Complete Poems (William Blake)

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This text is prescribed for the 2027 to 2030 HSC under the English Advanced 11-12 (2024) syllabus (focus area: Textual conversations, paired with Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead).
It is not on the 2019 to 2026 list that the 2026 HSC uses. Sitting the 2026 HSC? See the 2019 to 2026 text list.

Why this text suits Textual conversations

Textual conversations asks how two texts, often separated by centuries, speak to each other about shared concerns and how their forms and contexts differ. Blake is an ideal partner for a modern novel because his poems already argue with the authorities of their own day: the Church, the state, commerce and a narrow rationalism. The paired text, Tokarczuk's novel, takes its title from a line in Blake's Proverbs of Hell, which is itself on the set list, so the conversation is documented in the text and not only imposed by the syllabus. Your task is to show what each text does that the other cannot.

What NESA sets

NESA prescribes William Blake, The Complete Poems (Penguin UK, 1977, ISBN 9780140422153), and names the poems to study. The set poems are:

1. To Morning
2. From Songs of Experience: The Sick Rose, The Tyger, The Human Abstract and A Poison Tree
3. Proverbs of Hell (Plates 7 to 11, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
4. The [First] Book of Urizen, Chapter 1 (Plate 3)

This page stays with those poems. Blake's other famous poems are not set, so do not build an essay on them. NESA states that all listed selections constitute the prescribed text, and that an exam question quotes from the listed edition, so the Penguin text is the reference.

The Songs of Experience group

Four of the set poems come from the darker half of Blake's paired collection. Songs of Experience was combined with Songs of Innocence in 1794, and the Experience songs often read as answers to the more trusting songs that precede them. Look at how each poem builds its argument through form.

• The Sick Rose. Eight lines of compressed symbol: a rose, an unseen worm that flies in the night and a bed of crimson joy. The poem opens with an exclamation ("O rose, thou art sick!") that turns a diagnosis into a lament. It is open to sexual, social and psychological readings. Strong answers choose one reading, support it with diction and sound, and explain why ambiguity is part of the point.
• The Tyger. A single sustained run of questions about a maker, built on hammering rhythm and forge imagery (hammer, chain, furnace, anvil). The key question ("Could frame thy fearful symmetry?") asks whether creative power can be terrifying as well as beautiful. Note the poem never answers, which is its argument: awe and dread are held together. NESA lists the title as The Tyger; some editions spell it Tiger.
• The Human Abstract. A poem that reasons like a sermon and exposes the reasoning. It opens by claiming that pity depends on making somebody poor ("Pity would be no more"), then grows the figures of cruelty, humility and mystery into a tree whose fruit is deceit. Track the move from abstract nouns to a single growing image. This is Blake's sharpest statement that virtues can be manufactured by the systems that need them.
• A Poison Tree. A tight anecdote in rhymed couplets, opening with plain confession ("I was angry with my friend:"). Telling the wrath ends it; hiding it makes it grow into a poisoned apple. The poem is a case study in repression, and the final image of a dead enemy under the tree is deliberately chilling. Ask whether the speaker is condemned or merely observed.

To Morning, Proverbs of Hell and Urizen

• To Morning comes from Blake's earliest printed collection, Poetical Sketches (1783). It is a lyric address to the dawn, in the older poetic tradition, and it shows Blake's habit of addressing a natural force as a person. Use it to show the lyric ancestry from which the later Songs break.
• Proverbs of Hell (Plates 7 to 11) is a run of short, paradoxical sayings from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (about 1790). Each overturns a conventional moral maxim, and together they argue that energy and excess are creative and that cautious obedience is deadening. Because Tokarczuk's title comes from one of these proverbs, this is the hinge of the pairing. Quote from your set edition if you use a proverb.
• The [First] Book of Urizen, Chapter 1 (Plate 3) belongs to the prophetic books. Urizen is Blake's figure of reason and law imposed as a closed system. This is Blake's myth of how a repressive order is born, and it matters most when you argue that his critique is structural and not just personal.

