Briefly examine the structure of William Blake’s poem, The School Boy.
William Blake’s “The School Boy” is unique in structure/form. Characteristically, the poem is structured in six stanzas of equal lines with five lines in each stanza. Therefore, the poem comprises thirty lines in all. The stanzas contain series of run-on-lines and this makes reading easy. Besides, the stanzas have beautiful rhymes which make the poem musical. The rhyming scheme of the poem is a b a b b-stanza 1, c d c d d – stanza 2, e f e ff -stanza 3, g h g h h-stanza 4, i j i j j-stanza 5, k L k L L – stanza 6, beginning from stanza 1- 6.
There are other notable aspects of the poetic form which include the use of exclamations, contrasting expressions, mixture of long and short sentences in each of the stanzas of the mixture of long and short sentences in each of the stanzas of the poem. In all, the form or the structure of the poem is simple and basically short unlike some long English poems. The meaning is equally not difficult to unravel because of the simplicity of diction.