Auguries of Innocence Analysis

Iambic pentameter? Don't make us laugh. This poem is written in iambic tetrameter—surely the best of all the iambic meters. That's right—your teachers have been filling your minds with out...

Since there isn't any narrative thread in this poem—it being a scattershot collection of couplets—the speaker really isn't different from the actual poet. Usually, it's a bad idea to confuse a...

Since there's no real setting here, we're going to get abstract. So, how about this? The setting is… your mind. Perhaps you weren't expecting that? This isn't just playing off Blake's reputation...

At first, "Auguries" can sound kind of like a little kid reciting some sort of proverb in an old-timey schoolroom. They have an "Early to bed, early to rise / Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise...

Yeah, we didn't know what an "augury" was either, at first. We thought it was, like, an old-timey English girl's name—and Blake must have known a bunch of these Augury ladies, and they were all p...

Because of the mystical spin, you know this is a Blake poem. Sure, there are other poets who get pretty spiritual—Walt Whitman being a closely related example—but few claim to have actual visio...

Most people who enjoy poetry could probably read "Auguries" and find something to like. Parts of it are appealingly straightforward: "A dog starv'd at his master's gate / Predicts the ruin of the s...

Blake and his wife, Catherine, used to read Paradise Lost by John Milton together… um, in the nude. (Source.)Blake once threw a drunk and disorderly soldier out of his yard. The soldier then fals...

You can't really say "harlot" in a G-rated poem. But aside from all the references to prostitution, there's not really any wild and crazy erotic hi-jinks in this poem—you'll have to check out Bla...

The Book of Jonah (127)Blake references the Book of Jonah 4:10 when discussing how the physical eye (and the material world itself) was "born in a night to perish in a night." In Jonah, the same te...