ASSIGNMENT

Q. From your reading of Blake’s poetry in your syllabus discuss till what extent is he a poet
of political protest as well as a critique of institutionalized and orthodox religion.

William Blake, born on 28 November 1757, was an English poet, painter and printmaker,
widely considered to be one of the seminal figures of the Romantic Age. In his own lifetime,
Blake was dismissed as an “unfortunate lunatic” by the likes of Robert Hunt, mostly because
of his heretical and socially non-conformist views. His poetry embodies two key elements of
political and social protest writing: he champions the freedom of the individual (even as he
critiques bourgeois individualism) and condemns those who wield oppressive power. Blake
places much focus on the detrimental effects of the Industrial Revolution, and a lot of his
poetry recounts in symbolic allegory the effects of the French and American revolutions. His
work also impresses upon the reader that even though he believed in the Bible, he abhorred
the manipulations and cruelties of organized religion.

Blake’s Songs of Innocence, first published in 1789, are characterized by the themes of
idyllic pastoral harmony, oneness of the characters with nature, and primal human
innocence, with the figure of the Piper as the narrator. As Robert F. Gleckner has pointed
out in his essay ‘Point of View and Context in Blake’s Songs’, “… for the piper, the past can
only be the primal unity, the present is innocence and the immediate future is experience.”
This means that even as the piper’s tone is persistently joyous, it is never completely free of
the elements of experience, and thus is marked by an undercurrent of sorrow. In the
Introduction poem, for instance, the moment language enters to give wholesome meaning,
the child vanishes, and by extension, so does innocence. In the last stanza, even as Blake
trues to emphasise the lack of sophistication, and native innocence, the fact that language
led to the loss of innocence cannot be overlooked, implying that language itself is not
innocent at all. In Blake’s time, vantage points of education were accessible only to a
segment of the population. There was a marked targeting of working classes in the
articulation of religion and religious education, which was done in order to maintain the
status of the bourgeoisie and to prevent mobility between the classes. This articulation
privileged some, and disprivileged many. Moreover, there is a complete reversal of ‘normal’
adult-child relations in the introductory verse. The songs sung by the piper are not meant as
moral lessons for the child, unlike the contemporary literature being produced for children
in Blake’s time, which was full of didacticism, and Christian doctrines (eg. Isaac Watts’ Divine
and Moral Songs for the Use of Children (1715) and Charles Wesley’s Hymns for Children
(1763)). In this sense, according to A.S. Crehan, “… the Songs of Innocence are unique:
neither seeking to socialize children into the norms and codes of class society, nor
cultivating an individual sensibility, they psychologically prepare both parent and child for
an open, free, democratic society.”

To quote Northrop Frye, “Childhood to Blake is a state or phase of imaginative existence,

the phase in which the world of imagination is still a brave new world and yet reassuring
and intelligible.” This intelligibility is foregrounded in the way the child answers its own
question about the lamb’s creation in The Lamb, by seeing no distinction between the
maker of the lamb and the lamb itself, between the infant Jesus and himself as a child. He
claims God for himself, and chooses to define him, instead of upholding traditional Christian
hierarchy, where God is the superior being. Blake liberates the child, the lamb and God
himself, and effectively shatters the creation of an “other”, as well as critiquing the
hierarchies prevalent in both the Church and the society. The most socially direct of the
Songs of Innocence is The Chimney Sweeper, where the child’s suffering is made even more
poignant by his innocent and complete faith in God and His divine plan, such that his
innocent death wish in the poem becomes an insurmountable moral challenge to the
exploitative London society. Blake’s individual naming of the chimney sweeper boys is also
not entirely insignificant: as some critics have pointed out, this act might refer to the
philosophy of baptism in the Christian faith, wherein a child is baptized in order to salvage
him from the repercussions of the original sin. Baptism also implies that individuals are not
replaceable in the matters of sin and redemption. However, in the industrialist society
dominated by notions of free trade and free market, human sacrifice is effectively at work
as these children face death for the advantage of others.

In his essay ‘The Politics of Experience’, A.S. Crehan points out that “Blake’s Experience is in
one sense the experience of social misery, of poverty without the safety net of communal
concern and mutual obligation.” The advent of bourgeois individualism, and its associated
virtues of accumulation and profitable spending of time have led to widespread social
indifference, as well as a lack of empathy and genuine concern. Moreover, Blake’s poems
echo Rousseau’s ideas which asked for children to pursue their education in an
unencumbered and uninhibited fashion. In this way, he aligns himself with the
Enlightenment view of self-regimentation, and his poems, especially The Chimney Sweeper
become a symbol of political protest. In Songs of Experience, children no longer display
naiveté: they can see through the hypocrisy of their parents (paradox of church-going with
the sin of exploitation), and articulate their resentment in The Chimney Sweeper. Blake
opposes the advantage that the Church grants the abstract soul against the material body,
and for him, this is the philosophical root of the problem. Blake also mocks the Holy Trinity
by replacing it with a socio-political trinity of God, priest and king. In the last line, he goes on
to criticize the easy, luxurious life the rich and powerful can afford to lead at the expense of
hundreds of children living in deplorable, less-than-human conditions. Thus, Blake
condemns the entire socio-religious nexus that conspires to rob innocent children of their
childhood and basic rights.

Since Dante’s Inferno, wild beasts have been employed by poets and writers to symbolize
the dehumanization of the sinful man: it is his bestiality that reflects his abject degradation.
Therefore, it is no coincidence that Blake conveys “violent, revolutionary energy” through
the tiger in Songs of Experience. In an important essay, Martin K. Numi argued that Blake’s
The Tyger was a direct response to the French Revolution and its aftermath. By comparing
the tiger to the figures of Lucifer and Prometheus, who both wanted to equal God, Blake
may be pointing at how the Church stymies the process of gaining knowledge by branding
certain kinds of knowledge as ‘sinful’ and ‘tabboo’, and hence, stifles innate humanity itself.
Since the tiger comes from incomprehensible spaces, where even the identity of his creator
is not known for sure, he can be seen to bring with him a certain illumination which was not
accessible before, in the normative spaces where human beings express themselves in the
conventional manner. As such, the tiger is a symbol of social revolution and spiritual
regeneration. A.S. Crehan, in ‘Blake’s Tyger and the ‘Tygerish Multitude’’ has said that “…
Blake was not only consciously transforming a traditional symbolism, but that he was
criticizing, through the speaker of The Tyger, a prevailing conservative ideology that viewed
revolution merely as a horrifying, dehumanizing process.” The fact that the question behind
the tiger’s creation remains unanswered is also a critique of the religion which suppresses
individuality, and looks down upon questioning the strictures. By leaving this mystery
unresolved, Blake wants the reader to think for him/herself, and not blindly follow the
Church’s teachings.

In conclusion, through a careful analysis of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of

Experience, one can see that he employs certain archetypal symbols in a subversive manner
in order to question religious orthodoxy, and condemn unjust social practices. The
undercurrents of political and socio-religious protest even in the most innocent of his
poems cannot be missed. Therefore, one can say that he was a poet of political protest and
a critic of institutionalized religion to a very large extent.