Blake's Songs Of Innocence And Experience By William Blake

In the fourth stanza, Blake uses religious symbols to show how the structured religion of the Orthodox Church can destroy the love and joy within. The narrator finds that the gates to the chapel are shut, symbolizing the restrictive nature of organized religion. Blake alludes to the Ten Commandments when he describes the church gates as having “Thou shalt not” written across them. This demonstrates the constrained state that the church puts Blake in (Griffiths). Discouraged by the limiting statement on the gates, the narrator turns to the rest of the Garden in

As a forerunner to the free-love movement, late eighteenth century poet, engraver, and artist, William Blake (1757-1827), has clear sexual overtones in many of his poems, and he layers his work with sexual double entendres and symbolism. Within the discussion of sexuality in his work Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake seems to take a complicated view of women. His speakers use constructs of contraries, specifically innocence/ experience and male/female. Of the latter sex, he experiments with the passive (dependent, docile, virtuous) and active (independent, evil, a threat to the masculine) female subjects. Blake’s use of personification specifically of nature and botany suggest the use of nature to discuss human society. In Songs

William Blake was a complicated writer as well as a complicated person. As a kid, he never attended school because his parents thought he was abnormal. William spent a lot of time talking about his dreams of Christ coming to him in the night. He learned how to read as well as write at home, but William wanted to go to an actual school. His parents decided to send him to an art school where he learned how to paint. William’s parents couldn’t afford school so he apprenticed an engraver for seven years. Working in churches doing engravings gave William the inspiration he later used in life to write all of his poems. If you read William Blake's work you will understand that most, if not all of his work is about Christ, as well as what Christ can do for us. You will notice in my comparison of his works ¨The Lamb¨ and ¨The Tyger¨ both closely relate to Christ along with what the heavens are about.

Romanticism is described as the period across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, that enlightened artists and philosophers developed and expressed revolutionary responses to injustices at the time. On such revolutionary was poet artist William Blake. Blake lived and wrote in England at a time when the Christian Church and Industrialisation held utmost power over people. The philosophic writer saw such values and attitudes as crimes against nature and human nature and sought to protest. William Blake, in his protesting works like Garden of Love and A Little Boy Lost, through the use of irony, sarcasm, aesthetic and metaphor, expresses concerns of corrupted 18th and 19th century Britons.

William Blake was one of several transitionary writers between the Age of Reason and the Age of Romanticism. He saw the poverty and suffering that surrounded him and was a supporter of the French Revolution in its early days. He could not accept the neoclassical idea of a stable, orderly hierarchy in the universe, but instead viewed existence as a blending of opposite poles - good and evil, innocence and experience, heaven and hell. His magnum opus Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience is the epitome of how his work embodied his beliefs.

William Blake aims to make us understand the conditions that underlay the whole of London in the 1790s. The poem, London is about many discouraged citizens living in the city. It represents the whole English society during the time when the human condition was at its worst. The poem highlights the social-economic challenges that carried the order of the day as well as the major evils in the community. Blake introduces literary devices such as repetition and imagery to help the reader feel as though they were walking the streets of London.

William Blake was born in London, England on November 28, 1757. Blake left school at a young age, only staying to learn how to read and write. The Bible was a primary source of inspiration for him, he claimed to have received visions from God at a young age. Blake was multi-talented in the arts, not only was he a poet, but he was also a painter and an engraver. He also taught his illiterate wife to read and write. Blake’s work was considered a very influential figure of the Romantic Age. He worked hard on projects up until his death on August 12, 1827, some were left unfinished. Though his work went unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake’s creations have remained a heavy influence for modern-day writers and

William Blake was an 18th century poet, who lived in London during the industrial revolution. His views on human nature was profoundly influenced by his environment, on the macroscale the industrial revolution provided great leaps of progress for mankind. However on the microscale, people suffered harsh working conditions for low wages, and the cities were polluted where the streets were covered with a black layer of pollutants. Blake’s poetry was separated into two books, the “Songs of Innocence” focused on the purity and benevolence of mankind, while the “Songs of Experience” focused on the harsh reality and cruelty of the world. “The CLOD & the PEBBLE” is categorized into the “Songs of Experience” and unlike many of of the other poems, doesn’t have a corresponding poem in the “Songs

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 one excerpt, “The Chimney Sweeper,” Blake, through religious symbolism, gives the image of an innocence child living a life of hardship and grief that gains comfort from the knowledge that God will deliver him to a better life in heaven. The image of this child “who cried when his head, that curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved” gives the impression of the sacrificial lamb, sacrificed into a life of hardship, poverty, and early death. The child dreams of an

Although many of the Romantic poets displayed a high degree of anxiety concerning the way in which their works were produced and transmitted to an audience, few, if any, fretted quite as much as William Blake did. Being also a highly accomplished engraver and printer, he was certainly the only one of the Romantics to be able to completely move beyond mere fretting. Others may have used their status or wealth to exert their influence upon the production process, but ultimately, they were at the mercy of editors, publishers, and printers and relied on others to turn their visions into published works. Blake, on the other hand, was his own editor, engraver, printer, and publisher. He was able to control to

William Blake conveys both innocence and experience with the literary technique of light versus dark imagery. In Songs of Innocence, Blake discusses the issue of soot on several instances. In the beginning verse, the young chimney sweeper slept in soot, showing the incorruptibility and despair of the young child. Also, Tom Dacre’s “white hair” was shaved so that the dark soot

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is the foundation of the work of one of the greatest. English poets and artists. The two sets of poems reveal what William Blake calls “the two contrary states of the human soul.” In both series, he offers clues to deeper meanings and suggests ways out of the apparent trap of selfhood, so that each reading provides greater insight and understanding, not only to the poems but also to human life. Throughout this poem, the logic of this poem favors experience rather than innocence since in most of the poem , because purity is has little durability and is temporary but experience is permament and strong causing people to learn acceptance and adapt to reality.

Blake’s first book of poetry was Poetical Sketches published in 1783 and paid for by a few of his friends (“Artist and Engraver”). In 1787 Blake’s brother Robert died, Blake claiming to recall his spirit “clapping its hands for joy”(“Poets”) . A year later Blake claimed that Robert appeared to him, teaching him a process of

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, the Songs, by William Blake, has many underlying themes, one of which is duality. Duality is the opposing of two sides of the same whole. In this case, the two sides are innocence and experience. Innocence does not necessarily mean ignorance. In the Songs, the first half is Songs of Innocence and these poems seem to be very uplifting. In each poem the subject or narrator is happy because they are childlike and experiencing everything for the first time, or have yet to experience the evil associated with it. They are in a state of purity or good. Innocence, in the sense of the text, is being like a newborn. It is a state of being where the experience is not spoiled by age and the negativity of the mind and world. The second half of the Songs, is Songs of Experience. In this half, the narrator or subject is experiencing similar things as in Songs of Innocence but their mind is spoiled by negativity and their expectations from previous experiences. They are in a state of darkness or evil. At a superficial glance, one will walk away with the impression that one can either have innocence or experience, but not both. However, this is not the case, when digging deeper into the text and meaning, the duality of the human soul is having both innocence and experience at the same time. The organization of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience proposes that there are two sides to the human soul, just as there are two sides to the text