Songs of Innocence and Experience

WILLIAM BLAKE
 
Context
William Blake was born in London in 1757. His father, a hosier, soon recognized his son's artistic talents and sent him to study at a drawing
school when he was ten years old. At 14, William asked to be apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, under whose direction he further developed his
innate skills. As a young man Blake worked as an engraver, illustrator, and drawing teacher, and met such artists as Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman, as
well as Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose classicizing style he would later come to reject. Blake wrote poems during this time as well, and his first printed
collection, an immature and rather derivative volume called Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783. Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, followed
by Songs of Experience in 1793 and a combined edition the next year bearing the title Songs of Innocence and Experience showing the Two Contrary
States of the Human Soul.
 
Blake's political radicalism intensified during the years leading up to the French Revolution. He began a seven-book poem about the
Revolution, in fact, but it was either destroyed or never completed, and only the first book survives. He disapproved of Enlightenment rationalism, of
institutionalized religion, and of the tradition of marriage in its conventional legal and social form (though he was married himself). His unorthodox
religious thinking owes a debt to the Swedish philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), whose influence is particularly evident in Blake's The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the 1790s and after, he shifted his poetic voice from the lyric to the prophetic mode, and wrote a series of long
prophetic books, including Milton and Jerusalem. Linked together by an intricate mythology and symbolism of Blake's own creation, these books
propound a revolutionary new social, intellectual, and ethical order.
 
Blake published almost all of his works himself, by an original process in which the poems were etched by hand, along with illustrations and
decorative images, onto copper plates. These plates were inked to make prints, and the prints were then colored in with paint. This expensive and labor-
intensive production method resulted in a quite limited circulation of Blake's poetry during his life. It has also posed a special set of challenges to
scholars of Blake's work, which has interested both literary critics and art historians. Most students of Blake find it necessary to consider his graphic art
and his writing together; certainly he himself thought of them as inseparable. During his own lifetime, Blake was a pronounced failure, and he harbored
a good deal of resentment and anxiety about the public's apathy toward his work and about the financial straits in which he so regularly found himself.
When his self-curated exhibition of his works met with financial failure in 1809, Blake sank into depression and withdrew into obscurity; he remained
alienated for the rest of his life. His contemporaries saw him as something of an eccentric--as indeed he was. Suspended between the neoclassicism of
the 18th century and the early phases of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single poetic school or age. Only in the 20th century did wide audiences
begin to acknowledge his profound originality and genius.

Analysis
  Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) juxtapose the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption
and repression; while such poems as "The Lamb" represent a meek virtue, poems like "The Tyger" exhibit opposing, darker forces. Thus the collection
as a whole explores the value and limitations of two different perspectives on the world. Many of the poems fall into pairs, so that the same situation or
problem is seen through the lens of innocence first and then experience. Blake does not identify himself wholly with either view; most of the poems are
dramatic--that is, in the voice of a speaker other than the poet himself. Blake stands outside innocence and experience, in a distanced position from
which he hopes to be able to recognize and correct the fallacies of both. In particular, he pits himself against despotic authority, restrictive morality,
sexual repression, and institutionalized religion; his great insight is into the way these separate modes of control work together to squelch what is most
holy in human beings.
 
The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their transformation as the child grows
into adulthood. Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from an adult perspective. Many
of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the corruption and distortion of experience. Others take a
more critical stance toward innocent purity: for example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the emotional power of rudimentary Christian values,
he also exposes--over the heads, as it were, of the innocent--Christianity's capacity for promoting injustice and cruelty.
 
The Songs of Experience work via parallels and contrasts to lament the ways in which the harsh experiences of adult life destroy what is good
in innocence, while also articulating the weaknesses of the innocent perspective ("The Tyger," for example, attempts to account for real, negative forces
in the universe, which innocence fails to confront). These latter poems treat sexual morality in terms of the repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and
secrecy, all of which corrupt the ingenuousness of innocent love. With regard to religion, they are less concerned with the character of individual faith
than with the institution of the Church, its role in politics, and its effects on society and the individual mind. Experience thus adds a layer to innocence
that darkens its hopeful vision while compensating for some of its blindness.
 
