Both the publication and the relationship with history of these limpid, distilled illuminated poems are complex. Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, Songs of Experience in 1794, the same year in which Blake appears to have combined separate copies of the two sets of songs into one collection; in 1795, he first printed the poems as a single work. The poems transcend historical specifics; they are the products of a man who, as T. S. Eliot put it, possessed ‘a profound interest in human emotions, and a profound knowledge of them’.1 Yet the initial publication dates of the separate volumes coincide with the initial rapture associated with the French Revolution, ‘that glad dawn of the day‐star of liberty’, in Hazlitt’s movingly retrospective phrase, and with the horrors of the Revolution’s descent into massacre and state‐sponsored terror.2
So to phrase the matter, however, is to impose a false symmetry on ‘innocence’ and ‘experience’, and their supposed historical coordinates. Three of the songs in Innocence appear in the 1785 satirical work An Island in the Moon, where the presence of irony directed at the speaker of, say, ‘Holy Thursday’, leads David V. Erdman to believe that ‘Blake had both contraries [Innocence and Experience] in mind all along’; moreover, notebook evidence suggests that the Songs of Experience were composed in 1792–3, ‘in the Year One of Equality’, as Erdman has it, ‘in the time of the birth of the French Republic and the London Corresponding Society’.3 On such a reading, Songs of Experience expresses disillusion, not with the course of the Revolution, but with the fact that ‘the revolutionary spring torrent … is still in England dammed and frozen’.4 Looking at the issue in a different way, however, the poetry’s refusal to preach straightforwardly can mean that historical messages are difficult to identify reliably.
In what follows particular attention is given to the poetry’s manipulated shifts of perspective, one aspect of which was that, as Blake went on printing separate copies of the two sets, individual poems such as ‘The School Boy’, ‘The Voice of the Ancient Bard’, ‘The Little Girl Lost’, and ‘The Little Girl Found’ were switched from Innocence to Experience.5 Relevant here is Blake’s mode of production, described thus by Joseph Viscomi:
Blake drew a design on a copper plate with an acid‐resistant varnish and etched away the unprotected metal to bring the design into relief. He printed the plates on an etching press and colored the impressions by hand; each copy of each book is unique.6
Thanks to the ‘Blake Archive’ (www.blakearchive.org), it is now possible for anyone with an internet connection to take on board the implications of Viscomi’s final clause. Pictorial values vary from copy to copy and require the reader to engage continually in the process of interpretation. Sometimes the design is seemingly at odds with the text, notoriously so in the case of ‘The Tyger’, for which the designs are mainly unintimidating, even cuddly, save for one copy. The text depicts a creature who calls into question the nature of his creator. ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ (20), the speaker asks, as though the contraries of gentle innocence and an awe‐inspiring energy ‘burning bright, / In the forests of the night’ (1–2) were impossible to imagine as coexisting. The mounting intensity of the poem’s pounding rhythms, the newly forged power and suggestiveness of its images, and an air of inscrutable mystery are all impressively to the fore. Harold Bloom argues with attractive nonchalance that the poem ironizes its hysterical speaker.7 However, Blake’s imaginative suggestions, as in the lines, ‘When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d heaven with their tears’ (17–18), remain unglossed, hauntingly so. Erdman reads these lines as a ‘synoptic vision of the defeat of royal armies, as at Yorktown and at Valmy’.8 Yet such criticism seeks to hold a symbolic wind in the meshes of its historicist net. The poem defeats paraphrase, reductivism, or easy visualization; it exists as a visionary performance to its fearfully symmetrical fingertips, and Blake’s designs seem wryly to concede as much.
