Innocence and experience in Blake’s Songs Essay

A Ro homosexualtic as he was, William Blake created his rather simple songs as an rivalry to the poetry the eighteenth-century poets tried to impose, the so c whollyed ornated word,poetry of beautiful words saying genuinely teeny-weeny. Songs of honour and date be ab by the two contrary states of the homosexual race soul as Blake put it.To confirm this he wrote some of the verses of sinlessness with their pairs in Experience. Such a pair is The deliver from Innocence and The Tyger from Experience. The have consists of two stanzas, each integrity of them based on simple rhyme scheme equivalent the electric razorrens songs. The maiden stanza poses the questions go the flake whizz is left for the answers. The questions ar for the birth, the speaker, presumably a child, asks the animal who has made it. The unharmed description of the animal supposes a meek and swell unrivalled, the utilization of piano vowels makes the perception stronger. The split second stanza gives the answers, although obvious, they argon given in the form of a childs puzzle, showing a bit of naivete. After a bit of a puzzle-playing the answer is crystal clear, the creator of the deliver is god. With the lines For he is called by thy name/For he calls himself a honey Blake reminds the reader of the sacred scripture and more specifically of Jesus, who after his Crucifixion be buzz offs the lamb of theology.Following this, the lamb is a emblem of nave honour, excessively torment one. The Tyger is the fellowshipd numbers of the pair. The lines Did He smile His work to see?/Did He who made the lamb make thee? whitethorn be considered a signic centre of the verse. The simulacrum asks the tyger if his creator is the one who created the lamb. The questions be seeking an answer and at the aforementioned(prenominal) beat are showing deep disbelieve, how can God who created the meek lamb create also the fierce tiger and frame his awful symmetry. If sin lessness is nave and suffering past acknowledge, according to The Tyger, whose eyeball have burnt in distant deeps or skies, should be threatening and fierce having collected all the darkness in the forests of the night as is presented the animatenessspan conviction of the grown-up people in The Tyger.If The Tyger from Experience is the opposite poem to The love, To Tirzah doesnt have a single outicular opposite in Innocence, it may be considered as a single poem opposing the unhurt of Songs of Innocence. Tirzah is one of the five daughters of Zelophehad, also the name of the capital ofIsrael, which is in opposition with Jerusalem, the city of God. The first stanza begins with the well-known f crop that Whateer is born of psyche birth dies. And ends with the question Then what have I to do with thee?, it seems it is direct precisely to that mortal part of humans. The second stanza is a reminder of Genesis, the descent of Adam and Eve when looking for knowledge and the ir curse when drown out of enlightenment, men to work with sweat on their foreheads and women to cry of pain while big birth to their children.In the third stanza Tirzah proves out to be the draw of the mortal part of humans and thus baffle of close. The effigy of the poem seems to be a young man who is angry with his mother for giving him life that inevitably ends in death. The young man may also be afraid to break the stick to with his mother and live in the world of figure on his own. The finis stanza opposes life on primer whose tongue is made of clay and life in heaven whose symbolic representation is Jesus and his crucifixion. Experience understands the simple rules of life that what is born dies and cant accept them, while purity accepts and amuses in all(prenominal)(prenominal) thing even in perceiving be intimate. The bond in the midst of innocence and experience when judged from To Tirzah seems to be the bond of a sunny student to his desperate teacher.Such blissful innocence is presented in the invention of Songs of Innocence. The poem begins with a pipers song, the epitome sees a child on a cloud, an ordinary symbol of blissful innocence, the child/ nonpareil is en blessednessing the pipers song, which in Blakean times is considered to be the purest of all. The child virtually orders the piper to Pipe a song about a Lamb, innocence enjoys the song about another blissful innocent peter the lamb. Experience in the form of the grown-up piper praises and at the same time amuses innocence. The bond between the two contrary states of the human soul is a mother-child kinship. Experience teaches innocence as the piper writes down in a book the songs he knows so that E truly child may joy to hear. merely the mother also protects her child, so does experience as is distinctly seen from the poem Holy Thursday. Children, the well-nigh common symbol of innocence, are walking two by two and grey-headed beadles are guide them to St. capita l of Minnesotas cathedral, experience protects innocence and leads it to aplace where God will guide and protect it. In the second stanza of the poem innocence is a multitude, children are like flowers of London town, multitudes of lambs, innocence is cosmos united with nature.Following the flow of thought innocence seems to glow with its perceive image as is presented in