1. Introduction:
Background information and biographical notes on William
Blake
William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 into a world “unready to receive the artist and poet of genius that he proved to be.”
His father was a hosier who lived in the Soho district of London. Blake was the second son of a family of four boys and one girl, but only his brother Robert was of significance in William Blake's life because he was the one to share his devotion to arts.
Very soon William declared his intention of becoming an artist and was allowed to join a drawing school at the age of ten where he worked for five years. Aged nearly fifteen he entered the workshop of a master engraver, James Basire, on 4 August 1772, and worked there for seven years learning all the techniques of engraving, etching, stippling and copying.
Despite his leaving school at an early age Blake did not neglect general education but became a voracious reader and by the age of twelve was writing poetry. In 1783 his friends paid for the printing of Poetical Sketches, a volume of verse which placed him “among the chief initiators of the so-called `romantic revival'”.
In 1779 he entered as a student at the Royal Academy where he first made drawings from the antique in the conventional manner and some life studies but then exalted imaginative art above all other forms of artistic creation. Since his art was found too adventurous and unconventional Blake remained virtually unknown until Alexander Gilchrist's biography was published in 1863.
Therefore for many years Blake was forced to earn his money by working as a journeyman engraver making engraved book-illustrations from designs by his more conventional contemporaries, such as Fuseli and Flaxman. On 18 August 1782 he married Catherine Boucher who - after some training in painting and drawing - was able to take part in Blake's artistic output.
After his father's death in 1784 Blake and his wife were joined by Robert whom Blake trained as an artist. Blake himself started to attend social gatherings of intellectuals. His mind was developing an unconventional and rebellious quality so that about 1784 he wrote the burlesque novel, known as Island in the Moon, in which he ridiculed contemporary manners and conventions. The manuscript has proved to contain several of the poems afterwards known as Songs of Innocence.
When Blake recognized that these poems were better than their context he, in about 1788, began to assemble a collection of them fit to be made into a small volume.
When his brother Robert died in 1787 Blake's visionary faculty enabled him to see “ `the released spirit ascend heavenwards'”.
This faculty was of special service in 1788-89, when Blake was puzzling over the problem of how to produce his poems in a form that satisfied him.
It was Robert's spirit who instructed him in how he should proceed, with the result that he quickly evolved his peculiar method of etching both poem and design in relief on a copperplate. After executing some experimental plates in 1788, Blake made the 27 plates of Songs of Innocence, dating the title page 1789, and thus initiated the series of his famous Illuminated Books.
”The impulse to produce his poems in this form was partly due to his cast of mind, whereby the life of the imagination was more real to him than the material world. This philosophy demanded the identification of ideas with symbols which could be translated into visual images […].”
Having made his early copies of Songs of Innocence with very simple colouring, Blake soon began to elaborate both theme and method. He was rapidly developing a philosophical system expressed in symbols of increasing complexity at the same time that he invented a method of printing his plates in colours, using pigments of unknown composition.
When Blake published his work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell the plates were done at first by the colour-printing method.
After having moved to a small house close to the Thames in about 1789 he set about making a number of books embodying his philosophical system. They became known as his Prophetic Books, their production going on at the same time as Blake was painting numbers of pictures and making large colour prints.
Blake's poetry was affected by his increasing awareness of the social injustices of the time which led his thoughts to the composition of a series of lyrical poems forming the sequence known as Songs of Experience:
“There is no reason for thinking that when he composed the Songs of Innocence he had already envisaged a second set of antithetical poems embodying Experience.”
The poems in Songs of Innocence were the products of a mind in a state of innocence and of an imagination unspoiled by stains of worldliness. Through Blake's experience of public events and private emotions Innocence was soon converted into Experience and Blake's preoccupation with the problem of Good and Evil was produced.
This, together with his feelings of indignation and pity for the sufferings and pains of mankind as he saw them in London, resulted in composing the second set, Songs of Experience.
Blake reverted to the use of water-colour washes for some of the Experience plates as for the first series after executing them by his colour-printing method.
”The title page of Songs of Experience is dated 1794 and it is believed that he did not issue any separate copies of these poems, always combining them with the Songs of Innocence in a single volume, `Shewing', as he asserted on the general title page, `the two Contrary States of the Human Soul'”.
This suggests that Blake considered the Songs of Experience functionally indivisible from the richly allusive Innocence, “a companion piece whose constellation of meanings is insufficiently clear without the presence of the precursor volume.”
Furthermore it is important to mention that the two series are opposites, and they are opposites in more than one sense: The Songs of Experience are etched upon the other side of the copper plates for Innocence, so that the reader can hold two contrary states as an object in his hands.
At ever turn there are contraries and opposites. Blake, for instance, used a different calligraphy and a different method of printing colour.
The technical process is also of extraordinary importance
“[…] because Blake was actually writing backwards upon the copper on the back of the poems he was partly satirising […]; he was seeing words as discrete objects, not as transparent signifiers of meaning” which “[…] at some point […] cease simply to be the medium for lyric expression and become as materially based as any other copper image.”
Also Blake's own particular vision is irradiated by contraries and oppositions -
“love and hate, expansion and contraction, opaqueness and translucence, reason and energy, attraction and repulsion, these are the poles of his world, where `without Contraries is no progression'”.
