William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience - Compare and contrast the poems indicating briefly how far you consider each an appropriate introduction to the poems that follow it.

University Degree Linguistics, Classics and related subjects

William Blake – Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Compare and contrast the following poems indicating briefly how far you consider each an appropriate introduction to the poems that follow it.

Introductions

In Blake’s Introductions to each Song he gives a brief overview of the poems to follow them. In each overview Blake manages to engender feelings that directly relate to the collections of poems that follow them. The Introductions play integral roles in helping the reader to best understand Blake’s poems.

He begins his collection of poems with the first introduction, an introduction of the Songs of Innocence. He uses this introduction to give direction as to how the poems in this section came into being. While in the Songs of Experience Blake highlights the transition of man from a state of innocence to a state of experience.

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In the first Introduction we see a shepherd with a pipe, he is leading his flock of lambs. Blake uses the image of the lambs as an image of innocence throughout the Songs of Innocence. This image relates directly to the poems that follow where most of the poems include images of the lamb being related to Jesus Christ as humble and also innocent. There is also an image of a child, which is another image of innocence used by Blake in the writing of his Songs of Innocence. Blake uses images several times in his depiction of the presence of Christ throughout his works. He goes on to show the happy child telling the piper to “pipe a song about a Lamb”. The child then tells the shepherd to put down his pipe and “sing thy songs of happy chear”. The child weeps with joy to hear the shepherd sing. Then the same child instructs the shepherd to sit and write his songs “in a book that all may read” and that is exactly what Blake does as the shepherd. He documents all his Songs of Innocence that “every child may joy to hear”.

This introduction can be related to the introduction to Songs of Experience in that instead of someone instructing the writer to do something the writer is in turn calling the fallen man to regain control of the world, to “turn away no more”. The Bard is calling the “lapsed soul” to renew the fallen light and to awake from the “slumberous mass”. In this poem Blake makes reference to reason (the starry pole), Man has adopted reason and turned away from everything that held him close to God. In the Songs of Experience Blake explores a different aspect of human life. He explores the facet in which there is deceit and pain. He shows that in the Songs of Innocence mostly a life of naïveté was portrayed and he tries to highlight the other parts of life in the Songs of Experience. Blake’s uses of symbols also help to emphasize the immense difference between the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience. Blake’s thoughts were more experienced when he wrote the Songs of Experience than when he wrote the Songs of Innocence, which is one of the main reasons, why both introductions are structured differently.

In the analysis of both introductions it is evident that with them preceding the Songs of Innocence and Experience there is a greater understanding of Blake’s state of mind before writing each song and therefore helping us as the reader to comprehend each and every poem with a greater understanding and thus deriving a greater meaning from them.

Nadya Dee-Anne Forbes

Age: 17 years