Innocence and Experience — Ideal or Reality
As a rule, people are used to describing a simple person as a child, since childhood is considered as the most innocent age in human entire lifetime. While time goes by, child grows up and becomes conscious of the real world. In William Blake’s collection of poems Songs of Innocence and of Experience, he displays two distinct stages of human emotion, which is joy and sorrow, triggering the serious thinking about the religious idealism and human existence.
William Blake is well known not only as a poet, but also as a print-maker and a painter. With more than twenty years experience in printing and painting, Blake’s accomplishment towards fine arts has a great influence on his poems, which helps to depict vivid pictures by the wording and then makes readers feel as if they were actually there. Typically, Blake expresses romantic themes in the poems of SONGS OF INNOCENCE, creating such a lively and cheerful environment. For instance, in THE ECHOLING GREEN, the skylark and thrush’s “louder” singing proclaims that everything comes to life again with the advent of the spring; kids are playing in the green woods and echoes of their voice indicate an absolutely energetic and joyful situation; the old men with “white hair” watching them are affected by the lovely sight, recalling their own carefree childhood with smiles (Blake, 3). Even though the vocabulary that Blake uses here is not complex, he puts plenty of components in his green image, such as birds, kids, old men, and the simile between family and birds’ nest, so that readers could connect to their beautiful memories of the past days as well.
From “Innocence” to “Experience”, child grows up and transforms the unconscious mind to new awareness. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which costs Blake five years to adjust attitude and develop ideas, reveals his progress of maturation. In 1789, Blake first printed Songs of Innocence including nineteen poems; as a romanticism poet, he focuses on piety, love and worship of God. To illustrate, “Lamb”, “child”, and “God” are the three main characters that appear in these works. The “Lamb”, which symbolizes the pure soul that people originally have since they were born, always has “white hair”, inferring the innocent conception of the world: without any interruption, infants come to a peaceful earth; they satisfy with food and clothing provided to them and response the world with “tender voice”, for they are docile as the “meek” and “mild” sheep (Blake, THE LAMB). In THE CHIMNEY-SWEEPER, Blake designates a little child named Tom Dacre, who was sold by his father as a slave and he lives with thousands of sweepers in dark soot. Compared to the “coffins of black”—the shocking housing conditions of slaves, the child still keeps his innocence of “white hair”, since he immediately cheers up and will not be afraid anymore after he dreams an angel comes and sets them free, passing on God’s love and blessing all of them (Blake, 7). The ideal world that Blake shows in Songs of Innocence brings hope that everyone shares God’s love fairly and all good people could be in heaven eventually. In Blake’s poem THE SHEPHERD, he compares God with the “shepherd”, who should “be filled with praise”, stating his appreciation to God’s great creation and protection (2).
Despite the insistent respect of God, in Songs of Experience that Blake published in 1794, he questions the traditional theories of religions and criticizes the corruption occurred in those days, which was the root reason for poverty and slavery. Unlike the cheerful and bright scene in Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience is suffused with depressing atmosphere. For instance, instead of a belief in God that a sweeper Tom had previously, the little chimney sweeper complains slavery tearfully in Songs of Experience, “who make up a heaven of our misery”, is it “God”, “his priest”, or the “king” (Blake, THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER)? Through the sweeper’s crying, readers could feel Blake’s antagonism but also helpless, since he recognizes that freedom and innocence was bound up in fetters by theology, religious institutions, and the rulers. Moreover, using a repeating rhetoric question “What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry”, the poet make a sharp contrast between the “tiger” and the “lamb”; “tiger”, who has a beautiful appearance of “symmetry”, implies the wealth that capitalists grab from the slavery trade; “dread hand and feet” indicates the terrifying power of the social system, which oppress the working people (Blake, THE TIGER). Conversely, as Blake describes in Innocence, the “lamb” epitomizes the group of submissive people; they are innocent and peaceful, waiting for salvation with hollow beliefs while suffering exploitation of slaves (Blake, THE LAMB).
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is not only a pastoral, which Blake writes for children’s pleasure, is a contradictory combination that discloses the poet’s growth from idealism to realism, involving his self-exploration of religious viewpoints. Although Blake still some confuses and fears of the privileged stratum while asking God how he could create the “tiger” and the “lamb” and why in Songs of Experience, the poet has already moved a big step on conveying his own opinions and puzzlement towards the old theological perceptions.