Within his poetry and his art Blake establishes pairs and couples; just as his epic verse is heavily imbued with parallelism and antithesis, his painted objects are often placed in symmetry with each other.
”He establishes a bounding line of art or poetry that does not unite contraries but allows them to exist in harmony beside each other. […] The works become almost an idealised version of Blake himself, and in these Songs he becomes both writer and artist, satirist and lyricist, poet and prophet.”
Considering the fact that Blake does not only talk about contraries in his Songs but also expresses this idea in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell where it says that “without Contraries is no progression” (plate 3) it might be sensible to illustrate the importance of this idea in Blake's thought by dealing with the question in how far the idea expressed in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell could be useful for interpreting and analysing the two sets of the Songs.
To establish a basis for argumentation, analysis an comparison I am going to make some introductory and explanatory remarks on Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
2. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell holds a unique position among Blake's works presented in the series of Illuminated Books. It came early in the sequence - only the Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel precede it - and differs from these as well as from all the other books because it is principally written in prose. Furthermore it was Blake's first full-scale attempt to present his philosophical message. Although Blake was primarily a poet his poetry and prose were concerned with philosophy.
”He was a philosopher-poet, putting Imagination above Reason and so seemed to upset what is usually regarded as the foundation of the doctrines proposed by his predecessors such as Bacon, Newton and Locke.”
While Blake regarded human imagination as the essential divine quality by which God manifested himself in Man, they placed God above and separate from Man. Blake was almost equating Man with God and the Art with Christianity.
One believes that Blake began his composition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in about 1789, at the age of 32, having had ten years since emerging from his apprenticeship as an engraver, during which he developed his mental attitudes by thought and reading. So far his works as poet and pictorial artist had been limited to the Poetical Sketches of his adolescence, Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel of his early manhood and a few minor books.
According to his own statements Blake had already read, criticized and rejected the conventional philosophers with their materialistic views of the meaning of human life when he was only fourteen.
In fact he had become a mature thinker, while he had by patient experiment and practice evolved a method of presenting his thoughts in the entirely original and attractive form of Illuminated Printing, as unlike the usual form of philosophical treatise as can be conceived.
Blake had always rejected any thought of mass production such as it is achieved by the ordinary printed page. For this reason he produced in the form of poetry, philosophy, or philosophical poetry everything in the form of an attractive work of art, made by his own hands without the help of the surrounding materialistic society.
During this period of intellectual development Blake had been interested in the writings of the Swedish visionary theologian, Emmanuel Swedenborg, as his annotated copies of some of Swedenborg's books testify. Swedenborg (1688-1772) experienced religious revelations and wrote voluminous theological works, many in the form of biblical commentaries, such as “Apocalypse Explained” and “Arcana Caelesia”.
Very soon Blake realized that Swedenborg had more in common with the materialism rejected by him than with his own turn of thought.
Although he continued to value some of Swedenborg's attitudes, “he came to regard him as fair game for satire […].”
Thus he took Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell as a basis for his own philosophical treatise, calling it The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and thereby reversing the meaning of the terms `Heaven' and `Hell':
While Blake's Devil personified energy, which is good, Swedenborg's Angel supported conventional thought and religion, which is bad. Moreover Blake was also mocking the passages which Swedenborg had called `Memorable Relations' with his own `Memorable Fancies'.
Swedenborg's concept of the spiritual world as a kind of mechanistic equilibrium was quite foreign to Blake's idea of the creative energy of which man's spiritual life ought to consist.
Blake expresses this doctrine clearly in the fourth plate of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, calling it `The Voice of the Devil'.
As I have already mentioned before, on the third plate he had stated the doctrine of contraries.
”Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason […]. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.” (plate 3)
That nature and society are products of contrary forces is a commonplace going back at least to Heraclitus and Empedocles. Also Milton mentions the `struggle of contrarieties', in The Reason of Church Government, as the way in which change comes about. The burden of the Areopagitica is that truth cannot flourish unless falsehood is free to battle with it, an idea which comes closer to Blake's `progression' than to the equilibria of the Greek philosophers.
As far as Blake's struggle for contraries is concerned it does not revolve through ever higher levels of comprehensiveness to a final synthesis - even if it is progressive - as proposed by Hegel and Marx.
Since it seems that even in eternity Blake imagines that there is continual struggle on a spiritual plane he is closer to Goethe's notions of polarity and `Steigerung', the enhancement of identity through resistance and the growth of the spirit through widening but never resolved spirals, than to Hegel's dialectic.
By stating that without contraries there would be no progression Blake suggests that “[…] human thought and life need the stimulus of active and opposing forces to give them creative movement”.
By redefining Good and Evil Blake attacks the view that evil comes only from the body and good only from the soul. “What the religious imagine to be good and evil are in fact contraries, necessary in order that there shall be progression.”
Consequently, due to this principle, Blake gave the qualities Good and Evil meanings opposite to their usual acceptance, and in the fourth plate announced how the wrong interpretation had arisen, stemming from the conventional moral codes.
To him passive acceptance was evil, active opposition was good. This is the key to the meaning of the paradoxes and inversions of which the whole work consists. Everything changes places - Angels and Devils; Good is evil - Heaven is Hell.
