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Word and image in class
Blake and Wordsworth - exploring two pre-20th Century poems with students aged 13 and 14
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The two Williams, Wordsworth and Blake, wrote sharply contrasting poems about London. If students have access to a word processor while they are working on the poems, they can highlight the words from each poem that contrast with each other as a prelude to discussing the effects of this language. Alternatively, if the class is working on paper, they can use coloured pens or highlighters.
To read Blake without enjoying an example of his use of 'illuminated printing', though, is to miss one of the special features of his work. Fortunately there is an extensive Blake archive on the Internet, which allows students to see the poems as engraved and coloured by Blake himself.
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Blake's London
Click on the picture for
a high quality copy (this may
take a little time to load).
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The page shown here - especially if it can be viewed on a screen or printed out in colour - brings the reader into close contact with the original as Blake wished us to see it (even if he was not prophetic enough to foresee the World Wide Web). It can also be used as the way into a range of activities for students working in groups. Students are given the text in the middle of A3 sheets of paper and invited to provide their own illustrations for the images. Their pictures of the mind-forg'd manacles and the marriage hearse should prove to be particularly imaginative, requiring as they do that students think hard about just what Blake might mean here. (When, later, the students are asked to devise their own questions on the poem, they naturally ask about these images - with confidence that they have some ideas of their own.) The same technique could be tried with Wordsworth's view of the city and the results displayed in the classroom for the students to compare.
All this close attention to the imagery means that when the students come to write in response to more traditional questions their answers should keep close to the text.
Extensions to this topic could be:
- Students find images to illustrate one of the two poems - by using the Web, by cutting out pictures from magazines or by drawing their own.
- Students find images of modern city life and write their own poems, perhaps using Blake or Wordsworth's opening line as a starting point.
- Students find a picture of a place that evokes strong feelings and write about it.
Do you have interesting ways of using images in class? Please email them to English Online.
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