Critics of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience not surprisingly have focused their attention on the galaxy of characters whose voices are heard throughout Blake’s poems. Along with the cacophony of voices of London’s disenfranchised—the men, women and children, the chimney sweeper or the harlot who thronged London’s streets and whose piteous cries became the object of Blake’s concern, the two set of artistic manifestation portray a seamless blending between innocence, a gradual loss of innocence and finally a metamorphosis into a higher state of innocence. In addition to the spoken voices there runs throughout the Songs an undercurrent of silent voices—voices that can be inferred, or as Blake would say, imagined—which speaks no …show more content…
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
The understanding of the nature of God infuses and directs these lines with a force that gathers into itself all the accumulated attributes of God as the creator and god as redeemer which have been outlined in the poem. As a threefold In Soft Beulah’s Night, the poem celebrates an earthly paradise in which animals and human beings live in complete harmony under the protection of a benevolent God.
In the dark forest of ignorance, the eyes of the Tyger burn with their penetrating vision. As against the lamb’s brightness of innocence, the Tyger has a bright ferocity, the ferocity with which its experience keeps vigil over the lamb’s innocence, protects innocence from being engulfed into ignorance. Between God’s conception and his creation falls no shadow, as God the mysterious synthesis, can give symmetry and pattern to so ferocious a creation, and govern him by an immortal rhythm. “When the stars threw down their spears”- It also occurs in The Four Zoas in which, Urizen says:
“The stars threw down their spears and fled naked
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Even the poem in its “innocent” counterpart is one of mellifluous rhythm which nonetheless casts up enormous questions about what Blake means by “innocence” His Little Black Boy serves to teach humanity an education of compassion or pity, evident in the way he strokes his “silver hair” as if realising that whiteness cannot withstand the scorching force of God’s heat. His immortal words in Fly
In order to exist in nature and in human, innocence requires experience. The author, William Blake divided his poems into two volumes which are Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. “The Lamb” is the poem from Songs of Innocence and “The Tyger” is from Songs of Experience. In “The Lamb,” Blake writes in an incomplex, childlike way asking an innocent lamb who made it. In “The Tyger,” Blake asks who could have possibly made something as formidable as the tiger. William Blake uses archetypes in his poems “The Lamb” and “The Tyger.”
The poem "London" by William Blake paints a frightening, dark picture of the eighteenth century London, a picture of war, poverty and pain. Written in the historical context of the English crusade against France in 1793, William Blake cries out with vivid analogies and images against the repressive and hypocritical English society. He accuses the government, the clergy and the crown of failing their mandate to serve people. Blake confronts the reader in an apocalyptic picture with the devastating consequences of diseasing the creative capabilities of a society.
Compare and Contrast the ways in which Heaney and Blake write about innocence and experience in their poetry
William Blake's poem, "The Tyger," create striking images used to question religion and contrast good and evil. The Tyger could be inspiration, the divine, artistic creation, history, or vision itself. Creating a imagery of fire evokes the fierceness and potential danger of the tiger, which itself represents what is evil or dreaded. " Tyger Tyger, burning bright… In the forests of the night," Blake begins, conjuring the image of a tiger's eyes burning in the darkness. "
Blake’s “London” was at a similar disadvantaged. As part of his collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the poem was among works that could be mistakenly seen as merely nursery rhymes, and as such did not demand to be taken seriously. Comparing these texts demonstrates the importance of writing for the society in which one lives, rather than simply writing to
William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” in his Songs of Innocence is a literary masterpiece that is still relevant and impactful in the modern world. In lovely form and description, Blake explains the atrocities and hardships of the Industrial Age in a poem suitable for school-age children and with the beautiful simplicity that only a writer like Blake could produce. The Songs of Innocence is a look into the purity and wonderful outlook on life that children usually have. While in its counterpart, the Songs of Experience, Blake uses adults as protagonist. The Songs of Experience is a look at the effects that hardships and failures have on adults, therefore having a pessimistic outlook toward life. In his these two works, Blake produces a parallel universe between childhood and adulthood where the optimism of dreams of childhood and the bitterness and stagnation of adulthood never seem to know one another.