Although Blake makes free use of satire and paradox, he “[…] gives in the book some of the most explicit statements of his mental attitudes, which he elaborated in the later Prophetic Books and restated even more clearly in the phrases of the Lacoon plate in 1820.”
3. Analysis of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience
3.1. The two sets of poems - Innocence and Experience
As I've already mentioned before Blake issued his Songs of Innocence as the first volume to be produced in his new manner of illuminated printing and in 1794 he reissued it in the same manner, but with the addition of Songs of Experience to form a single book. The volume in its complete form represents Blake's “[…] mature, considered choice of his own poems.”
In this context one has to remark that Blake made a distinction between poetry and prophecy.
First of all he uses in his Songs the traditional metres of English songs and hymns while in the prophecies he writes in free verse because in the Songs he sings and therefore needs the regular measures of song - not an orator's freedom.
Second the purpose in the Songs and in the prophecies differs. In the prophecies Blake “[…] had a great message for his generation […], a summons to activity […].”
By contrast the opening poem of the Songs of Innocence, significantly called “Introduction”, makes it obvious that these are not the words of a prophet but of a poet […] who sings because he must”:
”Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of present glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
'Pipe a song about a Lamb!'
So I piped with merry chear.
'Piper, pipe that song again;'
So I piped: he wept to hear.”
(Songs of Innocence, “Introduction”, ll. 1-8)
Although there are “[…] undeniable connections between the two […] the Songs go their own way in their own spirit. In them Blake speaks of himself from a purely personal point of view”; and he also wanted his readers to understand what he said and to pay attention to it. This becomes clear from his title page which describes the Songs as “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”.
The grouping of the verses under two main headings already suggests that “[…] there is plainly a great difference of character between the two parts.”
In so arranging his work Blake followed his own maxim that “Without Contraries is no progression” (MHH, plate 3).
The two sections of Blake's Songs are contrasted elements in a single design. While the first part sets out an imaginative vision of the state of innocence the second part demonstrates how life challenges, corrupts and destroys it.
”What Blake intended by this scheme can be seen from the motto which he wrote for the book but did not include in it:
`The Good are attracted by Men's perceptions,
And think not for themselves,
Till Experience teaches them to catch
And to cage the Fairies and Elves.
And then the Knave begins to snarl
And the Hypocrite to howl,
And all his good Friends shew their private ends,
And the Eagle is known from the Owl.'”
This poem shows the relation of the Songs to some of Blake's most persistent elements in his thought.
Blake has nothing but contempt for empiristic philosophers who build their systems on sense-perceptions instead of on vision because “[…] for him the primary reality […] is the active life of the creative imagination.”
Blake has got the opinion that that the naturally good are deceived and corrupted by these theories and consequently cease to think for themselves, restricting those creative forces which he calls “Fairies and Elves”. When this happens the state of innocence is lost since knavery, hypocrisy and self-seeking enter into the soul. By contrast, for those who have eyes to see, the free, scaring spirit of the eagle is visible in all its difference from the sleepy, night-ridden owl.
This constitutes the main theme of the Songs.
In the first part Blake shows what Innocence means, in the second part how it is corrupted and destroyed.
The state of innocence, which he expresses in symbols of pastoral life, seems to be concerned with the loss not so much of actual childhood as of something wider and less definite:
”For him childhood is both itself and a symbol of a state of soul which may exist in maturity. His subject is the child-like vision of existence. For him all human beings are in some sense and at some times the children of a divine father, but experience destroys their innocence and makes them fellow spectres and illusions.”
To Blake childhood is a state or phase of imaginative existence, when the world of imagination is still a brave new world and yet reassuring and intelligible. The child feels protection from his parents and “the spontaneity of life which such protection makes possible is the liberty of the expanding imagination which has nothing to do but complete its own growth.”
However, the course of life in this world indicates that there is a higher world to attain to, and that is the world of the Providence and Father itself.
When he composed the Songs of Experience Blake seems to have undergone a spiritual crisis. He found himself frustrated and depressed by the forces which he most condemned. Partly in politics, partly in domestic life, Blake seems to have discovered that his central and most cherished beliefs were not shared by others but were the object of hatred and persecution. From this discovery the Songs were born.
Since Blake's crisis takes place in a spiritual order of things he has to speak of it in symbols so that what he describes are spiritual, not actual events which have to be persecuted symbolically in order that they may be intelligible.
As far as the complexity of the symbols in the two different parts of the Songs is concerned there can be found another contrast: In the Songs of Innocence the symbols are largely drawn from the Bible, and since Blake uses familiar figures (e. g. the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God), they can be understood easily.
In the world presented in the Songs of Innocence
“[…] the divine imagination is an infant, symbolized in Christianity by the Infant Jesus, the gentle and innocent Lamb of God. God from this perspective is a loving father who sees the sparrow fall. Nature is a kindly old nurse, and a vigilant Providence appoints guardian angels to take care of the children […]. Here we find the harmonious society which the single organism represents in the world.”
This is not the case in the Songs of Experience. Here the symbols Blake makes use of arise mainly from his own making so that the meaning is more elusive and some poems are only fully understandable by reference to symbols which Blake uses in his prophetic books.