The style of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is simple and direct, but the language and the rhythms are painstakingly crafted, and the
ideas they explore are often deceptively complex. Many of the poems are narrative in style; others, like "The Sick Rose" and "The Divine Image," make
their arguments through symbolism or by means of abstract concepts. Some of Blake's favorite rhetorical techniques are personification and the
reworking of Biblical symbolism and language. Blake frequently employs the familiar meters of ballads, nursery rhymes, and hymns, applying them to
his own, often unorthodox conceptions. This combination of the traditional with the unfamiliar is consonant with Blake's perpetual interest in
reconsidering and reframing the assumptions of human thought and social behavior.
 

Study Questions
 
Discuss Blake's use of auditory imagery in the poems, and cite one example.

Blake's work shows a constant awareness of the ironies of publishing "songs" in written form--publishing poems that lay claim to an oral culture in a
series of elaborately visual engravings. This awareness reflects the general Romantic preoccupation with the possibility of capturing in writing the
rhythms, immediacy, and spontaneity of the spoken human voice. Blake seems, if not pessimistic, at least dubious about such a possibility, as can be
seen in his Introduction to Songs of Innocence. Here, a child gives a wandering bard three commands: first to play his pipe, second to sing his songs,
and third to write them. This progression may imply a decline, from the purity of music (without linguistic meaning), to orality (bound by meaning but
still spontaneous and fleeting), to literacy (without need for human presence and perhaps less personal). The speaker's pen, ambiguously, "stain[s] the
water clear"; thus the image simultaneously implies both a purification (to "stain" it "clear") and a corruption (to "stain" the "clear" water). On which
process does the emphasis lie? Is writing part of the descent into experience?

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Comment on Blake as a social critic.
 
Blake wrote in an era of great social and political upheaval. The democratic ideals of the French Revolution of 1789--the year of the first publication of
Songs of Innocence--undoubtedly influenced him. But in politics Blake aligned with no particular system or idealism; he speaks always for the primacy
of the individual and the imagination. Blake did attach importance to particular social reforms: one might extrapolate some of these from a poem such
as "London," depicting great suffering and oblivious social institutions, or one might consider Blake's use of the plights of innocent children in a whole
range of poems such as "Holy Thursday." But a reading of Blake as social critic should always keep in mind the transcendent, humane values of the
imagination and of the self unrestricted by narrow social convention; for these values formed the core of his moral code. This code stringently opposes
an impersonal, conventional transcendence, and rejects the consolation of a life after this world--both of which are offered by the Church. See in
particular the irony of "The Little Black Boy" for evidence of this last point.
 
What were (and are) the effects of Blake's mode of publishing his poems with handcrafted colored engravings?

Blake is somewhat misnamed as a poet; he is perhaps better called a craftsman or artisan, and is widely studied and valued as a visual artist. To be
understood fully his poems must be considered as material artifacts. The color and composition of surrounding images can deeply change our stance on
a poem. (You might find an edition of Blake containing his images in color and test out this hypothesis on "The Nurse's Song.") We should also
recognize that such an arduous publication process helped condemn Blake to relative obscurity during his own lifetime. Poems universally known today
would have been read by very, very few of Blake's contemporaries.

"The Lamb"
 
Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee Gave thee life & bid thee feed. By the stream & o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice! Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee
Little Lamb I'll tell thee, Little Lamb I'll tell thee! He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meek & he is mild, He became a little
child: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Little Lamb God bless thee. Little Lamb God bless thee.
Summary
The poem begins with the question, "Little Lamb, who made thee?" The speaker, a child, asks the lamb about its origins: how it came into being, how it
acquired its particular manner of feeding, its "clothing" of wool, its "tender voice." In the next stanza, the speaker attempts a riddling answer to his own
question: the lamb was made by one who "calls himself a Lamb," one who resembles in his gentleness both the child and the lamb. The poem ends with
the child bestowing a blessing on the lamb.
 
Form
"The Lamb" has two stanzas, each containing five rhymed couplets. Repetition in the first and last couplet of each stanza makes these lines into a
refrain, and helps to give the poem its song-like quality. The flowing l's and soft vowel sounds contribute to this effect, and also suggest the bleating of
a lamb or the lisping character of a child's chant.
 
