The Redbreast Chasing The Butterfly Analysis

Throughout the history of the world, at the forefront of every major conflict faced by mankind, one topic has consistently emerged as a subject of debate: man’s inhumanity to man. Tyrants, humanitarians, and policymakers alike have wrestled with this subject, for better or for worse, when confronting slavery, genocide, and war. In the end, it has been authors who have recorded the progression of this issue on the pages of history. This has been especially true in the nation of Britain, the historical debating ground for such paramount issues. British literature is filled with examples of those who have struggled with various facets of human injustice. In particular, “The Redbreast Chasing the Butterfly" by William Wordsworth, "The Little Black

While he makes many allusions in “The Redbreast Chasing the Butterfly”, the most powerful is his allusion to Adam in lines 12-14 of the poem. According to William Knight’s notes in “Wordsworth’s Poetical Works”, this is not a direct allusion to the Bible as one might assume; rather, it is an allusion to lines 185-190 of Book XI of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (“The Redbreast Chasing the Butterfly” Footnote C). These lines refer to a point in the epic after Adam and Eve sin and evil is just beginning to affect the natural world. In the story, Adam sees an eagle chasing two beautiful birds (most likely peacocks, according to Thomas H. Luxon’s notes), which would have been unthinkable before the Fall (Paradise Lost 185-190). This grieves Adam because he knows that this is not the way God created the world to function. This particular allusion suggests that, just as it affected the physical world, man’s sinfulness is the root of human injustice. In addition to allusion, William Wordsworth also uses extended metaphor throughout his poem. By comparing people to robins and butterflies, he personifies the intangible quality of injustice. The “robins” of his poem can be seen as people who are bound by a sense of false superiority and treat others poorly as a result, while the “butterflies” of Wordsworth’s poem represent those who are treated poorly by others without

The poem, penned by William Blake in the late eighteenth century, discusses the issue of racial injustice from the perspective of a young African boy. The boy has an innocent view of injustice, seeing skin color as a “cloud” that covers the soul (“The Little Black Boy” 23). However, even with this innocence, the author does not ignore the racial injustice that existed at this time. In the poem, Blake, from the perspective of the black boy, addresses slavery, saying that at the time some people justified this practice by saying that people with dark skin were “bereaved of light” (4). Blake criticizes the injustice of this perspective when he states that it is only when the black boy is “like” the white boy will the white boy “love [him]” (28). Blake uses this statement to expose selfishness as the real root behind the support of the slave trade and racial