However,
”in both kinds of song it is clear that Blake anticipates those poets of a hundred years later who forged their own symbols in order to convey what would otherwise be almost inexpressible, since no adequate words exist for the unnamed powers of a natural world.”
In the Songs of Innocence the symbols convey a special kind of existence or state of soul. In this stat human beings have the same kind of security and assurance as belongs to lambs under a wise shepherd or to children with loving parents. Both, the shepherd and the father of Blake's poems is God who is Himself a lamb and becomes a little child, who watches over sleeping children and gives his love to chimney sweepers and little black boys.
In the fatherhood of God, Blake's characters have equal rights and privileges. However, Blake did not believe that God exists apart from man. For him, God and the imagination are one; that is, God is the creative and spiritual power in man, and apart from man the idea of God has no meaning. So when his Songs tell of God's love and care, we must think of them as qualities which men themselves display and in so doing realize their full, divine nature.
For Blake, God is the divine essence which exists potentially in every man and woman.
The power and appeal of this belief appear in “The Divine Image”. In this poem Blake enumerates the divine qualities which exist in man and reveal their divine character through him.
“In mercy, pity, peace, and love, he found the creed of brotherhood which is the centre of his gospel. He knew that by itself love may become selfish and possessive and needs to be redeemed by other, generous qualities. It is the combination of these that man is God.”
Life is governed by these powers in the state of innocence. They give to it its completeness and security. For this reason Blake calls his Songs of Innocence “happy songs” (Songs of Innocence, “Introduction”, l. 19) and says that every child will joy to hear them. But although Blake saw that this state of childlike happiness is wonderfully charming he was aware of the fact that it is not everything and it cannot last. Experience and suffering are necessary for man to reach a higher state.
As a matter of fact one can speak of experience as a necessary stage in the cycle of being - and this is the link between the two sections of Blake's book which are contrastive in many respects.
First the difference between the two states is reflected in the quality of Blake's poetry:
”Sweet and pure though the Songs of Innocence are, they do not possess or need the compelling passion of the Songs of Experience. In dealing with innocence Blake seems deliberately to have set his tone in a quiet key to show what innocence really means in his full scheme of spiritual development.”
Therefore he carefully excluded from the first part of his book anything which might sound a disturbing note or suggest that innocence is anything but happy.
From innocence man passes to experience. Blake knew that experience is bought at a bitter price, not merely in such unimportant things as comfort and peace of mind, but in the highest spiritual values. His Songs of Experience which are the poetry of this process tell how what we accept in childlike innocence is tested and proved feeble by actual events and how much is not true of the living world.
The reader clearly understands the terrible indictment of the world presented in the Songs of Experience.
“But Blake never forgets to see behind all the cruelty of man the fact of his fall. Just as one can watch a baby without smiling, so one can see a child tortured for its own `good' or neglected for someone else's.”
In such things the world is behaving illogically and contrary to its own best interests, but this is the only world the child can grow into.
The Songs of Experience are satires, but one of the things that they satirize is the state of innocence. Conversely, the Songs of Innocence satirize the state of experience, as the contrast which they present to it makes its hypocrisies more obviously shameful.
“Hence the two sets of lyrics show the two contrary states of the soul, and in their opposition there is a double-edged irony, cutting into both the tragedy and the reality of fallen existence.”
The dramatic perspectives and continual allusiveness of the Songs meant that they have been endlessly interpreted, but one important truth has often been missed in these interpretations.
As I have already mentioned at the beginning of this essay the Songs aren't poems in the normal sense. Instead “these are discrete works of art in which the words are only one element in a unified design. They are art-objects that `mean' something in the way a picture `means' something in a given period.”
But although the associations in the book are with medieval illuminations, with stained glass, with bardic prophecy, the cadences of the Bible and popular hymns they were not accepted by Blake's contemporaries.
”There is something `wild' about these highly compressed and concentrated lyrics. […] There is an intensity in the words and the designs that sets them apart from the more agreeable work of his contemporaries. […] The visual completeness, the insistent metres, the impersonal skill of the calligraphy, turn these poems into achieved works of art that seem to resist conventional interpretation.”
3.2. Comparison of the Songs of Innocence
and the Songs of Experience - discussion of certain poems
As the piper in the “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence leads the reader to expect, the world of the Songs of Innocence is a world of lambs - of real lambs as well as of metaphorical lambs, i. e. children. Moreover one can say that the world of innocence is a child's world, preserved in the minds of adults, who are full-grown children, by projecting the memory or desire for parental protection on to a higher realm.
Blake expects the reader to travel through this world poem by poem and picture by picture without stating explicitly the limitations of this world.
”If as adults we bring a condenscending scepticism to the confined and fragile little songs, he invites us, as Jesus did, to become a child again. […] If we come as grown-ups innocents, already convinced that God protects the world's lambs, he shows us gently […] how beliefs like ours are inculcated in us by our priests and social betters.”
As far as the state of experience, presented in the second set of the Songs, is concerned the reader may be tempted to take the state of experience higher than that of innocence, but that is not Blake's view:
“Some of the speakers of the poems of Experience see more widely and deeply than any in Innocence, and they do not sound the least bit childlike, but it does not follow that they are themselves in the state of experience, and it is the burden of some of these poems that those who are in that state should `return' to their original state of innocence.”
