Words Containment

      I always enjoy when my classes cease to parallel and there is a cross over between the material. William Blake is one man who has come up in three of my classes so far this semester. His first appearance was most obviously in my 19th century Literature class, he made his second appearance in my Art History class as an example of Enlightenment ideals. And finally in this class, where stories and words are the forefront of topic and their ability to survive time and change. Frye mentions Blake in regard to "double tradition, one biblical and the other romantic, growing out of an interest in Blake which seems to have contained them both...the distinction underlying this relation is our first step" (Frye, 6).  The word that most struck me was "contain" it seems to me that while words can live in a sentence or be the structure of a single story there is something ambiguous that makes them unable to be fully tamed. To me connotation and denotation are the easiest way to explain this; while the denotation of a word may mean one thing, the connotation of the word is just as if not more important than the actual meaning. Popular culture and slang also plays into the complete value of a word and that changes over time as well. While a word may remain constant in spelling and denotation, the word can completely change in its use and  everyday meaning. 

      Blake enters the picture for me via his poem "The School Boy", more specifically the fourth stanza. 

                              How can the bird that is born for joy

                              Sit in a cage and sing?

                              How can a child when fears annoy,

                              But droop his tender wing,

                              And forget his youthful spring?

It came up in class discussion of this poem that this stanza and the metaphor of the bird and child could also be imposed to be a reference to words and the inability to cage them. Even though these words exist in this poem in this order, they are merely put there by Blake. And one person cannot get the same meaning from the poem as another simply because words do not mean, or connote, the same meaning to people universally. I think that Frye too would agree that words cannot be caged, it is their nature to move and change in meaning and from story to story. While the context of words, or application of a genre or description for the text as a whole, these may only be able to provide a linear explanation and sort of imposed boundary on words they are still unable to be tamed. Perhaps this is why words and the tradition of story is such an interesting an complex study.