The Divine Image from Songs of Innocence. The first stanza of the poem states that Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love are the four most important virtues that invariablyy man prays to. The second stanza reveals that the virtues symbol of innocence and purity are God and human His child and care. Reading on the poem shows that man is made up of virtues and possesses the human form divine, the purest and Godly innocence.If innocence is the human form divine then what is experience and what have they to do with one another? Does London from Songs of Experience give the answer? London is symbol of fallen humanity, symbol o f the dark face of the industrial revolution that Blakes contemporaries so much prided on. The personas tour begins with I wander, he walks through each chartered street, in Blakean times charters were given to rich people as a licence to rule given city. A city, in our case London, may be chartered, further Blake uses irony when defining the river Thames as chartered because a river cannot be put under human rules. The whole city, even the river, look like prisoners thats why the persona can observe attach of flunk, marks of woe on every face he meets. From the first stanza his journey seems to be a sad walk through experience. In the second stanza the poet uses repetition in order to make the impact of his words stronger. He mentions manacles that were an ordinary thing to be seen on the hands of prisoners that were sent to Australia. But Blakes manacles are mind-forged, a symbol of moral rules and laws that restrict civil people.This image is also an allusion to Rousseaus s tatement that Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. The third stanza gives more specific examples of weakness and woe. The image of the child chimney-sweeper crying is a symbol of the unlawful use of childs labour the second the melanize church appalls every one, the church is b wishening as a symbol of stagnation, injustice, wrongly utilize power of not helping those that most need its caress the poor. And last but not least the sound of the hapless soldiers sigh Blakeuses hyperbole in this particular image when describing that the sigh Runs in blood down palace walls. Being a reminder of the cut revolution the poet warns the king and the people who rule the chartered streets and the chartered Thames that the hapless British may rise following the example of their soul duad the French.The action in the last stanza takes place at midnight, the time when all monsters come out to haunt the living, this is the time of full darkness, symbol of impurity. At midnight t he young harlot is forced to sell her body in a society where money is God. Blake uses a rather strong oxymoron to outline her image, sum hearse, there can never be such(prenominal) a thing or it can in a London with chartered streets and blackening church her curse damns lost innocence that can never be returned. London has a simple AB rhyming scheme that is ordinary for nursery rhymes, its innocent representation is in ironic opposition with its content, exactly like London of Blakean time, it was considered the peak of civilization while from the inside it was decomposition reaction away. From London it looks like that the bond between innocence and experience is very narrow, to read experience one just has to be aware of evil.Experience is also understanding and accepting death, most fearful of all experience. The gasify from Songs of Experience proves it. At first sight the poems home is about destruction, the persona kills the aviate but as the speaker identifies with t he fly in the third stanza he is also vulnerable to some wile hand that may brush him away, the hand of the inevitable, of blind providence. The perspective of the persona killing the fly is turned a bit sideways with the act of the speakers identification with the fly his act of killing may be not aimed to the fly but to himself. The last two stanzas are the most enigmatic and at the same time most oecumenical ones.The forth stanza toys with the idea that if thought is life importee that knowledge is life and the want of thought is death an allusion to the Bible, when Adam and Eve are repelled from Heaven for seeking knowledge, when leaving Heaven they leave innocence behind and enter experience where they learn of death. But the poet shows death as the lack of thought, the lack of life, he teaches us that the price for gaining experience is losing innocence but death may be the gate to achieving regained innocence, because if death is the lack of thought then it is the lack of experience meaningthat it is regained innocence.Experience also has its own laughable form according to the Introduction of Songs of Experience, its voice is the voice of the ancient get up who present, past and future sees, its ears have heard the Holy Word that is symbol of Jesus who walked among the ancient trees more than 2,000 years ago.The form of Innocence is presented in Holy Thursday from Songs of Innocence. The most well-known symbol of Innocence is the child, on that ground children are presented in the first stanza of Holy Thursday, children are walking two by two and beadles are leading them to St. Pauls Cathedral, Experience is guiding Innocence to the cathedral were Innocence