For Blake experience is a fallen state which is in no way higher than innocence. “It is the `lapsed Soul' that is addressed in the “Introduction” to Experience, and the title page shows Adam and Eve figleaved, in agony and surrounded by flames.”
However, what is important to mention is that no matter how hopeless the state of experience may seem while you are in it, you may still pass through it. One does not become fully aware of the nature and quality of Innocence until one has departed this state and moved into experience.
”Indeed, it is the latent presence of Experience within Innocence, where it lies hidden and ready to manifest itself as the individual's self-consciousness increases, that makes Innocence the complex and ultimately complete state that it is.”
Moreover, contraries are, for Blake, more like opposite poles on a spectrum: points which lie upon the same line and therefore have at least something in common.
”It is then incorrect to think of Innocence and Experience as mutually exclusive states; they are states in which both contrary elements are present but in which one is dominant and the other relatively recessive or repressed.”
Of course, Blake's contraries have also something in common. A basis in human existence, an existence which is both physical and mental, empirically rationalistic and imaginatively visionary.
“Fundamental to all those qualities, characteristics, and states that Blake identifies in his work as Contraries is the fact that they are chosen by the individuals who embody them or under whose sway the come.”
But when experience destroys the state of childlike innocence, it puts many destructive forces in its place. To show the extent of this destruction Blake places in the Songs of Experience certain poems which give poignant contrasts to other poems which appear in Songs of Innocence.
Therefore one of the pleasures of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience is to compare the matched or contrary poems. “The Tyger” (Experience) matches “The Lamb” (Innocence), “The Human Abstract” (Experience) answers “The Divine Image” (Innocence), and “Infant Sorrow” (Experience) replies to “Infant Joy” (Innocence), while there are two “Nurse's Song”, Chimney Sweeper poems, and two entitled “Holy Thursday”. Furthermore “London” (Experience) seems to be a kind of contrary of “The Echoing Green” (Innocence).
As regards the “Nurse's Song” of the Songs of Innocence, for example, Blake tells how children play and are allowed to go on playing until the light fades and it is time to go to bed. In this Blake symbolizes the care-free play of the imagination when it is not spoiled by senseless restrictions. The second “Nurse's Song” contrasts with the first one in so far as we hear the other side of the matter, when experience has set to work:
”When the voices of children are heard on the green
And the whisp'rings are heard in the dale,
When days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.
Then come home, my children, the sun in gone down,
And the dews of night arise,
Your spring and your play are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.”
(Songs of Experience)
The voice of the speaker in the second “Nurse's Song” is that of sour age, envious of a happiness that it can no longer share and eager to point out the menaces and the dangers of the dark. The nurse sees play as a waste of time an cruelly tells the children that their life is a shame passed in darkness and cold.
Blake understood well how it is that some people hate innocence and want to destroy it, usually because they are unable to bear the memory of their own lost “days of my youth” (Songs of Experience, “Nurse's Song”, l. 3) and want to repress it. Moreover they make their hatred acceptable to themselves by disguising it as love, but children see through it.
At this point it already becomes obvious that the first and most fearful thing about experience is that it breaks the free life of the imagination and substitutes a dark, cold, imprisoning fear.
”The fear and denial of life which come with experience breed hypocrisy, and this earns some of Blake's hardest and harshest words. For him hypocrisy is as grave as a sin as cruelty because it rises from the same causes, from refusal the refusal to obey the creative spirit of the imagination and from submission to fear and envy.”
He marks its character by proving an antithesis to “The Divine Image” (Songs of Innocence) in “The Human Abstract” (Songs of Experience). Here he shows in bitter irony how love, pity, and mercy can be distorted and used as a cover for base or cowardly motives. Speaking through the hypocrite's lips, Blake shows how glibly hypocrisy claims to observe these cardinal virtues:
”Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor,
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.”
(“The Human Abstract”)
In this corrupt frame of mind, selfishness and cruelty flourish and are dignified under false names. This process wrecks the world and harsh rules are imposed on life through what Blake calls `Mystery' (“The Human Abstract”, l. 16). It supports those outward forms which Blake regards as the death of the soul:
”The Gods of the earth and sea
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree;
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain.”
(“The Human Abstract”, ll. 21-24.)
“So Blake re-creates the myth of the Tree of Knowledge of Life. This tree which is fashioned by man's reason, gives falsehood instead of truth and death instead of life.”
It is also noteworthy to mention Blake's poem “The Clod and the Pebble” (Songs of Experience) which is a pair of contraries contained in one poem. Perhaps the worst thing in experience, as Blake sees it, is that in destroys love and affection. In “The Clod and the Pebble” Blake shows
“[…] how love naturally seeks not to please itself or have any care for itself, but in the world of experience the heart becomes like `a pebble of the brook' and turns love into a selfish desire for possession”.
The first stanza of this poem is the song of the Clod which describes self-sacrificing Christian love and its redemptive effects in uncompromising terms.
By contrast the Pebble in its Song, though one cannot at first endorse its self-centredness, is not only given the last word but suffers no indignity. “ It will continue to warble contentedly about its joys and delights, impervious to the flowing stream or any creature's feet.”
