William Blake wrote two collections of songs, the songs of experience and the songs innocence. The songs of innocence seem to progress towards the songs of experience. In the songs of innocence, Blake focuses around a child’s world and the innocence of a child, thus describing a world of natural innocence. Most of the songs of innocence by Blake, are narrated from the viewpoint of a child, and so imply that children are innocent. Blake also reveals the truth about moving from his own childhood to adulthood, losing all his innocence and hope in the process. In his songs of innocence, he portrays the image of the world as hopeful, happy and peaceful, and therefore immediately makes the reader think that he is a child reading a simple piece of literature. In his songs of experience, Blake seems to focus on the world around the viewpoint of an adult. This shows how the songs of experience are derived from the songs of innocence – in the same way as adulthood derives from childhood. In the songs of experience, all the happiness and ignorance of childhood is lost, to form a rather harsh look on life. Blake is comparing and contrasting his songs of innocence with his songs of experience. This is also shown by either two versions of the same poem, with different use of language in each (e.g. both versions of ‘The Nurses Song’), or two different poems, which are being compared by each other (e.g. ‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tyger’).
In the ‘Nurse’s Song’ in the songs of innocence, the first thing you notice, which indicates innocence is the ‘laughing’, in the second line of the first paragraph. This shows a characteristic of the children who laugh without experience. They are so innocent that they laugh as a result of something funny from their point of view. For the children it is a reflex action, because they laugh naturally as a result of happiness or fun. Moving into the second paragraph, Blake say, ‘Then come home my children, the sun is gone down’. This again indicates innocence, by the fact that the parent is telling the children to come home because it will get dark due to the sun going down. But the children are ignorant of this and would carry on playing if it wasn’t for their parents. This shows the ignorance and innocence of children. In the next line Blake’s use of language describe innocence. The first word of the next line, the ‘and’, isn’t used in the way of a conjunction, and so doesn’t join the two lines together. This appears again in the third paragragh. This shows that he uses his language in an innocent way. The same thing is done in ‘Little Boy Found’. In the second line of the second paragraph, he puts the word ‘and’ to try to join the two sentences. But Blake could do without the ‘and’, and could join the two sentences anyway. He doesn’t need the conjunction. His use of language to make the song look innocent continues. In the third line of the third paragraph, he describes the bird as ‘little’. This seems very bland and not very exquisite at all, thus making it sound more innocent to the reader. It tells the reader that the song is narrated from a child’s view and, because the child doesn’t know much vocabulary, he/she would use simple words to describe his / her surroundings. Throughout this song, the absence of time, apart from the relation to the sun, helps the vision of the song to be innocent. The first word of the song is ‘when’, and so is very vague in its relation to time. After this, there is no mention about time in the song, apart from the parent (who is experienced) telling the children to come in because it’s getting dark. The use of repetition in the song doesn’t direct it like in the songs of experience (e.g. ‘The Tyger’). In the beginning of the second and third
