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Contrast between the vision of innocence and of experience in Blake's Songs of innocence and of experience
Essay on romantic literature
Essay on romantic literature
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considered to be a groundbreaking forefather of what has become the Romantic genre. His poetry and even paintings have been distinguished as ¨Pre Romantic¨ due to his aid the development of the Romantic Period. The Song of Innocence and Experience is a collection of poems written by William Blake. “Innocence” and “Experience” are two definitions of consciousness that rethink John Milton’s existential-mythic states of “Paradise” and the “Fall”, this coincides with the romantic notion that adolescence is a state of protected innocence instead of original sin and yet is still not immune to the fallen world and its institutions. “The Divine Image” from Blake’s Songs of Innocence is in the form of five ballad stanzas, quatrains where each line
While William Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence was written before the French Revolution and Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Experience was written after, creating obvious differences in formal structure; these poems are also uniquely intertwined by telling the same story of children arriving to church on Holy Thursday. However, each gives a different perspective that plays off each other as well the idea of innocence and experience. The idea that innocence is simply a veil that we are not only aware of but use to mask the horrors of the world until we gain enough experience to know that it is better to see the world for simply what it is.
Analyzing innocence has always been a difficult task, not only due to it’s rapid reevaluation in the face of changing societal values, but also due to the highly private and personal nature of the concept. The differences between how people prioritize different types of innocence - childhood desires, intellectual naivety, sexual purity, criminal guilt, etc. - continually obscures the definition of innocence. This can make it difficult for people to sympathize with others’ loss of purity, simply because their definition of that loss will always be dissimilar to the originally expressed idea. Innocence can never truly be adequately described, simply because another will never be able to precisely decipher the other’s words. It is this challenge, the challenge of verbally depicting the isolationism of the corruption of innocence, that Tim O’Brien attempts to endeavour in his fictionalized memoir, The
All the poems agree that innocence is an important stage of mankind’s life, but they differ in how much time innocence should last - for example, The Lamb may suggest as long period of innocence than Mrs Tilcher’s Class. Experience with the exception of The Tyger, is perceived a being a must in everyone’s lifetime although as expressed especially in Piano it may seem hard to contemplate.
William Blake was an influential English poet during the mid 18th and mid 19th centuries. He is still known as a prominent figure of the Romantic Period. In Blake’s early years as a teenager he began writing poetry, and in 1794 he published Songs of Experience. Songs of Experience is a collection of twenty-six poems, and it formed the second part of Songs of Innocence. One of these twenty-six poems in Songs of Experience is “The Angel”. In this poem, Blake used the maiden queen, the angel, and the dream as symbolic figures in order to portray this poem as a tragic love story. My interpretation of “The Angel” is how a person’s view of love can evolve over time.
William Blake was first and foremost an imaginative genius. He worked as both a painter and an author who beautifully illustrated not only his own works but also illustrated others writings. His artistic skill is unrivalled for diversity as he created each copy of his books with slight differences, mainly in colour and tones. He illustrates his opinions on innocence and experience through numerous poems in his work ‘Songs of innocence and experience’ and numerous other books. Much of his work deals with the concept of both innocence and experience through religion and contrary statements.
Overall, it is apparent that Blake is extremely critical of the exploitation of children during his time period. Blake’s Songs of Innocence provides more implicit social commentary which forces the reader to think deeply about child exploitation. Songs of Experience presents a direct social commentary due to the mature nature of the child speaker. Although both texts provide similar social commentary, Songs of Experience expresses social commentary more directly due to the outspoken and mature nature of the child. Songs of Experience was likely written as a follow-up to Songs of Innocence at a later date in order to solidify the implicit ideas presented in Songs of Innocence.
In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake differentiates between being experienced and being innocent. In the poem "Spring," the speaker focuses on the coming of spring and the excitement surrounding it which is emphasized by the trochaic meter of the poem. Everyone, including the animals and children, is joyful and getting ready for the new season, a season of rebirth and a new arrival of nature’s gifts.
There are often two sides to everything: chocolate and vanilla, water and fire, woman and man, innocence and experience. The presence of two opposing items allows for harmony and balance in the world. Without water, fire cannot be put out and without woman there can be no man. William Blake’s poetry collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience draws parallels between poems of “innocence” and poems of “experience”. His poem The Lamb is mirrored by his poem The Tyger.
William Blake uses his two compilations of poems, The Songs of Innocence (1789) and The Songs of Experience (1794) to present two opposing pictures of human divinity and human corruption in his two poems “The Divine Image” and “A Divine Image.” In these two poems Blake uses several techniques and literary devices to transmit his thoughts on the ideal and more realistic views of human nature.
William Blake was one of England’s greatest writers (Tejvan) in the nineteenth century, but his brilliancy was not noticed until after he was deceased. Blake was very much a free spirit who often spoke his mind and was very sensitive to cruelty. At the age of twenty five he married a woman named Catherine Boucher. They created a book of all Blake’s poems called Songs on Innocence, which was not very popular while he was alive. On the other hand Blake’s other book of poems, Songs of Experience, were much more popular. These two collections are so magnificent because it is two different forms of writing successfully written by one man. Two major poems written by William Blake were “The Tyger” and “The Lamb”. The Lamb is from Songs of Innocence while The Tyger is from Songs of Experience, they may share different perspectives on the world yet they both complement one another very well. Blake believed that life could be viewed from two different perspectives, those being innocence and experience. To Blake, innocence is not better than experience. Both states have their good and bad sides. The positive side of innocence is joy and optimism, while the bad side is naivety. The negative side of experience is cynicism, but the good side is wisdom (Shmoop Editorial Team). The Tyger and The Lamb are two completely different styles of poems yet it wouldn’t have the same affect on a reader if one poem didn’t exist.
In the William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the vision of children and adults are placed in opposition of one another. Blake portrays childhood as a time of optimism and positivity, of heightened connection with the natural world, and where joy is the overpowering emotion. This joyful nature is shown in Infant Joy, where the speaker, a newborn baby, states “’I happy am,/ Joy is my name.’” (Line 4-5) The speaker in this poem is portrayed as being immediately joyful, which represents Blake’s larger view of childhood as a state of joy that is untouched by humanity, and is untarnished by the experience of the real world. In contrast, Blake’s portrayal of adulthood is one of negativity and pessimism. Blake’s child saw the most cheerful aspects of the natural wo...
William Blake Romantic poetry has been written since the late seventeen hundred up past the first reform bill passed in 1832. There were many romantic poets in the Romantic Era, many who have touched the hearts of many readers and still do to this day. William Blake was one of the first English Romantic poets to exist. This paper focuses on some of the history of William Blake’s life, William Blake as a Romantic Poet, and some songs from two of his famous books, "The Songs of Innocence" and "The Songs of Experience". Included in this paper are some of William Blake’s fabulous art creations, I also have a personal interpretation of some of his poems.
LaGuardia, Cheryl. "WILLIAM BLAKE: SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE." Library Journal 128.9 (2003): 140. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 13 July 2011.
William Blake, one of the infamous English romantic poets, is most known for his romantic views on conventional scenes and objects, which were presented in his works The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience. The first collection was published in 1789, and addresses subjects such as suffering and death from the innocent and optimistic perspective of a child. The later collection addresses these same issues, but is told from the perspective of an experienced bard. The poems contained in The Songs of Innocence often have a counter part in the second collection that reflects a darker or more corrupted take on the same subject. For example, the purity presented in the creation of “The Lamb” is dramatically contrasted with its shameful counterpart “The Tyger”.
Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake's Poetry and Designs. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1979.