Tag Archives: William Blake

Methought I Heard One Calling, “Child”

By Robin Bates | Published: June 18, 2022

For Father’s Day, here are a couple of God the father poems.

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Chaucer’s Miller & the Los Angeles Rams

By Robin Bates | Published: February 13, 2022

The LA Rams won the Super Bowl, bringing Chaucer’s Miller to mind.

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Wanted: Poets to Fight Climate Change

By Robin Bates | Published: December 29, 2021

To understand role poets can play in fighting climate change, go back to the Romantics and especially “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

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Hydrocarbons Are Our Dark Satanic Mills

By Robin Bates | Published: June 30, 2021

Blake’s “Jerusalem” can be read as a challenge to oppose the forces of climate change that threaten our beautiful country.

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Father God, I Want to Sit on Your Knees

By Robin Bates | Published: June 19, 2021

A Katherine Mansfield poem to “God the Father” for Father’s Day.

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A Star Has Fallen, to Blossom from a Tomb

By Robin Bates | Published: December 24, 2020

John Heath-Stubbs’s “On the Nativity” is one of my favorite Christmas poems.

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Lit that Championed Chimney Sweeps

By Robin Bates | Published: December 26, 2019

Watching modern chimney sweeps at work, I’m relieved that we’ve left behind the days of William Blake and Charles Dickens.

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Reluctance to Go to School

By Robin Bates | Published: August 16, 2019

Friday School has already opened in some states (Tennessee) and has yet to open in others (Maryland) so I’ve split the difference by choosing today to honor the occasion. Jonathan Swift’s mention of a laggard schoolbody in “A Description of the Morning” has always fascinated me. “Description of the Morning” gives an account of the […]

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Children’s Choirs, Vienna’s and Blake’s

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2019

Wednesday Last Friday I was able to see in person the Vienna Children’s choir, which previously I knew only from their recordings. As I listened to the high, pure voices in Sewanee’s cathedral-like All Saints Chapel, I thought of William Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence. The poem has some of Blake’s characteristic irony, […]

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