English Literature Infant Sorrow analysis ‘Infant Sorrow’ is the counterpart to ‘Infant Joy’ which Blake wrote in 1994 shortly after the battle of Bastille and the French revolution in1989. This collection of works became part of the songs of experience the predecessor of the songs of innocence. The form of the poem is two short quatrains made up of couplets, with the second and fourth lines using no caesura. The first and third always use caesura. The poem is written in the first person narrative and incorporates an internal rhyming scheme of rhyming couplets. Blake uses the pronouns mother and father within the poem and offsets them against adjectives such as ‘groan’d’ and ‘struggling’ to convey his perception that child birth is rife with terror and anxiety. The first quatrain has many active verbs such as ‘leapt’ and ‘loud’ this activity creates an energy which then changes and the tone becomes resigned. This is tone is sustained by the long drawn out vowel sounds in ‘ bound’, ‘weary’ and ‘thought’. Blakes use of simile ‘like a fiend hid in a cloud’ in the poem contrasts to the stereotypical image of a chubby smiling new born, and again as the baby is ‘struggling’ and ‘striving against’ this is also emphasised with alliteration. Blake includes a number of personal pronouns into the piece, possibly to help the reader indentify the real internal struggle the infant was suffering, and by introducing ‘I’ as a personal pronoun this enabled him to demonstrate this. In the first line of infant sorrow the nouns mother and father are used and again in the second quatrain this possibly illustrates Blakes perception of childbirth not being an experience of comfort by emphasising these nouns. In the final line of the poem Blake’s lexical choice of the baby to ‘sulk’ upon his mothers breast conveys the frustrated surrendering of the child as his relentless struggle is futile. The infant is the only angry speaker of this poem. He addresses a world that will never...