English Literature

The poem The Fly by William Blake contrasts the similarities between man and the little fly when a chance encounters on the summers day and leads the narrator to reflect on the evident position in the experiences of the world. The manifold use of repetition, rhetorical questions, rhyming as well as other poetic techniques exclusively portray the unpredictability of life, authority of death and ultimately unite the fly and man as one in the universal experience.

On the other hand, A Slumber Part in my Spirit Seal by William Wordsworth poses as a literary commentary on the dreams and realities of life as they are failed to be realized through sleep. Essentially, the dream, like state, is devoid of any common fears when human attributes to life and age are dealt with extensively. This is succinct in the death of a young woman in the poem, whom her true identity remains a mystery. In view of these two poems Blake and Wordsworth are able to integrate the literary elements in the multicultural connections between the restoration and the eighteenth century as well as the romantic period. This paper seeks to discuss the literary analysis of the two poems with emphasis on the aesthetic and technical aspects of the poems, the timeline and space, structures as well as the poetic techniques used to elicit both emotional and intellectual effects.
In the broadest sense, Blakes poem The Fly has an ironic sting in its tail a factor that samples a wide range of criticism from the intellectual world. Literary critics suggests  that a large number of images and irony used in this poem presents a merely conditional defeat in the face of human life and portends a nihilist view of life and human experiences, thereby demonstrating its effects as a heap of bodies in the end of the poem (Marshal, 200123-28). In addition, Blake was a spiritual man and the presentation of his poem The Fly had an emotional effect appealing to the feelings of many, who would compare themselves to the fly as it gets to die. The critical agreement amongst scholars is about the poems plot than there is about the significances and consequences of the events in the poem.  Kroeber (200547-53) asserts that the eventual death of the fly depicts the narrators attempt to identify with his victim in a high degree of irony.

The intellectual and emotional effect that the poem produces rests on what Vaughan (200762-69) calls affective Stylistics and which helps in the reflection of both the reading of the poem and the complicity in the drama of the poem. In the Wordsworth poem, critics have found a contentious issue in the identity of a woman who dies and eventually fails to realize her dreams and reality. As such, this has conveyed the nebulous image of the girl in a more figurative language that finally captures the lamentation of the death of young girls in very emotive patterns (Kroeber, 200576-85).
The aesthetic and technical aspects of the poems are accounted on the large amount of diction, parody, tone, the personae as well as the structure. The Fly by Blake begins with the narrator brushing off an innocent fly in a very thoughtless moment. This is beautified poetically in the reflection that follows the careless actions of the narrator and consequently leads to question of morality as the narrator ponders. The use of satire, and the diction used in the third stanza changes the viewpoint as the fly dies which provokes the reader to consider the consequences of their actions (Marshal, 2001 67-74) .In addition, Blake uses these technical structural prudence to coax the reader in learning from this and apparently, consider the feelings of others no matter how insignificant they may appear.

Wordsworth in his poem follows the rules of the ballad by maintaining a quite tone in the poem A Slumber Part in My Spirit Seal, which undermine the sense of eternity by revealing how the lady died. Ideally, with a rich use of vocabulary and a concise stanza by stanza structure, the narrator response to the womans death is empty and lacks bitterness and instead takes a consolation front from the fact that she is now beyond the lifes trials. This presents the characters used in Wordsworth poem as connected to nature and only existent between the spiritual and human spheres drawing the similarities of a mythical nymph (Vaughan, 2007112-116).The entire poem captures the transcending human fears towards immortality connecting the dead woman to nature and the narrators slumber. Wordsworth in this poem understood the relationship between being a human being and a thing intuitively captured and knitted together in a more aesthetic and technical way.

Blakes poem The Fly has a loose structure with a rhyme scheme that is not consistent. Kroeber (200597-103) outlines that the chronology of thought of the man responsible for the death of the fly runs in the poem from when he ponders the difference between the fly and himself is knitted together by a thread of irregular rhyme scheme. Ultimately, this lead to the conclusion that the two are similar, both living out their lives hoping to avoid death. With a large number of juxtaposition of the fly and the speaker, the observation of the flys situation is made concise and compared to the narrator. The events that follow aim at creating the picture that the fly is powerless and utterly disposable at first but later own compares the life of the fly to his own desires. The symbols used in the poem portend the element of those who are below in the society such as the poor the disadvantaged (Marshal 2001134-141).

Wordsworths poem is structurally identical to a lyrical ballad. Comprising of only two four line stanzas, it presents a great deal of activities in such a narrow space. For instance, the speaker realizes that the young woman is dead and goes ahead to accept that bad things can happen in the society. The beginning stanza comments on the innocence of the speaker on the devastating nature of death and progresses into harsh lessons learnt during the death of the woman in stanza two. The choice to hide death between the stanza is a striking poetic principle that is not only interesting but also seeks to imply that the speaker is unable to  verbalize the pain that goes along with sudden loss (Vaughan, 200776-83).The rhyme scheme of this ballad follows the iambic tetrameter and ends in iambic trimester.

In summary both poems use human as well as animal characters to discuss the nature of God and power. The Fly by Blake addresses the paradoxical fact that God is responsible for both life and death and the experience of human life puts us on an equal scale. The poem by Wordsworth underscores that God has absolute powers to end the life of another being. The speaker describes the young woman trapped between the surfaces of the Earth as an idea of the sudden loss in life as well as the inevitability of death. From the foregoing discussion, it is evident that the two poems works to elicit both the intellectual and emotional effects by its use of images, parody and irony thus achieving its aesthetic and technical aspects such as structure and other poetic principles.