JOURNAL OF ELT AND EDUCATION

ISSN: 2618-1290 (Print), 2663-1482 (Online), Volume 4, Issue 3, September 2021, Page: 71-74
Published by, Hello-Teen Society & Center for Academic Research and Development (CARD)

Received: 30/07/2021 Accepted: 02/09/2021 Published: 05/09/2021

Mystical Analysis of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of

[Citation: Dutta, B. K. (2021). Mystical Analysis of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Journal of ELT
and Education, 4(3): 71-74.]

Abstract
The study aims to show how William Blake has incorporated the thought of
mysticism in the different poems of Songs of Innocence and Experience with
keen observation. Blake holds the idea regarding the word ‘Mysticism’ that this
life has no meaning in this world, but this life becomes eternal after death. Death
is the birth of a soul. Human beings are responsible for their actions and their
aftermaths. The literary works which this study made completed use from
different. The study finds out and analyses the mystic elements used in the
poems of Songs of Innocence and Experience. The paper on such a topic of the
great divine poems of Blake conducted the study is a source of inspiration and
interest for the readers.
Keywords: Mysticism, Tyger, Lamb, Innocence, Experience

The mysticism that approaches the mysterious existence and the mysterious knowledge about life
and death looks for the real heart’s concern, and it is the aspiration to know the unknown.
(Samantaray, 2011, p.39). It was the common thought of William Blake’s writings that played an
influential role in his works. The idea he kept remain insight him that whatever is divine in God must
be sacred in man. The most common elements he used in his poetry are mysticism and its
characteristics, lyricism, symbolism, and imagination. But his personal experiences lead him to use
mysticism mostly in his poetry as he thinks visions are seen neither by the bodily eye nor with the
thought Rather it is apprehended with the intellect.
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience contains two aspects of nature; the natural
world and human nature or behavior. It exposes the two contradictory sides between two parts of
human nature, making the question of how much need the natural world is for the development of
children and how the natural world strikes childhood, and finally, the both lighter and darker views
of human nature.
In the very opening lyric, the poet creates a link with the Christ–child through the symbol of
Lamb. The two sections of the book, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, are designed with
contrasting elements in a single frame. The first section describes the imaginative thoughts of the state
of Innocence, and the second depicts the challenges of human life that force him for being corrupt and
destroy it. The poems ‘The lamb’ and ‘The Tyger’ are symbolic creatures chosen to explore the two
opposite states of the human soul; firstly, the lamb is demolished by experience, and secondly, the
tiger is bound to be recovered the world. Blake’s thought of mysticism is justified by ‘The Lamb’ and
‘The Tyger’. Blake represents in ‘The Lamb’ the mystical states through Innocence, and he recognizes
it with childhood. The poem 'The Lamb' appears actually to be uttered by a child. As a symbol, the

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lamb has represented the human child. The child wants to know about the originator of Lamb along
with the answer to the questions about lamb’s spineless woolly colourful clothing and food because
the child has the mystic knowledge indistinctively to find the way to reach the creator and to know
the undisclosed reason of the creation though the child has the idea that
Creator is lamb and became a child. As the poet utters:
I a child and thou a lamb
We are called by His name. (Blake, ‘The Lamb’, 17-18)

The presence of God that be in the lamb and the child and possibly is the human being. The child
and the lamb in the poem have used the symbol of the thought of mysticism. ‘He is called by thy
name’ supports that the creator of lamb God Himself, who is the lamb. On the other hand, the child
and the other things nothing else but Christian thoughts as we find in the line:
He is meek and He is mild. (Blake, ‘The Lamb’, 15)

Again, Blake writes few poems in “Songs of Experience” which were the opposite reactions to the
previously written poems in “Songs of Innocence”. As ‘The Tyger’ is the counterpoint to ‘The Lamb’:
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? (Blake, ‘The Tyger’)

