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Essay on Black's Songs of Experience and Innocence
The paper is explains philosophically and thematically, how Blake's Songs of Experience explore two contrary states of the human soul?
This 'Introduction' sets the tone for the Songs of Innocence as a whole, with its use of images of the child and the Lamb (Christ), collectively with the vivid tranquil bucolic setting, establishing the tendency of Innocence: guiltlessness, autonomy from hurt and indulgence. The full-page illustration, which accompanied this poem as frontispiece to the Songs of Innocence, shows a piper looking up at a child resting in the cloud, at the same time as sheep graze steadily between the trees: the equally harmonizing relationship between text and illustration is itself indicated in the final stanza, with the reference to the 'rural pen'. Even in this actually direct celebration of childhood innocence, laughter and joy, commentators have detected an anticipation of the darker tones of the Songs of Experience, and the sense that this springtime vision is momentary. The phrase "wept with joy" is one clue, as is the reference to the staining of the "water clear". However the predominating tone of this lyric is happy and full of joy. It is worth comparing this poem with the 'Introduction' to the Songs of Experience.
English poet and artist William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) are his best-known works of poetry and have had a lasting control on children’s literature. A number of Songs, such as the “Introduction” and “The Lamb,” explore the innocence of children’s understanding of God and the natural world. Others, such as “The Chimney Sweeper” and “The Garden of Love,” reveal the hardships both children and adults must confront in the unsheltered world of “experience.” American-born English poet and critic T. S. Eliot wrote that Blake’s poetry in Songs of Experience and other writings contained “an honesty against which the whole world conspires because it is unpleasant.”.................