Therefore one could call the Pebble healthy in its self-assertiveness ant the Clod extreme and one-sided in its altruism. In addition the Clod's virtue seems abstract and not much like the interactive individualism of the children who play together in the Songs of Innocence.
Summing up one can say that “The Clod and the Pebble” shows “how love naturally seeks not to please itself of have any care for itself, but in the world of experience heart becomes like `a pebble of the brook' and turns love into a selfish desire for possession.”
The withering of the affections already begins when adults repress and frighten children. This is illustrated in the “Holy Thursday” poems. Unlike the speaker of the other poems in the Songs of Innocence the speaker here seems to be an adult “[…] with views that seem inadequate to their occasion. The irony that seems to play across it raises questions as to just what innocence is when it captivates a pious older observer.”
The speaker of the poem is impressed by the sight of the procession of charity orphants into St Paul's Cathedral, by their singing and colourful clothing. But he has also been noting that the children's faces are `clean' (l. 1), that they walk `two & two' (l. 2), and that they sit in companies inside the church. Since he closes his account with a pious moral - “Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor.
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door” -
one gets the impression that he seems to be completely unaware of the tension between the colour, radiance and spiritual power of the children and the cold, colourless severity of the guardians.
”No doubt the guardians sit physically beneath the children in St Paul's but […] `beneath them' resounds with moral or spiritual meanings truer than the speaker knows.” But although this is also the case with the final line of the poem “[…] we get the impression that it is precisely pity that he cherishes, and occasions for pity like this one, rather than the children themselves.”
By contrast the second “Holy Thursday” poem in the Songs of Experience shows what it means when their elders repress and frighten children, how in a rich and fruitful land children live in misery:
”And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are fill'd with thorns:
It is eternal winter there.”
(ll. 9-12)
This speaker means what he says and knows what he means. He passes rather quickly between the two `lands', one that is `rich and fruitful' (l. 2) and one that is `land of poverty' (l. 8). They are the same land but they seem utterly different to the two peoples who inhabit them.
Blake ends this poem with a utopian vision of the redeemed land.
”For where-e'er the sun does shine,
And where-e'er the rain does fall:
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appal.”
(ll. 13-16)
This last line seems to have several meanings depending on how one takes `appall'. “Whatever mind we imagine as appalled, it is important that we see that it is with `mind' that Blake ends his poem. Innocence is a state of mind, and its preservation is vital not only to the growth and happiness of individuals but to the reformation of an `appalling' society.”
”Holy Thursday” suggests that the horror of experiences is all the greater because of the contrast which Blake suggests between it and innocence.
Another manifestation of the contrast between innocence and experience is formed by the two poems “The Echoing Green” (Songs of Innocence) and “The Garden of Love” (Songs of Experience).
While in “The Echoing Green” Blake tells how the children are happy and contented at play, in “The Garden of Love” he presents an ugly antithesis to the same rhythm and with the same setting.
The Green is still there but the garden itself has changed. “In the state of experience, jealousy, cruelty, and hypocrisy forbid the natural play of the affections and turn joy into misery.”
In general one can claim that the Songs of Experience are more powerful and more magical than the Songs of Innocence because they are born of a deep anguish in the poet's soul. Blake was aware of the fact that one kind of existence is bright with joy and harmony, but he sees its place taken by another which is dark, sinister and dead. However Blake was not simply complaining or criticizing. Actually he was looking for an ultimate synthesis in which innocence might be wedded to experience, and goodness to knowledge.
That such a state is possible he reveals in the first poem of the Songs of Experience, where he speaks with the voice of the Bard and summons the fallen soul of earth to some vast and apocalypse.
”Oh Earth, O Earth return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous mass.”
(Songs of Experience, “Introduction”, ll. 11-15)
“The true innocence is not after all that of the Songs of Innocence, but something which has gained knowledge from the ugly lessons of experience and found an expanding strength in the unfettered life of the creative soul.”
Blake foresees the consummation beyond experience and he knows that it won't come simply from good will or pious aspirations and that the life of the imagination is possible only through passion, power and energy.
“He sees that the creative activity of the imagination and the transformation of experience through it are possible only through the release and exercise of awful powers. […] The wrath which Blake found in Christ, his symbol of the divine spirit which will not tolerate restrictions but asserts itself against established rules, was the means by which he hoped to unite innocence and experience in some tremendous synthesis.”
The poetry of this desire and what it meant to Blake can be seen in “The Tyger”, the poem in the Songs of Experience which matches “The Lamb” in the Songs of Innocence.
Though dangerous and the contrary of the lamb, the tiger is felt as beautiful (`burning bright', l. 1). The reader wonders at the strength and energy in him and in his creator and questions why the universe should contain tigers and lambs, and the contrary things these represent.
'Lamb' and `Tyger' are two opposing mentalities and social characters. The former is the symbol of humanity and the latter the symbol of bestial existence. While the lamb represents selflessness the tiger represents individualism and selfhood.
The poem consists of questions,
”[…] and answers are should not be read back into it from later poems, but the emotional effect is not that we want to destroy the tiger and have a world only of lambs, but rather that we want to have both the energy of the tiger and the innocence of the lamb in a world in which the one would not destroy the other.”