Commentary
The poem is a child's song, in the form of a question and answer. The first stanza is rural and descriptive, while the second focuses on abstract spiritual
matters and contains explanation and analogy. The child's question is both naive and profound. The question ("who made thee?") is a simple one, and
yet the child is also tapping into the deep and timeless questions that all human beings have, about their own origins and the nature of creation. The
poem's apostrophic form contributes to the effect of naiveté, since the situation of a child talking to an animal is a believable one, and not simply a
literary contrivance. Yet by answering his own question, the child converts it into a rhetorical one, thus counteracting the initial spontaneous sense of
the poem. The answer is presented as a puzzle or riddle, and even though it is an easy one--child's play--this also contributes to an underlying sense of
ironic knowingness or artifice in the poem. The child's answer, however, reveals his confidence in his simple Christian faith and his innocent
acceptance of its teachings.
 
The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus. The traditional image of Jesus as a lamb underscores the Christian values of gentleness, meekness, and
peace. The image of the child is also associated with Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a special solicitude for children, and the Bible's depiction of
Jesus in his childhood shows him as guileless and vulnerable. These are also the characteristics from which the child-speaker approaches the ideas of
nature and of God. This poem, like many of the Songs of Innocence, accepts what Blake saw as the more positive aspects of conventional Christian
belief. But it does not provide a completely adequate doctrine, because it fails to account for the presence of suffering and evil in the world. The
pendant (or companion) poem to this one, found in the Songs of Experience, is "The Tyger"; taken together, the two poems give a perspective on
religion that includes the good and clear as well as the terrible and inscrutable. These poems complement each other to produce a fuller account than
either offers independently. They offer a good instance of how Blake himself stands somewhere outside the perspectives of innocence and experience
he projects.

The subtitle of Songs of Innocence and Experience is ‘Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’. The word ‘contrary’ had a very
specific and important meaning for Blake. Like almost all great poets, he was an enemy of dualism. For two thousand five hundred years Western
thought has been intensely dualistic, seeing everything as composed of warring opposites, head and heart, body and spirit, male and female, human and
non-human, life and death, innocence and experience, good and evil, heaven and hell, as though the split between the hemispheres of the human brain
were projecting itself on everything perceived by that brain.
Most of the poems in Songs of Innocence, lacking contraries, lack also energy, progression and complexity. They mime the state of infancy in
their simplicity and vulnerability. Even in those poems where there is no overt foreshadowing of experience, there is an element of desperation in the
joy, because we cannot avoid supplying the knowledge that the joys depicted are exclusive to infancy and very short-lived. It is like the state of Adam
and Eve in the garden before the arrival of the serpent. There are many images of atonement, but it is an atonement Blake can maintain only by forcing
himself to take ‘portions of existence’ for the whole, by keeping at bay the contraries pressing to darken the scene, as the tiger prowls just out of sight,
threatening the defenceless lamb, and the adequacy of meekness and mildness in any real world.
Blake is fully aware of several dangers in this enterprise, the greatest of which is sentimentality, one form of which is to allow oneself to
fancy another reality in which, for example, lions are vegetarian. But the god who walked with Adam in the garden in the cool of the day is the same

