Poetic Analysis Of The Schoolboy SS1 Literature-in-English Lesson Note

ANALYSIS:

The speaker in the poem is a young boy who cherishes rising up in the fresh and enjoyable, summer morning. The cheeping of the birds announces the day break. The boy gets entertained by the slender company of the hunter who blows his clarion form a distance field and sweet lullabies of sky-lark.

In the 2nd slender: the speaker expresses his disappointment in attending school on a sweet summer morning where he desires to derive pleasure in the mirth of summer. It weakens and burdens him to study under a discipline teacher who supervises his actions. “Under a cruel eye outworn” the boy is embittered with the school system, and wonders why the pleasure of pleasant summer should be substituted with the compulsory and constant school going system where boredom replaces childhood happiness.

In stanza 3: Expresses the boy’s weariness in the system. He sits drooping out in the sea of tediousness. The boy restrains the assault on him by the oppressive personality of the teacher and unnecessary lectures (shower of meaningless words) the finicky teacher gushes his words of erudition without even attempting to understand the boy’s aspiration and his desire for unchecked freedom. The learning bower represents a garden where the boy can study in a natural atmosphere with nature, which is totally devoid of the teacher’s interference.

In stanza 4: the speaker likens his situation to that of a bird. He declares that birds that are born cheerful and jovial can never sing sweet songs if restricted in a cage. In the same vein, a child placed under an umbrella of intimidation, fear, tension, and an uninspiring teacher can not experience the natural instincts of joy, and playfulness. Obviously, a world full of rigid courses of discipline will ruthlessly take away the beautiful spring (the precious childhood days) of one’s life.

In stanza 5: the boy complains to the education authorize, to parents, desiring that if a budding child is picked and swept of in the early stage of life and is thrown in an ocean of anguish, where there is no one to care, if Misery withers the tender plants the beautiful buds and the new buds, summer can never ever be joyful. 

In stanza 6: the boy warns that if care and concern is enthrone to rule over the plants,Flowers, birds such a summer will be dry and will bear no fruit. He further desires from his parents how, how they can recover what grief has destroyed. Saying further that if the plants are withered due to canker of grief, no fruit will be there in the season of autumn(mellowing year), by implication, the child means , that if childhood pleasures and joys are restricted and truncated, the adult life will be drab and fruitless.

THEME:

The poem discusses a boy’s repelling comparison at his school, his company from the animated objects of summer morning (bird’s flowers etc.) to the unanimated objects of his school is certainly a matter of concern and grief. School life is an ordeal for him.

The boy’s feeling of summer festivity is countered by the terrifying eye of the teacher that robs him of all his childhood happiness. School is nothing but prison that negates the playful activity of childhood. 

The restriction or imposing in school forms a hurdle for the natural expression of creativity and forlorn the essence of genuineness. Therefore:

1. Rigid school training kills skill and creativity in a growing child.
2. Parents should endeavor to relax the rigid control over their wards.
3. The compulsory formal education that begins formulated by the adult without the input of the children who bear the consequence of their parent’s action should be revisited to add more leisure for the young stars to exercise themselves properly. After all our work and no play makes jack a mere toy.

ASSIGNMENT:

1. Discuss William Blake’s “schoolboy” as a protest poem.