Voice, form and technique

• Deceptively simple verse. Ballad metres, plain words and nursery rhythms make the content more disturbing when it turns.
• Contrary states. Say which state of the soul you are describing, and watch for irony cutting both ways.
• The prophetic voice. Blake's speaker often claims to see what others cannot. This matters for the conversation with Tokarczuk, whose narrator also claims a way of seeing that the official world dismisses.
• Symbol rather than allegory. Images such as the worm, the rose and the tiger resist tidy decoding. Argue for the meaning you find most persuasive.
• Word and image. Blake engraved and illustrated his own poems. If your edition reproduces the plates, comment on image and text together.

Context as a driver of argument

Blake lived and worked in London through the French Revolution and the early Industrial Revolution. His poems argue that institutions manufacture suffering and then present it as natural. A powerful essay uses context this way, as the source of a poem's argument: The Human Abstract is persuasive because it traces how a society that depends on poverty praises the virtues that manage it, and Urizen gives that diagnosis a mythic shape. Use history to explain what a poem does, not to replace close reading.

Conversation with its pair

Read Blake beside Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and aim to show how each makes the other newly readable.

Values

Both texts defend imagination, compassion for the vulnerable (including animals) and the right to see the world differently, and both distrust institutions that demand conformity. Blake's values are visionary and religious in an unorthodox way. Tokarczuk's narrator holds a comparable moral intensity in a contemporary setting, and the novel borrows a Blakean proverb as a kind of creed.

Context

Blake writes against the confidence of the Enlightenment and the Church in a London being remade by industry. Tokarczuk writes about a rural Polish community where hunting, the Church and local officials hold power. Different centuries, same structure: a dissenting voice confronts established authority and is treated as eccentric.

Form

Blake compresses a worldview into a lyric of a few lines, where rhythm and repetition do the persuading. Tokarczuk extends a voice across a whole novel, using first-person narration, suspense and dark humour to make the reader weigh how reliable the narrator is. Ask what the lyric can do that the novel cannot (intensity, compression, symbol) and what the novel can do that the lyric cannot (sustained character, doubt, plot).

Common pitfalls

• Treating Innocence as simply good and Experience as simply bad. Blake's irony cuts both ways.
• Writing about poems that are not set. Anchor to the seven set poems.
• Biography as argument. Use context to explain what a poem does, not to excuse lack of close reading.
• Quoting loosely. Blake's punctuation and spelling vary between editions (for example thro' and charter'd in his own printing, against the modernised through and chartered), so quote the Penguin edition exactly.
• Writing about the pair as a theme list. Show how reading one text changes your understanding of the other.

Essay scaffold

Introduction

Argue a clear position on the conversation: for example, that Blake and Tokarczuk each dramatise a lone dissenting voice confronting institutional certainty, and that their forms decide how much we trust that voice.

Body 1

Blake's Experience poems (The Tyger with The Human Abstract, or A Poison Tree) and how form carries the argument.

Body 2

Proverbs of Hell and Urizen as the source of his critique of imposed order, and the link to Tokarczuk's title.

Body 3

The turn to the novel: shared values, different contexts, and what the shift from lyric to extended narrative changes.

Conclusion

Finish with a claim about what each text lacks without the other: Blake's lyrics compress dissent into a few memorable images, while Tokarczuk's novel gives that dissent a body, a plot and a moral risk. Together they ask whether a lone voice against authority is a prophet or a danger.

Read the text

Blake's poems are in the public domain, but the set text is the Penguin The Complete Poems (1977), so use that edition; NESA lets schools use another suitable edition only if it is out of print or widely unavailable. A free text of Songs of Innocence and of Experience is available through Project Gutenberg, which we used to check the quotations above (that edition prints the poem as "The Tiger", while NESA lists it as "The Tyger"). Quote from your set edition in the exam.

Sources

• NESA, HSC English prescriptions (checked 7 October 2026, year 2026).
• NESA, English Advanced Year 12 content pages: page 1, page 2, page 3 (prescription lists, checked 7 October 2026).