To celebrate this festive time each day through Christmas Stock Guru will publish a poem that we hope will enrich your lives.
The first is a familiar poem for children and adults. This is a poem I often have read to children to watch their eyes grow large. The rhythm, the cadence, the subject matter illustrate to them the power of poetry and this poem has the power to begin a life long appreciation of poetry. That is a wonderful gift to a child. We will follow with a poem for teens by Rudyard Kipling and a poems for all by Walt Whitman and Robert Frost.
We would encourage you to find a child or children over the holidays, bring them close and share this well loved poem, The Tyger. We also include a bit on the life of William Blake. You may not know that he was also a talented artist. You may link here for an excellent presentation of his work presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: William Blake. “William Blake, perhaps best known as one of the greatest poets in the English language, was also one of the most imaginative visual artists in Europe in his time,” said Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum. “The scope of this exhibition enables us to more fully appreciate the creative legacy of this remarkable man.
More about William Blake
William Blake was born in London in 1757 into a working-class family (his father was a hosier) with strong nonconformist religious beliefs, and was trained as a commercial engraver. Assisted by Catherine Boucher-a grocer’s daughter whom he married in 1782-Blake produced a remarkable series of color-printed books using his relief etching process. William Blake never traveled outside of Britain and remained poor all of his life. Aside from a brief period on the southern coast of England (where he worked for the poet William Hayley in Eartham from 1800 to 1803), he spent his entire life in London. At his death in 1827, Blake was mourned by a small group of intimate associates, some of them followers who called themselves the “Ancients”; today, he is celebrated as one of the most original and important artists and poets of the Romantic era.
The Tyger Blake, William (1757-1827)
Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
