure if simple like the baby, this symbolises innocence.  Infant Sorrow is the partner poem of Infant Joy ad is the complete opposite of it. It shows the pain and upset caused by child birth and shows the loneliness of the newborn baby. The structure of Infant Sorrow is two stanzas, each of four lines, which appears quite simple and innocence like however the lines are much longer than in Infant Joy. The poem is narrated by a new born baby. The three poems I have chosen have a lot of similarities, they are all narrated by children or babies but Blake changes his style of writing in each case. In Infant Joy the baby is but two days old, the baby appears happy and content as it is an innocence poem, throughout the poem the baby talks of its joy of being born. In The Lamb the small child is talking to Jesus, represented by The Lamb. The child asks questions of creation and then replies to itself. The Lamb is different to Infant Joy as the child is playing both parts, the lamb and the child therefore asking and answering its own questions where as in Infant Joy there is only one character, the baby, and therefore we only feel its emotions, the mother and father are not involved in the poem. Whereas in Infant Sorrow the mother and father play a main part, the baby talks of the upset and moaning of his mother and father shortly and it is born and shows how it is feeling lonely and controlled. Blake here is obviously creating a different child for each poem, and each child obviously has its own voice and opinions. Possibly, the babies in Infant Joy and Infant Sorrow are the same baby but Blake has given them different situations to live and cope in. Blake uses different language also in each of the poems, in The Lamb Blake uses archaic language to symbolise the relationship between the child, God and Jesus, Dost thou know who made thee, whereas in Infant Joy Blake uses innocent, positive words to symbolise that the baby is happy with its birth and excited at the fact that it will soon be named. Infant Sorrow is in complete contrast with the two other poems; Blake uses negative, experienced words of corruption and hatred to portray the emotions that the baby is feeling.

Understanding Percontation Punctuation Marks

Understanding Percontation Punctuation Marks The percontation mark (also known as the punctus percontativus or  percontation  point) is a late-medieval mark of punctuation (ØŸ) used to signal the close of a rhetorical question. In rhetoric, percontatio is a type of affective (as opposed to information-seeking) question, similar to epiplexis. In The Arte of Rhetoric (1553), Thomas Wilson makes this distinction: We doo aske often-tymes, because we would knowe: we do aske also, because we woulde chide, and sette furthe our grief with more vehemencie, the one is called Interrogatio, the other is percontatio. The percontation mark was used (for a brief period of time) to identify this second type of question. Examples and Observations When punctuation was first invented by Aristophanes, librarian at Alexandria in the 4th century BC, he suggested that readers could use middle ( ·), low (.), and high points (Ë™) to punctuate writing according to the rules of rhetoric. Despite this, it took another two millennia before the eponymous rhetorical question got its own mark of punctuation. Worried that his readers would not catch such a subtle figure of speech, in the late sixteenth century the English printer Henry Denham created the percontation mark- a reversed question markto address the problem. . . .Faced with a wave of apathy, use of the percontation mark had petered out within fifty years of its birth. (Keith Houston, 8 Punctuation Marks That Are No Longer Used. Huffington Post, September 24, 2013)The percontation-mark (or punctus percontativus), the standard Arabic question mark, indicated percontations, questions open to any answer or (more loosely) rhetorical questions, in various books of c.1575-c.1625. T his usage seems to have been invented by the translator Anthonie Gilbie or his printer Henry Denham (a pioneer of the semi-colon): roman examples appear in their psalms of Dauid (1581), black letter ones in Turbervilles Tragicall Tales (1587). It didnt catch on in print because, being reversed, expensive new type was needed, but was used by scribes including Crane, who worked on Shakespeares First Folio: so how did compositors set percontation-marks present in their copy but not type-cases? One possibility is that italic or black letter question-marks amid roman type record otherwise unsettable percontation-marks. (John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism. Oxford University Press, 2005) [Henry] Denham seems to have been interested in punctuation, since two of the books he published in the 1580s contain another new, but rare symbol, the percontativus . . .. This consists of a reversed, but not inverted, interrogativus and is used to mark a percontatio, i.e. a rhetorical question, one which does not require an answer. . . . For the most part 16th- and 17th-century authors and compositors either omitted to mark a percontatio, or used the interrogativus, but the percontativus does appear from time to time in the 17th century: for example, in the holographs of Robert Herrick and Thomas Middleton. (M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation. University of California Press, 1993)