is to be protected by God himself. In the second stanza the children are multitude, they are like lambs and exactly then and there Innocence is united with nature. In the last stanza the children raise their voice to Heaven and the aged men, Experience, are console there to protect Innocence.I nnocence is also symbol of new life being born as is presented in The Echoing Green from Songs of Innocence. start in the first stanza of the poem is symbol of the new life, of new Innocence being born. The colour of Innocence, as is easy to be guessed, according to the poem is green. The second stanza presents clever old people, sitting under an oak tree, and laugh at the youths games. They remember their own childrens games and their Innocence returns on the emit green. The last stanza is no more cheerful, youth is tired and everyone is returning to their homes like birds in the nests the echoing green is no more, it is darkening, like a dour experience, like a date on which Innocence will come for the last time and be gone forever.Interesting connection between innocence and experience provide also the pair of poems The Chimney-Sweeper from Songs of Innocence and the one from Songs of Experience. The Chimney-Sweeper from Songs of Innocence is Blakes most ironic poem if he eve r intended to write such. In eighteenth century England the chimney-sweepers were little children, most a great deal orphans orfrom poor families. Such is the case with the persona of the poem, when his mother dies his father sells him to be a chimney-sweeper and dooms him to sure proterozoic death because the chimney-sweepers from that time lived until they were seven or eight years old and died most often of respiratory problems caused by the soot. That is the story of the child-persona told in the first stanza while he walks the streets and cries Sweep, sweep, sweep as a kind of commercial for his job. But the spell out of the word is not by chance, the author chose to write Weep, weep, weep because misfortune is the true occupation of the child chimney-sweeper. The story goes on in the second stanza with little Tom Dacre.His head is curled like a lambs back and that is allegory to another poem from Songs of Innocence The Lamb, like the lamb Tom is meek and innocent and he c ries when his whisker is shaved. The child-persona consoles him that when shaved the soot cannot spoil his white hair so farther innocence blinded Tom when it is shaved he could see the reliable world. So in the third stanza he is quiet and has a fancy that thousands of sweepers are locked in coffins of black. Knowing the hard lives of Englands 18th century child-chimney-sweepers the coffins of black are the chimneys that buried the children.The forth stanza is left for the nonpareil with the bright key who comes and sets all the chimney-sweepers free. But the only Angel who has such a key is the Angel of Death. Tom dreams that all are run down a green plain, washing in the river all these are symbols of innocence. Later on the Angel tells Tom that if he is a good boy and does his work well hell have God for his father, meaning that hell return to innocence but only after his death. The children chimney-sweepers are doomed to have entered experience and the bad part of it too early and innocence is for them only a dream.The Chimney-Sweeper from Songs of Experience opposes the one from Songs of Innocence. A little black thing enters the scene, the child-chimney-sweeper has become one with the soot, he has even obtained its colour. As in Songs of Innocence the perssona cries weep instead of sweep, it sound is part of a melody whose notes are the notes of woe. The second stanza begins with Because, the child-chimney-sweeper feels that because he was happy upon the heath and smiled his parents have given him the clothes of death and give him to it.The persona is angry, he is nolonger innocent because anger is feeling of experience, so he enters experience angry. His parents think they have done him no soil and are gone to praise the Lord who cannot save the child from singing his notes of woe. In the last line of the poem God is aboveboard accused of being an alliance with church and state who made up a heaven of our misery. Heaven is no more a consoling place for the child-chimney-sweeper who has entered experience it is a place made up of the misery of his fellow black things.Blakes Songs prove his statement that innocence and experience are the two contrary states of the human soul, the relationship between the two is always opposition innocence is meek and suffering while experience is fierce and dark but experience accepts and understands life as it is while innocence amuses in everything, it is united with nature. The Godly innocence is the human form divine.Sometimes the bond between innocence and experience is very narrow, to enter experience one has to be aware of evil, experience is also understanding and accepting death. The most well-known form of experience is the grown-up while innocence is the little child, the colour of innocence is green, while those of experience is black. And last but not least the relationship between innocence and experience is that they are both states of the human soul but to the first one is given the blissful life, to the second the angry existence.