Songs of Innocence by W.

Blake
Songs of Innocence and of Experience William Blake The following entry presents criticism of Blake's poetry collection, Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794). See also, William Blake Criticism. INTRODUCTION Written in the deceptively simple style associated with children's verse, Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of short lyric poems accompanied by Blake's original illustrations. The two sections, written over an interval of at least four years, juxtapose the two contrary states of the human soul, as the combined text's subtitle states. The Tyger, an individual ver se from Songs of Experience, is one of the most widely recognized poems in the English language. Biographical Information Blake was born on November 28, 1757, in London, the second of five surviving children of James and Catherine Harmitage Blake. His father sold gloves, stockings, and haberdashery, maintaining the family in rather modest circumstances. Blake did not attend school as a young child but spent his time wandering freely throughout the city and the surrounding countryside, where he began experiencing the visions that would later inform his illustrations. His parents discouraged the child from relating his visions of angels in trees or God's face at the window, since, from their perspective, the boy was lying. They did, however, encourage Blake's artistic talent. At the age of ten he was enrolled in a drawing school operated by James Pars and four years later he began an apprenticeship with a master engraver. He briefly attended the Royal Academy after completing his apprenticeship, but soon began working full time as an engraver, producing illustrations for various books and periodicals. In 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher, who signed her name with an X on their marriage license. Under her husband's tutelage she learned to rea d and write, eventually assisting him in drafting. The couple had no children. In 1784 Blake went into the printing business with his younger brother Robert and a local engraver, but the business failed three years later, after Robert's death. Blake then turned to copperplate etching and perfected the technique that would allow him to produce both illustration and verse on a single page, as he did for the Songs. In 1790 Blake left the city he associated with disease, pollution, and a wide variety of social problems, in favor of Lambeth, a rural area across the Thames where he began composing the poems of the Experience section of his work. The Blakes lived there for more than ten years before returning to London. Throughout his lifetime Blake was plagued by financial problems and was often at the mercy of overbearing patrons. He was primarily known as an artist rather than as a poet, in part because his illuminated texts were self-published and reached a very limited readership. Widespread distribution of his work did not occur until after his death. Blake died on August 12, 1827, while working on a set of illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. Textual History The production of the version of Songs of Innocence and of Experience used in most modern editions took place over a period of thirty-five years, with Blake acting as his own publisher. According to most scholars, the first section of Blake's text, Songs of Innocence, was written and published in 1789. Blake later combined these poems with a second section entitled Songs of Experience. Blake called the combined edition, dated 1794, Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul and created a new illustration for the title page. Four of the songs originally assigned to the Innocence sectionThe Schoolboy, The Little Girl Lost, The Little Girl Found, and The Voice of the Ancient Bardwere moved to the Experience section in the combined version. In addition, there is a great deal of variation in the order in which the poems appear in the surviving copies of both the Innocence section and the combined sections. The final poem of the Experience sequence, To Tirzah, summarizes the entire work; it was added much later, possibly as many as twelve years after the appearance of the combined version. Major Themes The poems of the two sections deal with the opposition between the innocent, joyous perspective of the child and the more experienced, less spontaneous, perspective of the adult. Blake creates a dichotomy between wishes and desires on the one hand and duties and responsibilities on the other, always privileging the imaginative over the rational. Although children appear as the subject of individual songs in both sections of the work, their happiness or misery is determined by their relationships with the adults who maintain control over their lives, as in the contrasting poems Infant Joy from Songs of Innocence and Infant Sorrow from Songs of Experience. The group of poems associated with experience is replete with images of restriction and constraint, occasionally self-imposed, but more commonly imposed by parents or authority figures on the lives of the young. Although the poems of the two sections are obviously meant to serve as contrasting states of the human condition, the individual poems, even those associated with innocence, themselves contain discontinuities, as though in anticipation of the much harsher view of life outlined in the second sequence. Suspicion and mistrust of authority figures parental, religious, or politicaland the power they wield is an important theme throughout the work. The contrasts Blake set forth in the Songs are echoes of English society's approach to the social and political issues of his era a time characterized, on the one hand, by increasing desire for personal, political, and economic freedom, and on the other, by