The answers to the questions in “The Tyger” are understood in the context of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The choice of words in the poem defines the self-centred and destructive individualism which has an independent and separate mind and body from others. The tiger is a terrifying beast with the energy of the jungle, a fallen character because of his individualistic selfishness which has divided him from others. Thus the answer to the question: “Did he who made the Lamb' make the `Tyger' is negative.
'The Lamb' and `The Tyger' are social beings. Both are prophetic characters but one sacrifices his self-experience and selfhood for others and the other indulges his own limited and selfish interest by turning against others. “The power of the `Lamb' springs from the relationship with others, that is, with `all'. Lamb is making `all the vales rejoice'.”
The tiger is the product of a jungle-like society where the weak is the prey of the strong and the one who possesses bestial passion becomes the strongest by restraining others. By contrast the lamb represents a social and human unity, the selfless state of the `Human Soul'.
The poem secularises divinity and universalises humanity. The `child' (“The Lamb”, l. 16) in the poem represents true innocence which is selfless, free and universal humanity.
In short one can say that the lamb and the tiger are symbols for two different states of the human soul. When the lamb is destroyed by experience, the tiger is needed to restore the world.
4. Final remarks - including a comparison of the title pages of
the Songs of Innocence and of Experience
An analysis of the Songs leads one to conclude that the Songs of Experience are concerned with human experience.
”Blake is only concerned incidentally with extra-human experience.
[…] All the problems commented upon above are human and general; they need to be negotiated by every intelligent human being sooner or later. Blake's awareness of this fact is his intention to break Earth's chain […].”
Furthermore it forms the basis for his moral intention towards the reader since a concern with human experience is also a concern for the behaviour of human beings.
However, in the Songs there are only hints of the final consummation Blake is expecting to arrive some time and which shall restore men to the fullness of joy. The poems are concerned with an earlier stage in the struggle and treat of it from a purely poetical standpoint.
Blake gives the essence of his imaginative thought about this crisis in himself and in all men.
By the time he completed the whole book in its two parts, “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”, he was aware of that the state of innocence is not enough, but he had not found his full answer to his doubts and questions. He wrote his miraculous poetry from an uncertainty. “Against the negative powers, which he found so menacingly in the ascendant, he set, both in theory and in practice, his
gospel of the imagination.”
Finally I want to point out that also a comparison of the title pages of the Songs makes it obvious that Innocence and Experience are states which are opposed to each other.
By contrast to the Songs of Experience the title page of the Songs of Innocence is visually lively, the landscape is open and the sky is brightly lit. The letters in “Songs” sprout flame-like leaves (anticipating e. g. poems like “The Blossom”, “Infant Joy” and “The Divine Image”), while the gracefully cursive letters of “Innocence” anticipate those in the titles of six other Songs of Innocence, among them “A Dream” and “Nurse's Song”.
Moreover the letters and the spaces surrounding them are filled with life: tiny human and bird figures of various scales move actively or pause to sound musical instruments which may be pipes of some sort.
In short, there is activity and life everywhere.
That is not the case on the title page of the Songs of Experience. Here the open natural landscape is replaced by a sharply angular architectural backdrop in the lower half of the page and an undifferentiated sky above.
In most copies the entire page is encased in a thick frame within the plate's separate frame lines, so that one gets the impression of marginal closure and physical enclosure. In the lower half of the plate two children whose size and postures suggest adolescence bow in homage to an aged and apparently dead couple. The children are clearly involved with a moment in which consciousness of change and separation plays a significant part.
While the lettering at the top of the title page to Innocence is alive with life of all forms, the lettering here is comparably barren. A couple of weak, spindly tendrils bearing only a leaf of two apiece replace the elaborate vegetation of the Innocence title page.
Furthermore the “of” here separates a small male and female figure who would otherwise be able to embrace as their extended arms clearly suggest they wish to do. Meanwhile, a single tiny figure stands atop the base of the initial “S”, arms and hands extended upward in a traditional gesture of entreaty.
However, despite the contrasts and oppositions on the title pages and in the poems, when reading the Songs one must have in mind that Blake created a system of which both, innocence and experience, are vital parts.
Of equal importance is the fact that each of Blake's two song series (or states or major symbols) comprises a number of smaller units (or states or symbols), so that the relationship of each unit to the series as a whole might be stated as a kind of progression; from the states of innocence and experience to the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, to each individual song within the series, to the symbols within each song, to the words that give the symbols their existence.
For the serious reader of Blake's Songs a constant awareness of the context or state in which a poem appears is indispensable.
”And since each state is made up of many poems, the other poems in that state must be consulted to grasp the full significance of any one poem.”
If one reads a song out of its context it will mean much less than Blake expected of his total invention. Since Blake created a system of which innocence and experience are vital parts one should not deny to the Songs of Innocence the very background and basic symbology which it helps to make up.
”Without the system, Blake is the simplest of lyric poets […]. Yet with very little study the child of innocence can be seen to be radically different from the child of experience, and the mother of innocence scarcely recognizable in experience. The states are separate, the two contrary states of the human soul, and the songs were written not merely for our enjoyment, or even for our edification, but for our salvation”;
and “without Contraries is no progression” - as Blake's expresses it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
5. Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter: Blake. London: Sinclair-Stevenson 1995.
Beer, John: Blake's Humanism. New York: Manchester University Press
1968.
