We can analyze each bit of the poem discursively but we cannot, as readers, see them altogether as vision, a fact being brought home to me even as I type for my computer is resisting Avison’s compounds ‘stormcloud’ and ‘branchtip’ with garish red lines! The poem is a fragmentary witness to whatever it is Avison …
If this is so, then Cohen would seem to be acknowledging human responsibility for at least part of the darkness of the world. We are not blind puppets. WE kill the flame of life in others with a free will. Man is a wolf to man, according to the proverb. A man who accuses God …
Children, of course, cannot be objects of satire in the usual sense (the neo-classical sense of Pope, Swift, and Dryden say) because they are not worthy targets. The strategy of Blakean satire, though, is not so much to ridicule the ridiculous or to castigate vice as to diagnose forms of ‘bad faith’, to show the …