anxiety regarding the potential consequences of that freedom for social institutions. Several of the poems directly address contemporary social problems, for example, The Chimney-Sweeper deals with child labor and Holy Thursday describes t he grim lives of charity children. The most fully-realized social protest poem in the Songs is London, a critique of urban poverty and misery. Critical Reception Critical controversy surrounds the categorization of Blake's poetry in the Romantic period. Harold S. Pagliaro suggests that Blake not only participated in the Romantic era's preoccupation with mortality, but actually went beyond most of his contemporaries in embracing vulnerability to death. According to Pagliaro, Blake considered the world dea th-laden, filled with intimidating foes, , hypocritical smiles, and constricting social and religious systems that reduce life. The critic believes it was the aim of t he Songs to meet the challenge presented by such a dismal world view. Some scholars, though, reject the notion that Blake was a Romantic poet at all, and instead situate his work within the tradition of an earlier literary period. Heather Glen contends that Blake's text is not, as is often claimed, an experimental work. In presentation and s ubject-matter, Blake's Songs are closer to late eighteenthcentury children's verse than to anything else in the period, writes Glen. However, Blake's verses differ from the usual chi ldren's poetry, according to Glen, in their failure to provide a strong authorial voice conveying the message young readers should glean from the poems. Jon Mee, acknowledging the work's originality, also maintains that the songs are modeled on earlier literature, but insists that they often work by mimicking familiar forms and arousing expectations which they go on to frustrate. Martin Price contends that the association of the Innocence poems with verse for children has led some critics to dismiss them entirely or to treat them as ironic foreshadowings of the Experience poems, a position he rejects. He asserts that the poems of the first section are valuable in their own right and should first be examined in isolation from the second section. Only when we grant Innoce nce its proper value does the full dialectical force of t he two contrary states become clear, claims Price. Many scholars, including Glen, nevertheless defend the contention that the poems of the Innocence sequence contain an element of irony that undercuts their pastoral quality. Harold Bloom, too, refers to B lake's use of innocence as an equivocal term and suggests that the songs in the first section exhibit an ambiguity of tone. Controversy has also raged over the organization of the work and the relationship between the two sections. Many critics have studied the obvious dialectical pairings of individual poems, such as the contrasting versions of Nurse's Song or The Chim neySweeper in each section. Others see affinities between poems that do not have similar titles, such as the cluster Laughing Song, The Little Black Boy and The Voice of the Ancient Bard. Attempts to establish a direct correspondence across the board between the two sections have proven fruitless, however. Donald A. Dike maintains that Blake was too fine an artist to pair off in detail all the poems in the sequences; to get what he was after, it was enough to do this with a few. K. E. Smith suggests t hat attempts to match up the individual songs are complicated by the fact that Blake himself changed the order of the poems several times, moving some from Innocence to Experience. Smith suggests that Blake was constantly highlighting different paths through the innocent world, rather than pointing to one final, ideal arrangement of the poems. Glen has examined those piecessuch as Londonthat deal with social problems and notes that the self-consciousness of Blake's poetic voice sets him apart from his contemporaries. The poem's speaker, in relating the deplorable conditions associated with urban life, does not assume a position of righteous indignation: from the very beginning he recognizes his own implication in that which he sees. The result is not a moral attitude that exposes and protests against social problems, but rather a p rofound uneasiness on the part of both the poem's speaker and the reader. Mee also notes Blake's complex approach to social problems in the songs, contrasting The Chimney Sweeper with Mary Alcock's poem The Chimney -Sweeper's Complaint. As Mee sees it, Alcock's reader is not called upon to consider his or her role in the system of child labour, whereas Blake's reader is directly implicated in what is happening. Scholars agree that, although Blake participated in the contemporary discourse on social problems, his approach was original and far less consoling for the reader than that of other writers. Both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience contain poems that are interdependent. A critical reading of The Lamb, for example, is impossible without also reading the Introduction, The Shepherd, and Night from Songs of Innocence. Its meaning is further deepened when reading The Tyger from Songs of Experience, and vice versa. Taken as a whole, Blakes Songs of Innocence and of Experience offer a romanticized yet carefully thought out view of nature, God, society, and religion from a variety of perspectives, ultimately demanding that the reader choose the view he or she finds most compelling from among the myriad voices of the poems.

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Blake published Songs of Innocence in 1789, Songs of Experience in 1793-94, and the combined text in 1794. Though not composed at the same time, and Songs of Innocence was published separately, the two parts form a dialogue rather than discrete texts, which is underscored by how Blake moved poems from

Innocence to Experience. While the poems of Songs are written in a direct, unornamented language, they raise provocative questions. There is the issue of there being no definitive text. The 28 surviving editions show 19 different arrangements of the poems within the two sections, although after 1815 Blake settled on an order. There is also the question of how the arrangement affects interpretation of the larger text and of individual poems. Significant, too, is the idiosyncratic punctuation, capitalization, and spelling and how this impacts on possible meanings. Opening Songs, the questions multiply. On the title page, beneath fluid swaths of flaming colors and letters swirling into the design, we see Adam and Eve covering their nakedness and shielding their prostrate bodies from flames. The image depicts the moment immediately after the Fall when they leave Eden. Yet before we succumb to the kind of dualistic thinking that sees experience as merely negating innocence, we should recall that the contrary states exist in a dynamic tension, which we see by contrasting this plate with the frontispiece and title page for Innocence. The former depicts a shepherd with a pipe, gazing upward at a child on a cloud; the latter, a seated mother or nurse instructing two young children, who gaze at a book opened on her lap. While these pastoral scenes evoke innocence, they and the poem Introduction, which connects to the former image, also question our perceptions of this state. The poem introduces a figure Piping songs of pleasant glee, at first spontaneously for himself and then at the behest of the child, who asks him to Pipe a song about a Lamb! to pipe it again, to sing it, and finally to write down his songs, In a book that all may read. In response to the childs commands, the piper plucked a hollow reed from which he fashioned a rural pen and staind the water clear in writing down his happy songs / Every child may joy to hear. Returning to the relationship between innocence and experience, we find that the states comment on each other: Northrop Frye writes, The Songs of Experience are satires, but one of the things that they satirize is the state of innocence. They show us the butchers knife which is waiting for the unconscious lamb. Conversely, the Songs of Innocence satirize the state of experience as the contrast which they present to it makes its hypocrisies more obviously shameful. Songs of Innocence and of Experience simultaneously invites and frustrates inquiry in order to resist any reductive logic; thus, we uncover no key that will systematize its contraries. The poems generate ambiguities, which only multiply as we read and reread them, for we must continually grapple with the dialectical relationship of innocence and experience. Blake devised a dual text-and-image method to prevent any passive reception of the poems and to arouse the mind and senses jointly. Nonetheless, the regeneration of a fallen humanity and return of Earth that the bard in the Introduction vainly hoped would immediately commence appears in the concluding poem to be not far off yet not immediate. Still, a prophetic consciousness emerges that calls a Youth of delight to see the opening morn, / Image of truth new born (The Voice of the Anciet Bard, ll. 1-3). Blakes later prophetic books will imagine that new Jerusalem.