Blake’s generation of what Stephen C. Behrendt calls ‘a “third text”, a meta‐text that partakes of both the verbal and the visual texts, but that is neither the sum of, nor identical with either of, those two texts’,9 prompts the reader’s enquiring involvement with his poetic works. Such involvement bears witness to Blake’s way of working on the reader’s consciousness and, not infrequently, conscience. How should one read, for example, the ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Experience? The text begins confidently enough, asserting bardic authority: ‘Hear the voice of the Bard!’ (1). But a trailing syntax, postlapsarian in its appositional ensnarings, makes it hard to erase the sense that the Bard, ‘The Holy Word’ (4), and ‘the lapsed Soul’ (6) are all toppling over into an abyss of fallenness. Thus the second stanza reads:
Calling the lapsed Soul
And weeping in the evening dew:
That might controll,
The starry pole;
And fallen fallen light renew! (6–10)
One assumes that it is the ‘Holy Word’ that is ‘Calling’ and ‘weeping’, but the fact that the poem begins by referring to the Bard’s voice, plus the slippage created by the ‘apparently chaotic punctuation’, makes it possible to hear the Bard as also calling and weeping.10 Further ambiguities surround the following lines: ‘Is it’, ask the Norton editors appositely, ‘the Soul or the Word who could reverse the fallen state if only it chose to?’11 Robert Gleckner argues that the last stanzas should be heard as doubly voiced, spoken by a corruptly repressive Holy Word and by the ‘Bard, mortal but prophetically imaginative’, and yet the poem seems unready to supply what he calls ‘the all‐important point of view’.12 The reader has to enter the labyrinth of doubt and uncertainty. Narrative plots deriving from Genesis and Milton haunt the poem; in a reworking of Miltonic epic, the lyric seeks to justify to itself the ways of Blake’s imaginative search for authority.
The very form of the poem, with its four five‐line stanzas and contrapuntal rhyming (abaab), establishes it as a stay against chaos and, potentially, as a form of entrapment. The poem’s addressee, the Earth, interprets the final appeal as a patriarchal trick. In the subsequent poem ‘Earth’s Answer’ she refers to herself as ‘Prison’d on watry shore’ (6). In ‘Introduction’ the ‘watry shore’ (19) ‘Is giv’n thee till the break of day’ (20), serving as a stabilizing boundary. In ‘Earth’s Answer’ the same rhyme scheme and images are used (though the poem has an extra stanza), but the tone has changed from poignant appeal (‘O Earth O Earth return!’, ‘Introduction’, 11) to angry, anti‐repressive assertion (‘Selfish father of men / Cruel jealous selfish fear’, ‘Earth’s Answer’, 11–12). What the bardic speaker of ‘Introduction’, possibly in a state of self‐aggrandizing delusion, may view as a proffer of help is regarded by Earth in ‘Earth’s Answer’ as a means of imposing the ‘bondage’ (25) of restraint.
In the design for ‘Introduction’, we see a naked figure, back to the viewer, on a couch or robe, itself supported by what looks like cloud; she is surrounded by a few stars and has a rising sun behind her head, but the image, partly because of its coldly blue tonalities, may suggest not so much the imminent approach of ‘the break of day’ (20) as a posture of resigned waiting. ‘Introduction’ expresses a mood of longing for a voice that ‘might controll, / The starry pole; / And fallen fallen light renew!’ (8–10), but the purity of lyric yearning coexists with a complexity of perspective. Although Blake may have been ‘a man without a mask’, in Samuel Palmer’s memorable phrase,13 his songs are engaged in ‘Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’, as the subtitle to Songs of Innocence and of Experience has it. They are often mini‐monologues, provoking the reader to question the speaker’s view. At the same time, and herein lies a major source of their hypnotic force, the songs always invite us to enter into the ‘State of the Human Soul’ that is being explored: whether it is the speaker’s savagely exultant delight in ‘A Poison Tree’ that his ‘Christian forbearance’ (a draft title) has destroyed his enemy, or his chagrin in ‘My Pretty Rose Tree’ at being unrewarded by his partner for his resistance to temptation, it is the human mind’s psychological workings that capture Blake’s most immediate interest. The poems stop before moral judgement starts. Should we prefer the clod’s seeming selflessness or the pebble’s gleeful selfishness in ‘The Clod & the Pebble’? Crystalline in their phrasing, assertive in their syntax and use of statement, Blake’s poems manage continually to stir up a variety of jostling responses.
These are poems that read the reader. They expose assumptions and underlying biases. Easy to misread as simplistic, Songs of Innocence may suggest how hard it is to re‐enter a state to which children often seem to have access, a state marked by trust, acceptance, kindness, mercy. Blake’s speakers are sometimes children (a ‘two days old’ (2) child in ‘Infant Joy’), sometimes adults. They delight in a world seen as providentially arranged and structured, whatever its apparent realities or ills. Those realities or ills impinge on a number of poems in which an element of social protest seems on the verge of voicing itself, but only to subside in favour of an affecting mood of acceptance. Arguably, this subsiding only makes the social point more strongly.
