Songs of Innocence and Experience
Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794)
is a relatively early work: Innocence was first published in
1789; Experience, in 1794. The years between these two dates saw the
most bloody acts of the French Revolution: the September massacres (1792) and the
execution of the Royal Family (1793), followed by the Reign of Terror.
Blake's Songs illustrate two imaginative
realms: the state of innocence and the state of experience. Another way of expressing this
contrast is to say that the two states represent two different ways of seeing.
Northrop Frye's distinction between the
imagined states of innocence and experience:
World
of innocence: unfallen world / unified self / integration with nature / time in
harmony with rhythm of human existence
World of experience: fallen world / fragmented divided self /
alienation from nature / time as
destructive, in opposition to human desire
Songs of Innocence and Experience
The Songs of Innocence and Experience, a series of illustrated lyrics, were first published as a combined volume in 1794, although the Songs of Innocence were first engraved in 1789, and the Songs of Experience in 1793 - 4. Between 1789 and 1794 Blake worked on both sets of Songs, whilst also working on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Thel, and the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, revising and rearranging the Songs throughout this period. The result is a set of thematically related lyrics organized by a general principle of wishing to show the contrast between the state of Innocence (childhood, idealism, youthful joy, the lamb) and that of Experience (disillusionment, social criticism, world-weariness, and combination of energy and violence of the 'Tiger'). Blake's intentions, in general terms, are difficult to define exactly, and resist lucid propositional statement: he wishes his readers to see what he is attempting to reading and viewing the illustrated lyrics themselves, and drawing out the contrasts and similarities between the two sets of Songs. Blake's own summary description of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, that they show "Two Contrary States of the Human Soul" offers perhaps the best way of approaching this thematically organized set of illustrated lyrics. "Innocence" and "Experience" are, for Blake, two complementary but also conflicting states of the human soul, and states within all of Creation: neither is "better" than the other, and both are necessary to the other. We must keep in mind Blake's own lines from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "Without Contraries there is no Progression..." In terms of the Songs of Innocence and Experience we may see both 'Innocence' and 'Experience' as but two dialectically arranged aspects of not just the human psyche, but within and behind all Creation itself. Behind this rather vague and abstract perspective is an essentially archetypal vision of human life - 'Innocence' and 'Experience' are not abstract qualities or concepts, but active forces, persons, even gods, which manifest themselves in all human, natural and supernatural life. In The Book of Thel we see Thel as an allegorial and archetypal expression of an 'Innocence' which has not yet encountered the world of 'Experience'. Thel, or "Innocence", may be a metaphorical goddess, an abstract state or quality, a state of mind, a perspective on life and creation, but she may also simply be Thel. The glory of Blake's vision is that he is able to relate aspects of human psychological, spiritual and physical experience, to the more abstract realms of the conceptual, the archetypal and the spiritual. The 'Tiger', for example, "represents" (or, better still, conjures up) that mixture of energy, destructiveness and fear which Blake attempts to describe in longer poems such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.