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William Blake (1789) · Eduqas Poetry Anthology
Eduqasby William Blake
William Blake (1757-1827) was a London poet, painter and engraver. He printed his poems himself, etching words and pictures together on copper plates and colouring the pages by hand.
The Schoolboy first appeared in Songs of Innocence (1789). In 1794 Blake joined those poems to a new set in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul", and in later copies he moved The Schoolboy among the Songs of Experience. It sits between the two: a child’s voice, as in the Songs of Innocence, describing a joy that adults are destroying, as in the Songs of Experience.
Blake had no ordinary schooling that anyone knows of. From the age of ten he went to a drawing school in London’s Strand, and at fourteen he was apprenticed to an engraver. The poem does not attack learning: it imagines "learnings bower" as a place of delight. Its target is a schooling that keeps children indoors, watched and afraid, away from the world outside.
“I love to rise in a summer morn”
The opening line is full of energy and pleasure. The verb "rise" suggests freedom and lightness, and the "summer morn" is the child’s natural element. Everything that follows is measured against this first line.
“And the sky-lark sings with me”
The skylark, a bird that sings as it climbs high into the sky, is the boy’s companion. "with me" makes the child part of nature’s music, which is why the stanza ends "O! what sweet company."
“Under a cruel eye outworn”
The teacher is never named, only reduced to "a cruel eye": school is a place of being watched. "outworn" makes that eye tired and joyless, the opposite of the bright morning outside.
“Nor sit in learnings bower”
A bower is a shady, pleasant shelter. Blake imagines what learning could be, a place of rest and delight, and the child’s "Nor" tells us he cannot reach it. The poem’s quarrel is with this kind of schooling, not with learning itself.
“How can the bird that is born for joy, / Sit in a cage and sing”
The poem’s central metaphor. The child is a bird made for freedom and song; school is the cage. The question answers itself: a caged bird may still sing, but not for joy.
“O! father & mother, if buds are nip’d”
The child appeals to his parents directly. Children become "buds", which a frost can nip before they open: to send a child to such a school is to damage the growth that parents should protect.
“How shall the summer arise in joy”
The last stanza widens the argument from one school day to a whole life. A childhood that is "nip’d" in spring cannot grow into a joyful summer, and the poem ends looking ahead to "the blasts of winter".
“How can the bird that is born for joy, / Sit in a cage and sing”
The caged bird turns the classroom into a prison. A bird is "born" for flight and song, as a child is born for play and freedom; shutting it up does not stop it singing, but takes the joy out of its song.
“I love to rise in a summer morn … But to go to school in a summer morn”
The same words, "in a summer morn", end lines 1 and 6. The morning is identical; only school has changed it, so the second stanza undoes the first exactly.
“O! it drives all joy away”
The cries "O!" and "Ah!" give the poem a child’s voice, speaking from the heart. They mark its moments of feeling: delight in stanza 1 ("O! what sweet company."), complaint in stanzas 2 and 3, and appeal in stanza 5.
“How can a child when fears annoy.”
Stanzas 4 and 6 are built of questions, though Eduqas closes them with full stops. They need no answer: a child kept in fear can do nothing "But droop his tender wing".
“if buds are nip’d, / And blossoms blown away”
Children are "buds", "blossoms" and "tender plants", and harsh schooling is the frost or wind that destroys them before they open. The metaphor makes childhood a season of growth that cannot be had again once it is lost.
“How shall the summer arise in joy. / Or the summer fruits appear.”
The last stanza runs through a year: summer, its fruits, the harvest ("gather") and "the mellowing year", until winter. The year is a human life, and a spoiled spring spoils all of it.
“The little ones spend the day. / In sighing and dismay.”
Stanza 1 is full of music: birds, the huntsman’s horn, the sky-lark. In school the only sound is "sighing". The children "spend the day" there, as if it were used up rather than lived.