Joy and Woe are Woven Fine

  Joy and Woe are Woven Fine  by William Blake.

Hello readers..

About Poet William Blake.

 William Blake didn't really think of himself as a poet and a painter, he thought of himself as a craftsman. He thought all painters should be craftsmen and not think of themselves as better than that.

As well as painting Blake also made books of his poems which he illustrated. One of his most famous works is a book called Songs of Innocence and Experience. It was published in 1789 and was inspired by illuminated manuscripts made by monks in medieval times. One of the most famous poems in the book is called The Tyger.

   

William Blake was a poet and a painter who was born in Soho in London in 1757. He is an important figure of the Romantic age. Which was a time when artists and writers reacted to the massive changes happening in Europe, such as new machinery and big factories making cities much bigger and industrial. Romantic artists were excited by emotions and tried to reflect the awe and wonder of the natural world.

Blake was a very religious man and he felt that the amazing things he saw in the world came from God. Here is one of his paintings. It is a scene from the Bible where a dead man comes alive again.

An  English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced".

Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".

Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and"Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England - indeed, to all forms of organised religion - Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg.Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blakeas a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors".

William Blake and his works have been extensively discussed and criticised over the twentieth and now this century, however previous to that he was barely known. He first became known in 1863 with Alexander Gilchrist’s biography “Life”and only fully appreciated and recognised at the beginning of the twentieth century. It seems his art had been too adventurous and unconventional for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, maybe you could even say he wasa head of his time? Either way, today he is a hugely famous figure of Romantic literature, whose work is open to various interpretations, which has been known to take a lifetime to establish. As well as his works being difficult to interpret,him as a person has also provoked much debate.

 

 

So, we've said that Blake wasn't exactly a fashionista. But he's talking about clothes again, here—so maybe we were wrong. But these are symbolic, metaphorical clothes—making Blake a Ralph Lauren of the Mind (if you will). Joy and woe are experiences that the soul "wears"—it hasn't experienced them in the womb, but when it comes into the world, it gets a taste of happiness and suffering (and then some). 

     

He says joy and woe are woven fine. Woven means things which are attached to each other. Both happiness and grief are fine. They are cloths of our soul. In every grief, there are also joy we need to find it. We are not here for only happiness or for only pain. But we are made for both. And when we know that joy and woe both are part of our life, we can live happily in grief also.

So, in this poem poet wants to tell that accept both joy and pain. Do not become unhappy when sad moments come, there are always happy moments also. Know that both are part of everyone's life and live happily. That is all poet wants to say in the poem.