"How the Chimney-sweeper's cry. Every black'ning Church appalls;" -"London" by William Blake
When used in a poem, imagery does much more than add vibrancy and interest. In most of the poems in this unit, the imagery is an effective indicator of the tone, or the attitutude the writer or speaker takes toward the subject. I personally found it very helpful in the majority of the poems. In "Those Winter Sundays," Hayden's line of "love's austere and lonely offices" helped me piece together the probability that the speaker now notices his father's love even though he did not know as a child that it could take a cold, "austere" form. Other times it led to my confusion. "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" prompted me to think Dickinson was moving through a process of successful mental inquiry because of the image of "I heard them lift a Box," but group discussion convinced me that she is in fact coming upon insanity. The quote at the beginning was one of the most useful in determining the tone. Not only does Blake regret the world he lives in, he, like the Chimney-sweep and Church, strongly detest what their society has forced upon them. The graphic visuals suggest a world in which no sane person would want to grow.
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