The Poetry of William Blake

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Recommended: William blake songs of innocence and experience analysis

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.

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