Behrendt, Stephen C.: Reading William Blake. Macmillan 1992.
Bolt, S.F.: “The Songs of Innocence (1947)”. In: William Blake. Songs of
Innocence and Experience. A casebook; ed. by Margaret Bottrall.
Macmillan Education LTD 1970, pp. 114-122.
Bowra, C.M.: “Songs of Innocence and Experience (1950)”. In: William
Blake. Songs of Innocence and Experience. A casebook; ed. by
Margaret Bottrall. Macmillan Education LTD 1970, pp. 136-159.
Ferber, Michael: The Poetry of William Blake. Penguin Critical Studies
1991.
Frye, Northrop: Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton
University Press 1947.
Gleckner, Robert F.: “Point of view and context in Blake's Songs
(1957)”. In: William Blake. Songs of Innocence and Experience. A
casebook; ed. by Margaret Bottrall. Macmillan Education LTD 1970,
pp. 189-197.
Mankowitz, Wolf: “The Songs of Experience (1947)”. In: William Blake.
Songs of Innocence and Experience. A casebook; ed. by Margaret
Bottrall. Macmillan Education LTD 1970, pp. 123-135.
Lindsay, Jack: William Blake. His Life and Work. New York: George
Braziller 1979.
Sabri-Tabrizi, G.R.: The `Heaven' and `Hell' of William Blake. London:
Lawrence and Wishart 1973.
Songs of Innocence and Experience with an introduction and
commentary by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. London: Oxford University
Press/Paris: The Trianon Press 1967.
The Illuminated Blake: William Blake's complete illuminated works with
a plate-by-plate commentary; ed. by David V. Erdman. New York:
Dover Publications 1992.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; ed. by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford
University Press.
Vine, Stephen: Blake's poetry: Spectral Visions. The Macmillan Press
LTD 1993.
William Blake: Selected Poems; ed. by P.H. Butter. Everyman 1997.
Songs of Innocence and Experience with an introduction and commentary by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. London: Oxford University Press 1967, p. ix.
Cf. ebd., p. 8.
Ebd., p. xii.
Ebd., p. xiii.
Ebd., p. xiv.
Ebd., p. xv.
Behrendt, Stephen C.: Reading William Blake. Macmillan 1992.
Ackroyd, Peter: Blake. London: Sinclair-Stevenson 1995, p. 142.
Ebd.
Ebd.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; ed. by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford University Press. London & New York 1975, p. ix.
Ebd., p. x.
Cf. Ferber, Michael: The Poetry of William Blake. Penguin Classical Studies 1991, p. 96.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a.a.O., p. xi.
Beer, John: Blake's Humanism. New York: Manchester University Press 1968.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a.a.O., p. xi.
Bowra, C.M.: “Songs of Innocence and Experience (1950)”. In: William Blake. Songs of Innocence and Experience. A casebook; ed. by Margaret Bottrall. Macmillan Education LTD 1970, p. 136.
Ebd.
Ebd., p. 138.
William Blake. Selected Poems; ed. by P.H. Butter. Everyman 1997, p. 9.
Bowra, a.a.O., p. 138.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 9.
Bowra, a.a.O., p. 139.
Ebd., pp. 139-140.
Ebd., p. 140.
Ebd.
Frye, Northrop: Fearful Symmetry. A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996, p. 236.
Ebd., p. 235.
Bowra, a.a.O., p. 143.
Cf. William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 15.
Bowra, a.a.O., p. 146.
Ebd., p. 147.
Frye, a.a.O., p. 236.
Ebd., p. 237.
Ackroyd, a.a.O., p. 122.
Ebd.
Ferber, a.a.O., p. 2.
Ebd., p. 19.
Ebd.
Behrendt, a.a.O., p. 54.
Ebd.
Ebd.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 26.
Cf. Ferber, a.a.O, p. 31.
Bowra, a.a.O., p. 149.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 15.
Ebd., p. 31.
Ebd., p. 150.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 22.
Bowra, a.a.O., p. 148.
Ferber, a.a.O., p. 26.
Bowra, a.a.O., p. 150.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 16 and p. 22.
Ferber, a.a.O., p.17.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 16, ll. 11-12.
Ferber, a.a.O., p. 18.
Ebd.
Ebd., p. 28.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 10.
Ebd., p. 29.
Bowra, a.a.O., p. 152.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 21.
Bowra, a.a.O., p. 156.
Ebd.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 28.
Ebd., p. 10.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. xxvi.
Sabri-Tabrizi, G.R.: The `Heaven' and `Hell' of William Blake. London: Lawrence and Wishart 1973, p. 38.
Cf. ebd., p. 38-39.
Mankowitz, Wolf: “The Songs of Experience (1947)”. In: William Blake. Songs of Innocence and Experience. A casebook; ed. by Margaret Bottrall. Macmillan Education LTD 1970, p. 134.
Bowra, a.a.O., p. 158.
Cf. Behrendt, a.a.O., p. 65-66.
Gleckner, Robert F.: “Point of view and context in Blake's Songs (1957)”. In: William Blake. Songs of Innocence and Experience. A casebook; ed. by Margaret Bottrall. Macmillan Education LTD 1970, p. 191.
Ebd., p. 192.
William Blake. Selected Poems, a.a.O., p. 47.
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