In the stanza above quoted from the fifth stanza of the poem, The Tiger in the Songs of
Experience (1794) where the poet compares this deadly animal to the lamb which is pliable, quite
contradict to the anterior. It is a poem of the production of thinkable revision. William Blake provides
motivation and life-force to human life for creating human life comfortable. Blake, in ‘The Tiger’,
discusses human beings and their spirit. The tiger in the poem symbolized as the ferocious force in
the soul is important to disband the bonds of experience. God has given two powers to human beings;
the first one is to deed in a good manner and the second one is to deed in an evil manner. For this
reason, human beings are enabled to control or stabilize their life. (Reddy, 2018) In the stanza above,
the poet intends to make a comparison with this ferocious animal to the lamb which is docile as
completely different to the past one. Moreover, an allusion from Paradise Lost by John Milton is also
found where the poet mentions that when the tiger was created, the stars (here means Satan and his
followers) which had been in war with Him were so terrified by Tiger’s sight that they received their
loss and cast down their weapons and get the sky wet with the tears.
In the third line of the stanza, the poet surprises to see God would have delighted after forming
Tiger as it had been beyond the words to describe the satanic approaches. He also ponders He the
same who was the creator of the lamb because the latter is quite docile while the former is rampant
enough to scare Satan.
According to Blake’s conception, while the fallen angels approached hell, they “watered heaven
with their tears” kicking them off behind the stars. It indicates the ultimate relationship with the fallen
man, and the chapter into the world of death, and such frights as the tigers. The human being and
angels have had into Experience. The other explanation is the rebellious angels are so surprised to
have about God’s newly created, tiger, which is cruel, solid as well as brutal.
Again, Blake says:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb, make thee? (Blake, ‘The Tyger’)

The lines 19-20 of the poem, the speaker asks whether the creator of the Tyger is the same who
created the Lamb. The Lamb is a Christian symbol that has been used in the other poem of Blake. The
Lamb of God is a symbol of Jesus Christ, meant the speaker is conjecturing if the same God created
both the creature under the study. The speaker also spectacles if the creator, again apparently the
Christian God, smiled upon appreciating his work of the Tyger accomplished.
Dutta, B. K. 73

On the other side, ‘The lamb’ is found as calm and innocent while the tiger is found as brutal and
dangerous. In addition, the creator is the same in the case of both. Blake says in “The Lamb”:
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
………………………………….
He is called by thy name
For He call Himself a Lamb. (Blake, “The Lamb”)

The poet here creates a portrait of a lamb where the child of innocence in the poem repeatedly
asks the lamb about his creator. The same question has been put frequently all through the first lines
of the poem. The child speaks to Little Lamb for asking him who made him and wants to ascertain
whether he knows who created him. The child wants to know who gave the Lamb his life, who fed
him while living along the river on the other side of the meadow. He also wants to get the idea from
the Lamb who provided him with eye-soothing body-cover (clothing) that is softest, full of wool and
shining. The child of innocence also asks the lamb how he got such a bleating voice that creates a
pleasant note around the valleys. The stanza above is penetrated by the child’s innocence that
considers the primary stage in Blake’s journey towards the truth.
On the other hand, we read “The Divine Image” in the Songs of Innocence and “A Divine Image”
in the Songs of Experience written on human nature. While the poem “The Divine Image” focuses on
affirmative moods of human nature, “A Divine Image” looks at the opposite sides. These have
discussed nature through exploring the instinct universal outcome on human nature. Lastly, the
poems mark the affirmative result that being connected with the universe has on humankind.
Though Blake beholds the idea of natural learning, he also likes to use a concept of the nimbler
human nature that is exposed in the poems of his “The Divine Image”. Blake's poem “The Divine
Image” draws a picture of God and Humanity. The image of a happier, lighter side of human nature
is drawn in the poem “The Divine Image” of Songs of Innocence. The poem recites how these
mannerisms are traced in both humans and God. If “Mercy has a human heart, / Pity a human face,”
then by highlighting these qualities in mankind, he is providing human nature with a progressive
connotation (9-10). He also narrates the themes of “Peace.” And “Love”. We find in the 1st half of the
poem that “Love, [is] the human form divine / And Peace, [is] the human dress” (11-12). These
qualities make humankind none but an abundant creature that is adept at compassion. Blake has
explored the idea of equality of all men in the last portion of the poem.
Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too. (Blake, ‘The Divine Image’)

