The Schoolboy:Notes

---

This child-monologue, like The Little Black Boy and The Chimney Sweeper, expresses a less idyllic and sunlit feeling than poems such as The Shepherd. The boy complains at the constraints of education and the classroom, which deprive him of access to the joys of Nature, and force him prematurely into the world of adult cares and responsibility. His argument may be an innocent (unthinking) reaction, and thus represents one form of Innocence: - innocent complaint . However, it may also represent a view on childhood and education often associated with Rousseau, and developed by Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads and Ode: Intimation of Immortality, that childhood is a state of natural grace, and entrance into the adult world means loss and imprisonment in the artificial constraints of civilisation ("shades of the prison-house begin to close / upon the dying boy", Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations). Within the Songs of Innocence it is probably right to view this as a 'transitional' poem, anticipating the darker vision of the Songs of Experience.


Return to The Schoolboy