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Songs of Innocence and Experience
(poems, 1789–94)
Sometimes profundity comes packaged in childlike simplicity. Such is the case with William Blake, an odd, visionary poet who was anything but a traditional Christian but whose work is suffused with a spiritual fire that comes from his love and trust in God. Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, and its companion, Songs of Experience, was added in 1794. These two small collections of poetry each combined Blake’s poetry with his own distinctive artistic images, which had been engraved on copper plates, and were printed in small print runs. When he gathered the two collections together into one volume, he subtitled it, “The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.”
In Songs of Innocence, Blake shows us the world through the eyes of a child. Using seemingly effortless language and rhyme, Blake celebrates the joys of life, the love of God, and the brotherhood of all human beings. There is a wild imagination, a gentleness and childlike wonder at work in these poems, a promise that even when life is agonizing and difficult there is a heaven awaiting us where pain will be forgotten. It is the message of comfort in these poems that probably accounts for much of their popularity.
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
The simple joys celebrated in Songs of Innocence are balanced out in Songs of Experience, written five years later as a complementary text. Many of its poems seem to be answering the views espoused by the childlike narrator of the earlier poems. In our souls, Blake says, we are innocents and children, but this world is often a dark and mysterious place, filled with pain and cruelty. While “The Chimney Sweeper” in Songs of Innocence offers a hope in the next life, its similarly titled partner in Songs of Experience focuses on the cruel injustice of this life and the guilt of those who “make up a heaven of our misery.” To make it worse, this injustice is perpetrated under the protective cloak of piety: “They think they have done me no injury / And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King.”
What we see when these Songs are taken together is a tension between opposites: good and evil, flesh and spirit, and even seemingly two faces of God himself—the meek and mild God of forgiveness (“The Lamb”) and the God of fearsome power and judgment (“The Tyger”). How can one reconcile the forgiver of sins with the punisher of sins? Of the fearsome “Tyger” Blake enquires, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” It is his way of asking the age-old question about where evil comes from. Is it possible that the same God who created the good also created the evil? As Blake’s poetry developed, he “resolved” this tension by breaking the paradox and rejecting some aspects of the traditional view of God.
Another of the themes that runs throughout Songs of Innocence and Experience is Blake’s reaction to the intense changes being experienced in British society due to the influence of the French and American revolutions and the new technologies that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. Though the Industrial Revolution was still in its infancy when he wrote, Blake already saw the dire consequences its new technology would have, especially on the poor. Blake was one of the most urgent voices raised against the injustices that arose as the greedy barons of industry benefited from these changes while bringing crippling poverty to the working classes, whose sweat and labor made the whole machine of industry run. He saw these new factories where people labored for subsistence wages in terrible working conditions as “dark Satanic mills,” and longed for a return to the simplicity of rural life.
The Lamb (from Songs of Innocence) by William Blake, Library of Congress, Washington, DC [Wikimedia Commons, CC-PD-Mark]
William Blake was born in London in 1757 and died there seventy years later, spending almost his entire life in that city. From his earliest days he professed that he saw visions, once claiming that he saw a tree filled with angels. This otherworldliness was to characterize him throughout his life, alienating many but enchanting those who momentarily recaptured a sense of their own lost childhood in the immediacy of his childlike poetry. Later in life he would even claim that much of his work was inspired and encouraged through communication with archangels.
As a child Blake learned to read by reading the Bible, and its images are prevalent throughout his poems and writings. His parents were dissenters who rejected the prevailing concepts of the Anglican Church, so it is not entirely surprising that he later even dissented from the dissenters, for his mind was formed within a context of the rejection of accepted religious ideas.
As a young man he was apprenticed to a master engraver. In that job, and in a stint at the Royal Academy, he had the opportunity to hone his skills. The paintings and engravings that accompany many of his poems are small masterpieces themselves, art that inhabits an unseen world. Blake did not paint the world that he saw but rather the world of his vibrant imagination. Those who knew him spoke of him as a man of spontaneity and a sweet spirit, whose mind seemed to mostly dwell in a vivid inner world where his imagination took him. “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company,” his wife once said. “He is always in Paradise.”1
Blake saw himself as a prophetic poet with a mission of calling the world away from a simplistic dualism to a vision of a world interpenetrated by the Spirit. He rejected the philosophical materialism of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Bacon, convinced that there was more to life than their reductionist philosophies, and offered his readers a vision of life on a deeper spiritual level. “We ever must believe a lie,” he warned, “when we see with, not through, the eye.” His outlook was deeply spiritual, though it did not fit neatly into traditional religious categories.
Blake’s theology was a concoction of his own making, a mixture of traditional Christian belief with some elements freely cribbed from various less traditional sources and a large dollop of his own unique and idiosyncratic mystical insights. The details and symbolism in his more complex poems are so arcane that few can honestly claim to grasp the entire system and its attendant mythology. How literally he took all his own imaginative musings about divinity and humanity is probably an open question. He did not believe that the Bible should be read literally, and one cannot help but wonder what he would have thought of those who try to read his own religious musings too literally. But he did have a central concern with pointing readers away from traditional religious conceptions and toward a faith emphasizing freedom and the primacy of the heart. Rejecting the idea of original sin, Blake embraced what might be called “original innocence.” He saw in children a natural goodness and purity of heart that was usually lost by the time most people reached adulthood.
In Blake’s system of thought, religion itself is one of the culprits in our loss of original innocence, for religion has too often focused on rules, regulations, and restrictions. It is often more about the attempt to prevent or suppress certain kinds of behaviors through conventional morality rather than celebrating the earthly (and sometimes earthy) joys of human life. In his poem “The Garden of Love” he writes that “the gates of this chapel were shut / And ‘Thou Shalt Not’ writ over the gate.” Instead of people enjoying the freedom of experiencing God, “Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds / And binding with briars my joys and desires.” He saw very clearly the hypocrisy within the church and was unblinking in his disdain for its repressive nature. He questioned the need for an intermediary and thought that ordinary people could reach God through prayer, good deeds, and their own imaginations.
Blake took evil very seriously, but suggested that the way of dealing with it was less through rules and commandments than through embracing the God “within man’s breast.” He made a distinction between the God of the Old Testament (whom he referred to as “Urizen”) and the God of the New Testament. The paradoxes about God that were held in creative tension in his early poems are unfortunately resolved in later work with a simplistic rejection of the Old Testament God, which fails to do justice to the complexity of the Hebrew vision of the divine. Blake saw that God as terrifying and tyrannical, a corruption of the truth about the divine. The true God, he believed, could be found in our heart and our imagination as we “cleanse the doors of perception.” He hoped his poems would assist in that process.
We can leave it to the scholars to unravel all the complex mythology in Blake’s poetry, especially in his latter poems that feel weighted down by the freight of their ideas and rarely soar in the way his earlier poems do. In fighting against religious dogmatism Blake falls into a dogmatism of his own. While few would embrace all the intricacies of his religious system, his central vision is still powerful and compelling: a vision of forgiveness and love that has the potential to bind us all together under the watchful eye of a loving God. Blake believed that the best way to worship God was to love all beings, both human and nonhuman, for he saw a spark or remnant of the divine in every person and every created thing. That is why Blake could exclaim, “Every thing that lives is Holy.”2 He saw a spiritual radiance around everything and wanted to impart to his readers a new way of seeing:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.3
Behind all our religion, our morality, and our social systems there is, asserted Blake, a spiritual reality, and at the center of that reality is a God who loves all and who can be glimpsed in all things.