Blake versus Keats, or Teaching versus Learning James Clack 12th Grade

William Blake was known for tailoring his romantic poetry specifically for children, particularly in ‘Songs of Innocence’, where the themes of nature and religion were utilised to allow Blake to directly educate his intended younger audience about faith, the beauty of the natural world, and the injustice of the industrial revolution in the 18th century. It is certain that Blake’s poetry was intended to teach. However, Keats, who wrote the poem ‘The Human Seasons’ only two decades after Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’, delivers far less of a ‘taught’ message and more of a general observation on the life of man, due to his more casual writing style, his younger and more innocent age, and his extremely short life span. These factors contribute to the possible interpretation that, as MacLeish states in ‘Ars Poetica’, “A poem should not mean, but be.” Although Keats does not mean to teach, readers may often be able to discover and learn from his poetry.

In ‘The Human Seasons’, Keats creates an extended metaphor for the progression of the four seasons as man’s life: youth in spring, adulthood in summer, old age in autumn and death in winter. The reader is able to learn from the final rhyming couplet of the poem, as Keats relates Winter...