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god who numbered the predatory lion among the first of his creatures, demanding of Job: ‘Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion? or fill the appetite of the
young lions?’. This is very much at odds with his earlier claim to have given ‘every green herb for meat’ to ‘every beast of the earth’. As Milton could
not make his heaven as interesting as his hell, so Blake is desperate to give innocence its due before allowing experience to have its devastating say. He
rejected several excellent poems from the collection, presumably because in them he had failed to keep experience out; they are frequently more explicit
in their reservations (to say the least) about innocence.
Nevertheless, there are many poems from which he cannot keep out the shadow of experience. Several of the apparently carefree poems are
deceptive when looked at more closely. In the ‘Introduction’ the poet moves through three phases. First he pipes, which always seems to Blake to
suggest a purely natural and spontaneous music – what Milton called ‘native wood-notes wild’. The child responds with laughter. Then he sings a song
about a lamb, and the child weeps. Song, since it involves language and a fixed melody, is more complex. Although we are told that the child weeps
‘with joy’, the fact that we weep for both joy and sorrow perhaps indicates that they are closer than they seem. Having persuaded the singer to turn poet,
the child then vanishes, so that the written songs he produces (more sophisticated again) have no live audience. He writes so that ‘every child may joy
to hear’, but can have no assurance that they will. Moreover, the reed he converts into a pen is ‘hollow’, which, though literally it would have to be,
cannot avoid a certain incongruity. The words ‘hollow’ and ‘happy’ sit uneasily together. The incongruity deepens when we are told that in order to
write poems the speaker has to ‘stain’ the clear water. The word introduces, in however dilute a form, the idea of sin and corruption. In the very act of
celebrating childish innocence, the poet corrupts it through his inability to prevent the shadow of his own experience falling over the scene. This drives
away the very spontaneity he is seeking to express, as the scientist can never observe how creatures behave when they are not being observed.

Blake was not, on the whole, a great admirer of Wordsworth, who made, he thought, too much of the non-human world, as if mountains, for
example, had meanings other than those conferred on them by human vision. But he was a great admirer of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from recollections of early Childhood’. Though Blake frequently compared the innocence of the infant to the innocence of Christ, there is
no suggestion in Blake as there is in Wordsworth, that infant joy derives from the ‘vision splendid’ of the soul’s prenatal existence in heaven. Heaven
and hell in Blake are other names for states of the human soul. His terminology and imagery translates much more easily into psychological than
eschatological terms, and indeed the work of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung constitutes just such a translation.
But Blake and Wordsworth are very close in their description of how that innocence comes to be lost. Both Blake and Wordsworth were
deeply concerned with the exploitation and persecution of children in their own day. Not long before Blake, the Wesley brothers, founders of
Methodism, had taught that laughter, singing - other than hymns - and dancing were sinful and should be eradicated in schools. Children were
condemned to slavery in the mills, and often died there. In Blake the little boy becomes a chimney-sweep, the little girl a harlot. Deeper than these
specific abuses is the imposition by society on the young (beginning with parents and nurses) of the false inauthentic values of a society living in bad
faith. The parents, having been themselves brainwashed, become in turn agents of this society. Parental pressures are later institutionalized in the form
of schools and churches. And all this often in the name of love. The main concern of Blake and Wordsworth is with the systematic stultification of the
children’s souls and crippling of their capacity to lead fulfilling lives, which would probably happen to some extent in any ‘civilized’ society at any
time.

The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their transformation as the child
grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from an adult
perspective. Many of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the corruption and distortion of
experience. Others take a more critical stance toward innocent purity: for example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the emotional power of
rudimentary Christian values, he also exposes--over the heads, as it were, of the innocent--Christianity's capacity for promoting injustice and
cruelty.
The Songs of Experience work via parallels and contrasts to lament the ways in which the harsh experiences of adult life destroy what is
good in innocence, while also articulating the weaknesses of the innocent perspective ("The Tyger," for example, attempts to account for real,
negative forces in the universe, which innocence fails to confront). These latter poems treat sexual morality in terms of the repressive effects of
jealousy, shame, and secrecy, all of which corrupt the ingenuousness of innocent love. With regard to religion, they are less concerned with the
character of individual faith than with the institution of the Church, its role in politics, and its effects on society and the individual mind.
Experience thus adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision while compensating for some of its blindness.
The style of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is simple and direct, but the language and the rhythms are painstakingly crafted, and
the ideas they explore are often deceptively complex. Many of the poems are narrative in style; others, like "The Sick Rose" and "The Divine
Image," make their arguments through symbolism or by means of abstract concepts. Some of Blake's favorite rhetorical techniques are
personification and the reworking of Biblical symbolism and language. Blake frequently employs the familiar meters of ballads, nursery rhymes,
and hymns, applying them to his own, often unorthodox conceptions. This combination of the traditional with the unfamiliar is consonant with
Blake's perpetual interest in reconsidering and reframing the assumptions of human thought and social behavior.