Blake affirms in the final stanza that people should have to love and show respect to all human
beings’ any proof of the virtues, whether those virtues perform in another Christian or even found “in
Heathen, Turk or Jew”. Many of the Christians or Blake’s period was contemptuous of people who
had not been Christians. Blake also considers that the creator or God might be found redirected in the
goodness of any person.
The terms “Jealousy,” “Secrecy,” “Cruelty,” and “Terror,” have been applied in the poem ‘A
Divine Image’ Instead of applying the peaceful terms the gentler terms “Mercy Pity Peace and Love”
in ‘The Divine Image”. Mysteriously, Blake applies “Secrecy” as the sign of opposite of “Love.” Bake
makes “Love” as an expression that the innocent holds, parting “Secrecy” as the expression of the
experienced. Songs of Innocence appears to condense the open, loving human being that Songs of
Experience show the lonely human being. As they get more experienced, the poet suggests that
people convert more mysterious and less open to being kind to others. “A Divine Image” shows these
darker notions of the human being.
Blake draws a different picture of the spiritual in the Songs of Experience. Blake in "The Angel"
interconnects to the reader what has been interconnected to him not only by the unearthly guest of the
poem but by the unkindness and wickedness of life. ‘The Angel’ is all about someone when they are
innocent, and angels come to relax them. A person becomes ager for the time being, then the angel
Mystical Analysis of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience 74

quits, and they got the idea of how to protect themselves. When the angel goes back, the person does
not have any importance of the angel.
Soon my Angel came again;
I was armed, he came in vain;
For the time of youth was fled
And grey hairs were on my head. (Blake, 'The Angel')

The line “For the time of youth was fled / And grey hairs were on my head” recommends that
the speaker has grown ager for the time being. The following line “I was armed, he came in vain”
bonds back into how the speaker describes that they had “armed their fear” in the earlier stanza. The
line “He came in vain” states that the speaker does not demand to the angel for any help. Blake might
be recommending that as the speaker has been older, they might have discharged the practicality of
religion and reality. It makes a difference between the speaker’s affirmative attitude on religion and
towards the angel at the very starting of the poem.
These themes are incorporated extensively in Blake's prose poem "The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell". Blake, in this artful work, explores the ordinary ideas of the role of God and religion in human
life. In other ways, it appeals to what is inferred in the frame of the Songs of Innocence and
Experience. Blake's attitude in all sets of the verse is to bring to light the duality of human's nature to
express the immeasurability within them. In the poem, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", the poet
draws the immeasurability in humans in the course of the rigid discourses of science and religion
Blake considers it as his works as a poet to reveal what human being has concealed from them the
immeasurability. Blake's personality, his visions, his mood, we're not as much as Blake appears to
emphasize, his compassion to the mystical sustaining of human life.
To conclude the study, it is found that Blake has a concrete belief in God and the oneness of God.
Mysticism can be compared to the smell of a flower. As we can take the smell of a flower, but we
cannot be able to see the flower; just we can feel its existence in our surrounding or in the nature like;
we cannot see the physical existence of God but we can have Divinity Knowledge and the Ultimate
reality. Mysticism is similar to honeybun which refines the malady from the soul as the honey
eradicates the feebleness from the humanoid body. Blake’s tiger has been traditionally interpreted as
the symbol of divine wrath, the wrath which Blake found in poems; his symbol of the divine spirit
was the means by that he expected to have the innocence and experience together. Blake has exposed
his all attitudes towards Mysticism through his writings what have been found in the poems under
study.

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