Charles Dickens's Hard Times

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Introduction

Songs of Innocence and of Experience contain William Blake's best-known and most widely read works, including what is perhaps his most famous poem.

Discussion

Actually, observed that loving care and care-free jollity in the poetic world of “Innocence” whereas in “Experience” repression is the theme, repression of human instincts, human rights and ultimately human life of freedom.

The poet himself was brought up in the centre of English social resistance. Being a successful artist, Blake's ways of fighting against the social vices is through the media of art. And in his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience the poet depicts and criticizes the corrupted and ill shaped English society of his period.

The title itself has had an enormous effect on ways of thinking about poetry. Songs of Innocence—the title of the first part, which appeared by itself in 1789—might seem a fairly innocuous title, like the famous Songs and Sonnets which begin the full title of Tottel's Miscellany (1557; Shakespeare has Falstaff refer to it that way). But the idea of Songs of Experience (added to the Songs of Innocence in a new volume in 1794) was peculiarly modern; it led eventually to such titles as Bertolt Brecht's "Ballad of ill-gotten gains" in The Three penny Opera (1928), but it is more radical still because of the difficulty of understanding the idea that there should be such things as songs of experience. The idea of the songs is something like the idea of innocence. Experience does not sing (although sorrow might), since the idea of experience might be that it no longer believes in song.

But for Blake there is more than irony in the title. That all things should be in some sense poetic—should long for poetic expression, long to sing—is one of his central tenets. The songs of experience also indicate the possibility that in experience there is still some fundamentally saving innocence that may not recognize itself but is still there, still attracted toward the love and life which for Blake constituted holiness. Conversely, the idea of Songs of Experience might mean that songs themselves are not the sure symptom and symbol and expression of incorruptibility we might wish them to be, so that the songs of innocence do not protect or immunize their singers from corruption as we would wish them to do.

Another way to put this point is to say that the Songs of Innocence, even when they appeared alone, are far from being expressions of naïveté, later corrected by an older Blake with the Songs of Experience. The very idea of songs of innocence is an idea that comes from a no-longer-innocent perspective. This is clear throughout the Songs of Innocence, for example in "The Nurse's Song" and "The Little Black Boy." As these poems indicate, the truly innocent do not recognize their innocence because, by the very nature of that innocence, they have had no experience to the ...