The little black boy in the poem of that name guilelessly exposes the cruelly hierarchical binaries associated with attitudes to skin colour. The poem links these binaries to a Christian ideology that promises those who suffer on earth a compensatory reward in heaven. That said, this Christian ideology is voiced by the mother who speaks, consolingly, with gentle affection and concern for her son. The poem works as an ideological critique of racism and slavery (a word never mentioned in the poem), of the indoctrination that leads the speaker to say, ‘But I am black as if bereav’d of light’ (4). That critique entwines itself with and emerges from the poem’s engagement with the boy’s innocent perspective. Thus, Blake explores in the final stanza the boy’s sense of supposed inferiority. In heaven, says the black boy, he will ‘be like’ (28) the ‘little English boy’ (22) ‘and he will then love me’ (28).
Here as so often, Blake cuts below the abstractions of protest poetry and evokes a complicated response; we may detect the presence of what a Marxist would call ‘false consciousness’, but we hear the catch of hopeless hope in ‘and then’; critique coexists with pity and even – and here the poetry has an uncomfortable force – a kind of admiration for the boy’s innocent acceptance. The little black boy could have been indignant; instead, he is continually loving, innocent in that he is unaware of the exploitative ideology of which he is the victim, but innocent, too, in that his gentleness and capacity for love shine out radiantly from the poem. As Northrop Frye argues, the Songs of Innocence ‘satirize the state of experience’, as much as experience ironizes innocence.14 This is not to say that the poem satirizes the would‐be protester against social injustice; rather, it brings radiantly alive a refreshed understanding of a value that the social protester is likely to view with caution, that of innocent trust: easily manipulated and exploited, but still a form of rebuke to more worldly‐wise perspectives. Indeed, that subtle form of rebuke may well disturb readers more deeply than the angrily sincere anti‐slavery rhetoric which was widespread in the period.
Blake’s attention to the speakers of the poems, their contrary states of soul, occurs in a number of poems which have the same title in each collection. ‘Holy Thursday’ (Innocence) invites us to question whether the speaker (originally Obtuse Angle in An Island in the Moon) is myopically delighted to see ‘the annual regimented singing of London charity‐school children as evidence that the flogged and uniformed boys and girls are angelically happy’.15 Erdman, whose sarcastic description has just been quoted, sees the contrary poem in Experience as bringing out explicitly the irony latent in the Innocence version.16 Yet the Innocence poem seems both to acknowledge the speaker’s delight in ‘these flowers of London town’ (5) and to suggest perspectives beyond the speaker’s scope, though touched on almost inadvertently by his language. An example is the line, ‘Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song’ (9); the long, flowingly cadenced line paints a quasi‐biblical picture in which the children are able to pierce the ears of heaven with the ‘voice of song’; it also suggests how, without complaining of their lot, the children might be heard as reserving a right of complaint amidst their jubilation. On this reading, the last line’s prudential moral, ‘Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from the door’ (12), is well intentioned yet an unconscious indictment of a system that might, indeed, bring a poverty‐blighted ‘angel’ to ‘your door’. The design shows regimented children ‘walking two & two’ (2), as if to bring out the reality of the children’s condition, dependent on charity and authority figures, ‘beadles’ with ‘wands as white as snow’ (3). Yet in this song of innocence we weigh in the balance a keen sense of adult complacencies and an even fuller recognition of the children’s innocence and ‘radiance’ (6). That is, irony and protest, so evident in the Experience counterpart, are neither absent from, nor the only or last words in, the Songs of Innocence.
As Erdman notes of the Songs of Innocence, ‘There is woe in this world’, citing among a number of examples the fact that ‘the chimney sweeper has been sold to hard labor’.17 ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ illustrates the subtlety of Songs of Innocence, partly because of its layering of voices and perspectives. The chimney sweeper is aware of horrific social realities, yet he is, humblingly, unembittered by them; the movement of the opening – ‘When my mother died I was very young, / And my father sold me’ (1–2) – is uncomplaining. Only a fleeting trace of sharpness can be felt in the ‘your’ of ‘So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep’ (4).18 The poem’s metrical deftness suggests an awareness that is grave, non‐accusatory, even as the child’s exploited state is made painfully clear, the more so because of the absence of protest. In this world the brutal is accepted as normal, leaving the sweeper to comfort a younger boy, Tom Dacre, when ‘his head / That curl’d like a lambs back, was shav’d’ (5–6). Blake brings out the sweep’s care for another in writing of restraint and poignancy; much work is done, for instance, in the just‐quoted lines by the controlled rhythmic movement that dwells on ‘curl’d like a lambs back’ and then comes up sheer against the shearing in ‘shav’d’. Blake’s meanings inhere in the play of voice and stress, in, for instance, the subsequent and quickly responsive ‘so I said’ (6) which introduces the hushing consolation given by the speaker to the younger child.
