Blake or Wordsworth? Reading the Difference

The idea

Blake and Wordsworth are both early Romantics who write about children, nature and the city, so the exam can ask which one wrote a passage. First, look at form: Blake writes short songs in simple rhymed stanzas, often with a child's or a bard's voice; Wordsworth writes long blank-verse meditations, sonnets and lyrics in his own reflective voice. Second, look at the stance on nature: for Wordsworth nature teaches and consoles, a presence "far more deeply interfused"; for Blake, nature is a symbol in a moral and spiritual drama, as the Tyger is. Third, look at the social target: Blake accuses church and state directly, the "mind-forg'd manacles," while Wordsworth more often turns toward memory. Fourth, look for paired contraries, Innocence and Experience, which point to Blake, or for recollection in tranquillity, which points to Wordsworth. Then name the poet and the evidence.