This is clear throughout the Songs of Innocence, for example in “The Nurse’s Song” and “The Little Black Boy.” As these poems indicate, the truly innocent do not recognize their innocence because, by the very nature of that innocence, they have had no experience to the contrary. The very idea of songs of innocence is an idea that comes from a no longer-innocent perspective. Conversely, the idea of Songs of Experience might mean that songs themselves are not the sure symptom and symbol and expression of incorruptibility we might wish them to be, so that the songs of innocence do not protect or immunize their singers from corruption as we would wish them to do.Īnother way to put this point is to say that the Songs of Innocence, even when they appeared alone, are far from being expressions of naïveté, later corrected by an older Blake with the Songs of Experience. The songs of experience also indicate the possibility that in experience there is still some fundamentally saving innocence that may not recognize itself but is still there, still attracted toward the love and life which for Blake constituted holiness. That all things should be in some sense poetic-should long for poetic expression, long to sing-is one of his central tenets. Experience does not sing (although sorrow might), since the idea of experience might be that it no longer believes in song.īut for Blake there is more than irony in the title. The idea of the songs is something like the idea of innocence. But the idea of Songs of Experience (added to the Songs of Innocence in a new volume in 1794) was peculiarly modern it led eventually to such titles as Bertolt Brecht’s “Ballad of ill-gotten gains” in The Threepenny Opera (1928), but it is more radical still because of the difficulty of understanding the idea that there should be such things as songs of experience. Songs of Innocence-the title of the first part, which appeared by itself in 1789- might seem a fairly innocuous title, like the famous Songs and Sonnets which begin the full title of Tottel’s Miscellany (1557 Shakespeare has Falstaff refer to it that way). The title itself has had an enormous effect on ways of thinking about poetry. The book, beautifully and delicately illustrated by Blake, has been vastly influential, determining, for example, the opening poems in William Butler Yeats’s book The Rose (1893), which contrasts “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” with “The Sad Shepherd:” (The second Song of Innocence is called “The Shepherd.”) The contrast, and the very idea of the song, harkens back to Blake. Songs of Innocence and of Experience contain William Blake’s best-known and most widely read works, including what is perhaps his most famous poem, The Tyger.
Analysis of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experienceīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Febru
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