Q: Discuss Innocence and experience are two supposed opposites of the human state in Songs of Innocence and Experience in Blake poem.

William Blake: William Blake had a unique view of the world around him. At the age of eight he saw ‘a tree filled with angels’, and his perception of beauty from every luminous detail of his paintings and every line of his poems. Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of great visual and literary power.

Innocence and experience are two supposed opposites of the human state, yet so interwoven. Innocence is the lack of experience, and thus cannot exist without it; if there is no distinction in levels of experience, then innocence would not be possible. On the other hand, innocence is the base standard, the comparison level to which the different levels of  experience are held to. Although Blake separates the two sections of his book with a clear distinction, there are many parallels and explicit similarities between poems of both sections. Take for example, the two poems, “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow” – while both are very different in form and structure, there is a clear parallel between them, up to the point where even the colours of the art surrounding the poems share close links and draw from the same basic shades. “The Chimney Sweeper“ in the Songs of Innocence section shares the exact same name with its counterpart in the Songs of Experience section, and both share the same themes of despair and suffering (though the former does end on a much more optimistic note). Finally, there is “A Divine Image” near the end of Experience, which although was likely a later addition, is quite possibly meant to contrast with “The Divine Image” from Innocence.

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 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.

The poems are a strange and wonderful exploration of, in Blake’s words, ‘the two contrary states of the human soul’. They follow simple rhythms and rhyming patterns, echoing the forms of 18th-century children’s ballads, but their meanings are complex and often ambiguous.

Songs of Innocence

In the poem The Divine Image the personified figures of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are listed as the four “virtues of delight.” The speaker states that all people pray to these in times of distress and thank them for blessings because they represent “God, our father dear.” They are also, however, the characteristics of Man: Mercy is found in the human heart, Pity in the human face; Peace is a garment that envelops humans, and Love exists in the human “form” or body. Therefore, all prayers toMercy, Pity, Peace, and Love are directed not just to God but to “the human form divine,” which all people must love and respect regardless of their religion or culture.

Songs of Experience

In Sick rose, the speaker, addressing a rose, informs it that it is sick. An “invisible” worm has stolen into its bed in a “howling storm” and under the cover of night.

O Rose thou art sick.

The “dark secret love” of this worm is destroying the rose’s life.

Does thy life destroy.

In the next poem The Tyger, The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind of divine being could have created it: “What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful symmetry?”

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

Each subsequent stanza contains further questions, all of which refine this first one. From what part of the cosmos could the tiger’s fiery eyes have come, and who would have dared to handle that fire? What sort of physical presence, and what kind of dark craftsmanship, would have been required to “twist the sinews” of the tiger’s heart? The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart “began to beat,” its creator would have had the courage to continue the job. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, he ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the smith who could have wielded them. And when the job was done, the speaker wonders, how would the creator have felt? “Did he smile his work to see?” Could this possibly be the same being who made the lamb?

In the other poem, London, The speaker wanders through the streets of London and comments on his observations. He sees despair in the faces of the people he meets and hears fear and repression in their voices. The woeful cry of the chimney-sweeper stands as a chastisement to the Church, and the blood of a soldier stains the outer walls of the monarch’s residence. The nighttime holds nothing more promising: the cursing of prostitutes corrupts the newborn infant and sullies the “Marriage hearse”.

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse