This picture was painted by Blake in 1805 with water colours as well as pen. It is called, ‘The River of life’ and shows the experienced and innocent swimming and wading through the river of life.
Also the golden sunset on the horizon appears to be the destination and it is like a guiding light, offering hope and almost suggesting it is heaven as Blake was very religious and it does lie at the end of the river. The two tall figures at either side of the picture are holding pipes and playing a tune on them which goes back to Blake’s poem, in Songs of Innocence ‘Introduction’. The ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence is showing how Innocence needs Experience and is led by experience.
Introduction
Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant 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.
Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe Sing thy songs of happy chear,
So I sung the same again
while he wept with joy to hear.
Piper sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read --
So he vanish'd from my sight,
And I pluck'd a hollow reed.
And I made a rural pen,
And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear
The repetition of pipe and piper gives the poem an uplifting feel because of the imagery that it provokes in your mind (a tune being piped). This kind of youthful happy imagery is used in many of the poems to put across the carefree, naïve days that come with childhood. However the piper, being older, represents experience or so you would think and yet it is the little boy who cries to hear the song; if the boy is innocent and has no experience how could he know sadness that comes with experience. Blake was right that you need opposites because after all you cannot balance anything if it is one sided; hence the irony of the boy having experience and innocence.
I think that Blake has chosen to make the Songs of Innocence poems happier on a whole because he had such an unhappy childhood as many of his brothers died then and re-wrote the jolly childhood that he missed out on. I also think that the Songs of Experience poems are less pleasant because Blake stated to see the world in an abstract way and was less naïve when he was older and he noticed more of the bad things in the world for example, in his descriptive poem of London where he spent lot of time (as well as in the countryside). London was also the subject of a poem by William Wordsworth but it portrayed a contrasting view to Blake’s, many say this was because Blake became bitter.
London
I wander through each chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear –
How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning church appals,
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls;
But most through midnight streets I hear
How youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
This poem portrays a very sinister London which he appears to have experienced in detail as he says in the 1st line ‘each chartered street .....where the chartered Thames does flow’, implying that he has been down the same streets many times before being that chartered means somewhere that has already been discovered or found. The repetition of ‘every’ in the 2nd stanza, ‘In every cry of every man, In every infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban,’ emphasizes the monotonous, repetition in every one of his days. As he is talking about ‘mind-forged manacles’ as well, it is like he is saying that no-one escapes as even the innocent are touched by experience; for example, ‘In every infant’s cry of fear’ Blake could hear experience trapping them. The world was far from perfect in Blake’s day and still is today, but that didn’t stop Blake; in a perfect world, people would be able to do anything and not be restricted by rules of law or physics, which is what Blake wanted; this was because Blake was a Romanticist. Romanticism characterized many works of literature, paintings, music, architecture, criticism in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism is often seen as the rejection of the rules of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that epitomised in general. This is why he was opposed to the enlightenment period and the reason and illusory science that came with it. In Songs of Innocence, Blake endeavoured to make the world a better and happier place in his eyes by giving a distinctive naïve view to the poems.
The poems were striking in the 18th century and even more so today, but Blake in his time was seen as a unique thinker because he could look at the world differently to everyone almost in an abstract way which appealled to citezens of London and England (although mainly the radical thinkers he surrounded himself with e.g. Thomas Paine who he also wrote some political sketches with). Songs of Innocence and Experience are some of his most infuencial linguistic works of art, how ever it was the poem ‘London’ which influenced L.S. Lowry to draw his infamous match stick people outside of a industrial building all walking around and that was written over 100 years prior.