William Blake’s poem “London” takes a complex look at life in London, England during the late seventeen hundreds into the early eighteen hundreds as he lived and experienced it. Blake’s use of ambiguous and double meaning words makes this poem both complex and interesting. Through the following explication I will unravel these complexities to show how this is an interesting poem.
In William Blake's Poem “The Chimney Sweeper”, Blake uses allusions, symbols, and metaphor to convey his theme of Innocence, Death, and Youth. With this Blake also goes in depth about the speakers childhood. Finally Blake ends with a dream and how innocence is a major part of the poem. Blake’s foundation of this poem relies on biblical allusions which provide the poem with a theme of innocence and, without them, Blake may have just had an ordinary poem with no deeper meaning in it.
William Blake was a painter, engraver and poet of the Romantic era, who lived and worked in London. Many of Blake’s famous poems reside in his published collection of poems titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This collection portrays the two different states of the human soul, good and evil. Many poems in the Songs of Innocence have a counterpart poem in the Songs of Experience. The poem “A Poison Tree” is found in the Songs of Experience and it delves into the mind of man tainted with sin and corruption that comes with experience. In a simple and creative style, the religious theology of the Fall of Man is brought to life. The poem tells the story of how man fell from a state of innocence to impurity, focusing on the harmful repercussions of suppressed anger. Blake utilities many literary devices to successfully characterizes anger as an antagonist with taunting power.
The Songs of Innocence poems first appeared in Blake’s 1784 novel, An Island in the Moon. In 1788, Blake began to compile in earnest, the collection of Songs of Innocence. And by 1789, this original volume of plates was complete. These poems are the products of the human mind in a state of innocence, imagination, and joy; natural euphoric feelings uninhibited or tainted by the outside world. Following the completion of the Songs of Innocence plates, Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and it is through this dilemma of good and evil and the suffering that he witnesses on the streets of London, that he begins composing Songs of Experience. This second volume serves as a response to Songs of
William Blake was deeply aware of the great political and social issues during his time focusing his writing on the injustices going on in the world around him. He juxtaposed the state of human existence through his works Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), showing differentiating sides of humanity. The contrast between Songs of
Blake has another meaning to ‘Innocence’; He refers innocence to ignorance. This means that innocence is corrupted and full of naivety. It is the ignorance of corruption, of the real
In both of William Blake’s poems, “The Little Black Boy” and “The Chimney Sweeper,” an innocent-eye point of view portrays the stresses of society in an alternative way to an adult’s understanding. The innocent perspective redirects focus onto what society has become and how lacking each narrator is in the eyes of the predominant white culture. Each naïve speaker also creates an alternate scenario that presents a vision of what their skewed version of life should be like, showing how much their unfortunate youth alters their reality. From the viewpoint of children, Blake’s poems highlight the unhealthy thoughts or conditions in their lives and how unfortunate they were to be the wrong race or class level. These narrators were cheap laborers and were in no control of how society degraded them. Such usage of a child’s perspective offers important insight into the lives of these poor children and raises awareness for the horrible conditions children faced in the London labor force prior to any labor laws. The children of the time had no voice or platform on which to express their opinions on their conditions. Blake targets society’s lack of mindfulness towards the children using the innocent-eye point of view and illusions of what they dream for in life.
William Blake is one of England’s most famous literary figures. He is remembered and admired for his skill as a painter, engraver, and poet. He was born on Nov. 28, 1757 to a poor Hosier’s family living in or around London. Being of a poor family, Blake received little in the way of comfort or education while growing up. Amazingly, he did not attend school for very long and dropped out shortly after learning to read and write so that he could work in his father’s shop. The life of a hosier however was not the right path for Blake as he exhibited early on a skill for reading and drawing. Blake’s skill for reading can be seen in his understanding for and use of works such as the Bible and Greek classic literature.
Some of William Blake’s poetry is categorized into collections called Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Blake explores almost opposite opinions about creation in his poems “The Lamb” and “The Tiger.” While the overarching concept is the same in both, he uses different subjects to portray different sides of creation; however, in the Innocence and Experience versions of “The Chimney Sweeper,” Blake uses some of the same words, rhyme schemes, and characters to talk about a single subject in opposite tones.