Tom’s ensuing dream of the boys’ release by an ‘Angel’ (13) from ‘coffins of black’ (12) is clearly wish‐fulfilment. The older sweep seems to approve of the dream, yet not to share in it; ‘they run’ (15) in the retelling of Tom’s fantasy, not ‘we run’, just as when the dream fades and the sweeps wake up to go to work, the speaker says: ‘Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm’ (23), a way of putting it that shows the older sweep’s reticence and concern for Tom. Yet in its vigour and vitality – the boys are imagined ‘leaping laughing’ (15) – the dream embodies an innocence captured in the poem and yearned for, the more so when Blake brings out the repressive effects of doctrinal teaching, first on Tom (19–20), and then on the older sweep, who concludes with a moral – ‘So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm’ (24) – that brings chilly comfort.
Blake suggests differing feelings within as well as between Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The theme of poetic authority may, as suggested, loom large in the Introduction to the later book. But it is present in the piper’s song in the ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence; after the child instructs the piper to ‘write / In a book that all may read’ (13–14), hints of loss, faint intimations at best, but present all the same, enter the poetry. The child vanishes; the piper plucks a ‘hollow reed’ (16) and ‘stain’d the water clear’ (18), where ‘clear’ may be adjective or adverb, pulling in negative or positive directions, respectively, and the series of strong active verbs concludes with a conditional ‘may’: ‘And I wrote my happy songs, / Every child may joy to hear’ (19–20). Does Blake imply that giving form to the idea of innocence involves, necessarily, loss of some pre‐verbal harmony or vision? ‘The Echoing Green’ switches in its final line from ‘Ecchoing Green’ (10, 20) to ‘darkening Green’ (30), and a shadow cast by the imminence of experience seems to pass over the calmly accepting joyfulness of the poem. Inexorably time enters the poem, stealing in with the past tense of the old people’s memories, ‘Such such were the joys’ (17), and the final effect is one of mingled acceptance and muted foreboding, even as – in a further twist – the beautiful illustrations extend a joyous welcome to process and sexuality. The second design has a reclining youth handing grapes down to a girl in a red‐pink bonnet; she is at the end of a procession of youthful figures guided by ‘Old John’ (11).
In Songs of Experience Blake does not give his prophetic ambitions an easy time. Even in ‘London’, when he hears ‘In every cry of every Man’ (5) ‘mind‐forg’d manacles’ (8), he is part of what he reports, as Bloom notes: ‘“Every man” includes the Londoner William Blake, whose voice also must betray the clanking sound of “mind‐forg’d manacles”.’19 And yet the poem does not simply deconstruct the speaker’s passionate vision. The poem persuades one by allowing for the speaker’s involvement in what he sees, an involvement that heightens and does not nullify its force. The poet may have to ‘wander’, to be in exile, but his vision proves its validity through the power of metaphor. Blake’s metaphors in the poem work to expose startling connections, as he turns from sight to sound and hears ‘How the Chimney‐sweepers cry / Every blackning Church appalls, / And the hapless soldier’s sigh [:]/Runs in blood down palace walls’ (9–12). The verb ‘appalls’ suggests hypocritical dismay (one imagines an unctuous sense of being ‘appalled’), but it also implies that the church wears the cries like the soot that the chimney sweepers are made to clean. The soldier’s ‘sigh’ implies expiration of breath on a battlefield, yet it turns, as in some biblical omen, into a sign of coming retribution as it ‘Runs in blood down palace walls’.
Marriage and prostitution are yoked together in the final stanza, violently but also with visionary insight, and, as with many of Blake’s Songs, with variously ponderable suggestions:
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new‐born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. (13–16)
Powerfully mixing trochaic and iambic feet, making full use of the poetry’s stress system to bring the voice of the poet down with maximum impact on key verbs, and packing their language with menacingly yoked‐together opposites, these tetrameters represent some of the most searing lines written by a Romantic poet. They root themselves in the grim realities of Blake’s London; they speak for all time as a nightmarish account of how ‘all best things’, to draw on the Fury’s word in Prometheus Unbound 1.628, can be ‘confused to ill’. In the poem’s design, depicting an old man being guided by a young boy, however, one senses that innocence still has a role to play in leading Blake beyond the impasse often presented by experience.