Senior Woe
“I have no name,
I am but yet to be 100 years old”
How should you be known?
“I tired am,
Woe is my name.”
5
Bitter woe precedes thee.
Rueful woe.
Bitter woe of ripe old age,
Bitter woe, you are named
You wear a frown
10
A sign of lament—
Bitter woe precedes thee.
Defense
I chose the poem “Infant Joy” by William Blake to imitate for this project. I chose the poem because its simplistic nature conveys the innocent minimalism of being a newborn baby. The nature of the poem symbolizes how each person enters the world: bare without any possessions, predispositions or even names. Extremely simple poems that capture the essence of innocence are often difficult for me to write, so I chose this poem because I thought it would be a challenge. The result however, was a combination of the simple wording in Blake’s original poem and a more complex syntax. I chose this approach to juxtapose Blake’s work.
Rather than write another poem about the innocence of newborns, in order to imitate Blake’s poem I chose to write a poem with the opposite goal in mind. I did this because imitating the theme of the poem made it too difficult to properly imitate style while providing a significant amount of original content. On the other hand, writing a poem with the opposite theme allowed me to stylistically mirror Blake’s usage while providing unique and original content.
So rather than a poem about the young, my imitation is about the old. In the poem the speaker is on his deathbed, presumably in the throws of life. In Blake’s poem the infant is only two days old. Blake therefore uses poetic license to speak on behalf of the newborn infant. There is also a second speaker that has one line in the first stanza and speaks for the entirety of the second stanza. This is evident from the use of quotation marks to set off two sentences in the first stanza. The second speaker has been interpreted as the mother or caregiver. In the imitation, the second speaker is unaccounted for but can also presumably be the caregiver, or possibly the child of the primary speaker in order to mirror the relationships in the Blake poem.
While the diction is similar to that used in the Blake poem, the sentence structure is more complex. Still not wandering too far from the original text, the sentences in the imitation were written to be slightly more convoluted and complex. This fits with the overall theme of the poem because it shows that over time, as we grow old, everything in life becomes more complicated. The diction however, remains somewhat simple because it still fits with the theme of the primary speaker being tired and weary.
In the imitation the speaker indicates that he is woeful, full of worry and perhaps regret. These emotions serve to highlight juxtaposition to the Blake poem that focuses entirely on the happiness associated with the birth of a child. While there may be situations that evoke different emotions, Blake focuses on the ideal situation where the child is welcomed and cared for, bringing joy and perfectly portraying innocence. The opposite is true of the imitation. Neither poem is meant to offer a categorical display of emotions tied to either event. Thus, while there may be those who are content to grow old in peace, the speaker in the imitation is old, tired, worn-out and cynical: the opposite of the innocence of the newborn.
Though he is old and has been on the earth for nearly a century, the speaker is not given a proper name. In Blake’s “Infant Joy” the child is called ‘Joy.’ Because this is both a name and an emotion it is used interchangeably in the poem, which offers the interpretation that the child has not yet been named, but is called for the symbol that it represents. In the same way the aging speaker is called ‘Woe,’ and the name is used in the same way that Joy is used in the Blake poem, but rather than highlighting the happiness of life, it points to a more skeptical version of it. It evokes images of the trials and tribulations of the speaker in the reader’s mind. Moreover, it brings to mind the old adage that ‘we brought nothing into this world, we can take nothing out of it’ (derived from 1 Timothy 6:7). While the child in Blake’s poem has no name because he had just entered the world, the speaker in the imitation has no name because he is about to leave it behind in this world.
The imitation of “Infant Joy” by William Blake used similar diction and thematic elements to juxtapose mood and syntax in a poem that mirrored Blake’s. The poem matched Blake’s in order to provide a look at the other end of life.