This essay will aim to show the relationship between Innocence and Experience in William Blake's Songs.
Both Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence serve as a mirror Blake held up to society, the Songs of Experience being the darker side of the mirror.
Blake's Songs show two imaginative realms: The two sides to the human soul that are the states of Innocence and Experience. The two states serve as different ways of seeing.
The world of innocence as Northrop Frye saw it encapsulated the unfallen world, the unified self, integration with nature, time in harmony with rhythm of human existence.
Frye saw the world of Experience as a fallen world, with the fragmented and divided self, with total alienation with nature, destructive.
Written in the time of the Romantic Movement, societies actions, hopes, fears and aspirations are all held within the poems in Blake's Songs.
This essay will explore Blake's background and how he came to write Songs.
Blake's influences will also be discussed, and how factors including the French Revolution helped shape his ideas.
Blake disliked the idea of dualism, and championed the individual. Blake's idealism and individualism feature heavily in Songs. It will be shown how Blake refuted dualism, how experience can prefigure innocence, and vice versa.
Some of the poems in Songs of Experience share the same title as in Songs of Innocence. This essay will also discuss Blake's ideas that the two states are complimentary, but also conflicting. Both states need each other; both are essential to one another. It will show how Songs of innocence and experience are related intra-textually. They echo ideas found in one another.
The relationship between Innocence and Experience will b...
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...ve is not giving life it is taking life away, a rather perverse notion.
Love is also selfish and self seeking in Experience, "Love seeketh only itself to please..." (The Clod and the Pebble). This is a far cry from the virtuous nature most people associate with love.
Seen from the two perspectives of Innocence and Experience, love appears both benign and pious contrasted with the cynical, bitter view of experience.
Blake's intention of using all these themes in a contrasting way was to portray the different sides of the human soul, and the human race.
The unquestioning, unfaltering love of an innocent child serves as a sharp foil to the sexual, self-seeking side of love that experience shows us.
The same can be said for all the themes that have been discussed. The Innocent view on life serves as the sharp foil to the world of the disillusioned adult.
Childhood is a time in one’s life where innocence and experience are seemingly two separate worlds. Only when one becomes an adult, and has been thoroughly marked by experience, one realizes that innocence and experience resides in the same world. Innocence and experience are equivalent to the flipsides of a single coin. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience demonstrate that religious doctrine and experience are responsible for destroying and understanding innocence in childhood.
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.
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.
In Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789 and 1794), William Blake arouses readers' minds and leads them into a path of finding their own answers and conclusions to his poems. He sets up his poems in the first book, Songs of Innocence, with a few questions as if they were asked from a child's perspective since children are considered the closest representation of innocence in life. However, in the second book, Songs of Experience, Blake's continues to write his poems about thought-provoking concepts except the concepts happen to be a little bit more complex and relevant to experience and time than Songs of Innocence.
In this essay I am going to be looking at two poems from the Songs of innocence and experience works. These poems are The Lamb and The Tyger written by William Blake. Both these poems have many underlying meanings and are cryptic in ways and both poems are very different to each other. In this essay I will be analysing the two poems, showing my opinions of the underlying themes and backing them up with quotes from the poems. I will compare the poems looking at the similarities and differences between them and also look at each one individually focusing on the imagery, structure and the poetic devices William Blake has used. Firstly I will look at the Tyger a poem about experience.
Keynes, Sir Geoffrey. Introduction to William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Blake's poems of innocence and experience are a reflection of Heaven and Hell. The innocence in Blake's earlier poems represents the people who will get into Heaven. They do not feel the emotions of anger and jealousy Satan wants humans to feel to lure them to Hell. The poems of experience reflect those feelings. This is illustrated by comparing and contrasting A Divine Image to a portion of The Divine Image.
William Blake's poems show the good and bad of the world by discusses the creator and the place of heaven through the views of Innocence and Experience while showing the views with a childlike quality or with misery.
One of Blake’s most famous works is The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Expe...
...e and believe that Blake is radical and heretical. Therefore, Songs of Experience presents social commentary more clearly as Blake provides a more direct, perhaps more radical, speaker.
In his work, Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, William Blake uses the aforementioned contrasting states of being to illustrate his unique view of the world around him. Through this work, Blake lays bare his soulful views of religion and ethics, daring the reader to continue on in their narcissistic attitudes and self-serving politics. While Blake's work had countless themes, some of the most prevalent were religious reform, social change, and morality. Philosophically, one would think that William Blake was a Deist; however Blake rejected the Deist view of life. He was a devout Christian, yet he also wanted nothing to do with the church or their teachings. These views give Blake a refreshingly sincere quality with regards to his art and writings. Blake frequently alluded to Biblical teachings in his work and, more often than not, used corresponding story lines to rail against the Church's views and accepted practices. One may say however, that Blake's universal appeal lies within his social commentary. Similar to a fable, Blake weaves a poetically mystical journey for the reader, usually culminating in a moral lesson. One such poem, "A Poison Tree," clearly illustrates some of William Blake's moral beliefs. With his use of imagery, as well as an instinctive knowledge of human nature, William Blake shows just how one goes from the light to the darkness (from innocence to experience) by the repression of emotions.
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.
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...
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. Although Blake’s poem The Tyger revolved around the idea of a ferocious mammal, its illustration of a sheepish tiger complicates and alters Blake’s message in the poem by suggesting that good and evil simultaneously exist.
LaGuardia, Cheryl. "WILLIAM BLAKE: SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE." Library Journal 128.9 (2003): 140. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 13 July 2011.