While mentioning summer, William Blake's "The Schoolboy" is not really a poem that focuses on summer, but a lament of a youngster who simply hates to attend school.

Blake’s “The Schoolboy” consists of six five-line stanzas each with the rime scheme, ABABB.

First Stanza: “I love to rise in a summer morn”

The first line of “The Schoolboy” asserts, “I love to rise in a summer morn,” and the second lines continues, “When the birds sing on every tree.” The speaker delights in summer under certain conditions, with the birds singing in the trees, with the huntsman winding his horn, and the “the skylark sings with me: / O what sweet company!”

Second Stanza: “But to go to school in a summer morn”

But he does not enjoy summer, or apparently life in general, when he has to go to school. Going to school “drives all joy away!” But then suddenly, the speaker switches from the purely personal first person to complain that the “little ones,” presumably his classmates, “spend the day / In sighing and dismay.”

The poor little creatures! They sit “under a cruel eye outworn.” The use of the word “outworn” seems to appear only for the purpose of providing a rime with “morn.” The notion that the “cruel eye” exhausts them does not make sense.

Third Stanza: “Ah then at times I drooping sit

Then the speaker returns to the first-person: “Ah then at times I drooping sit, / And spend many an anxious hour.” He is apparently one of those poor little ones who is exhausted by a cruel teacher stealing their summer from them.

The pitiful speaker cannot even enjoy his books, because he must “sit in learning’s bower, / Worn through with the dreary shower.” Again, the reader must suspect rime as the culprit responsible for the choice of the word “shower.” Just what kind of “shower” is this? Is the speaker crying a river?

Fourth Stanza: “How can the bird that is born for joy”

In the fourth stanza, the speaker likens the “little ones” including himself to a poor bird that cannot sing because it is sitting in a cage. Yet Maya Angelou’s famous title claimed, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Who is correct? Can a caged bird sing or not?

Regardless of the birds, this speaker wants to know, “How can a child, when fears annoy, / But droop his tender wing, / And forget his youthful spring!” Not only is summer destroyed by school the youth’s entire youth is obliterated.

Final Two Stanzas

In the fifth stanza, the speaker compares the poor students to spring flowers having their buds and bloom stripped away, as he asks in the sixth stanza, “How shall the summer arise in joy, / Or the summer fruits appear?” How indeed? The comparison is ludicrous, but Blake’s creative principle requires much of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “suspension of disbelief” from the reader. Perhaps, too much.

And After-Thought

Did students have to attend school in summer back when Blake was a schoolboy? Blake did not attend conventional school; therefore, we cannot read this poem as biography. He would not have suffered as he described the poor little ones in this poem, but Blake believed that “imagination” was superior to “reason” in creating art; therefore, the speaker of “The Schoolboy” sympathizes with the poor students who have to sit in classrooms, instead of simply sitting outside reading, as Blake believed education should be.

Other Summer Poems

• Dickinson’s Summer
• Frost’s ‘The Oven Bird’
• Whittier’s ‘The Barefoot Boy’
• Riley’s 'The Old Swimmin’-Hole'
• Amy Lowell’s ‘Penumbra’

Summer Poem Poll

Please take a moment to vote for your favorite summer poem in this month’s poll. Your choices are:

• 1. Emily Dickinson’s “I know a place where Summer strives”
• 2. John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Barefoot Boy”
• 3. James Whitcomb Riley’s “The Old Swimmin’ Hole”
• 4. Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird”
• 5. Amy Lowell’s “Penumbra”

The poll is located under the blog on the homepage of the Poetry site. Thank you for participating in this month’s poll.