Church and Religion in the Songs of Innocence and Experience

William Blake is an English poet, painter, and printmaker from the eighteenth century. With his unique way with words and mastery craftsmanship, he created an illustration collection of poems called Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1789. His most famous poems from Songs of Innocence and Experience are “The Lamb and The Tyger”. These poems use animals to attest to God’s role as the Creator, yet they possess contrasting tones and language of the speaker and present conflicting views of God’s power and ability. “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” called me to ask questions of myself, my beliefs, and how my beliefs shape my worldview.

In this essay I am going to be looking at two poems from the Songs of innocence and experience works. These poems are The Lamb and The Tyger written by William Blake. Both these poems have many underlying meanings and are cryptic in ways and both poems are very different to each other. In this essay I will be analysing the two poems, showing my opinions of the underlying themes and backing them up with quotes from the poems. I will compare the poems looking at the similarities and differences between them and also look at each one individually focusing on the imagery, structure and the poetic devices William Blake has used. Firstly I will look at the Tyger a poem about experience.

What does it mean to be human? William Blake, an 18th century English poet, artist, and philosopher asked these questions, often masqueraded under a wall of color, and rhyme. Through seemingly childish, almost nursery-esq poems, Blake teases us to think about who we are, and ask ourselves things that challenge who we are as a species. Often his poems were sister pairs that mirrored each other in theme and appearance. For example, his poem “The Lamb” a poem about innocence and divine creation, is mirrored by “The Tyger,” a look at experience, and a subtle inquiry at why the divine creator of the lamb, would create such an evil as a tiger. The same can be said about two of his other poems, “The Chimney Sweeper” and “Infant Sorrow,” whose themes deal with again, innocence and experience, in a Taoism manner of thinking. Blake uses archetypes of innocence and experience in “The Lamb, “The Tyger,” The Chimney Sweeper,” and “Infant Sorrow.”

“The Lamb” in Songs of Innocence, and “The Tyger” in Songs of Experience were written with biblical influence, and Blake demonstrates his biblical upbringing through out these poems. “The Lamb” is represented through a pastoral story line, allowing a connection with agriculture and nature, much like many stories in the Bible. “The Tyger’s” storyline, however introduces the question of theodicy, or why there is evil in the world. How can God make a lamb so innocent and pure, and in turn create something so evil and cruel? Throughout “The Tyger”, Blake asks hypothetical questions,

The poem “The Lamb” written by William Blake is a part of his collection of poems called Songs of Innocence. His outlook on life when writing this collection of poems was optimistic and showed his great appreciation for life and especially nature. In this poem, which is pastoral in nature, Blake uses imagery to emphasize the innocence (bordering on naivety) that he sees in the world. This works in tandem with Blake’s pleasant diction to create a tone of comfort and well-being, which reflects the optimistic point of view that Blake had on life. Additionally the religious symbolism throughout the poem highlights the love that the speaker - as well Blake - feels towards nature and all living beings. Through the pleasant diction, the imagery of innocence and the religious symbolism, Blake spreads his message and belief that all aspects of life are pure and are deserving of love because they were all created by a benevolent and generous god.

Being one of the most influential poets during the Romantic Period, the religious status of Blake has long been as controversial as his own literary works. Nonetheless, the fact that he is indeed a Christian is doubtless - such can be easily illustrated from many fragments of his works such as ‘I a child, and thou a lamb, We are called by His name. Little Lamb, God Bless thee! Little Lamb, God Bless thee!’ from his poem The Lamb. This singsongy excerpt from the Song of Innocence not only appears to readers as Blake’s direct praises of God but also an evident reference to ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’(Eg. Psalm 23) from the Holy Bible. However, it can also be easily argued that Blake is not an ordinary, churchgoing Christian. A great portion

“The Tyger,” however, is part of the “Songs of Experience” collection, which revolves more around a “ruthless, ferocious” (Northrop 380) “world of experience” that an “adult” would live in (Northrop 380). Whereas the “Songs of Innocence” are “relatively light and optimistic poems” (Milton), the “Songs of Experience” are much darker in tone and exposing the world as seen in the “Songs of Innocence.” Postulated to be unique in the fact that these two collections were the most intricate of all of his works, Blake's “artistic vision” is clearly shown in “The Songs of Innocence and of Experience” (Curran 256). Being from this volume of Blake's most complex works, “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” are commonly thought of as companion poems because of the similarity and opposition found in the two. Each of these poems, read in light of each other, seem to revolve around the topic of religion, as many others found in this particular novel do. Leading to one of the central themes of the piece, it could be considered that Blake's overlaying message in the pieces were about religion. However, despite him being a Christian, albeit “unconventional” in his practice (Evans), the overlaying theme of most, if not all poems in the volume revolve around some aspect of humanity's spectrum. Thus, despite the use of theological logic in part of each poem, the idea of religion is explored with a more rationalistic

When analyzing poems of innocence and experience, often they are viewed to be a “contrast between what we thought in our youth and what we have came to know, painfully, as adults” (Abcarian, Klutz, Cohen 76). When deciding which poem I wanted to recreate I decided I wanted to choose The Lamb and The Lion by William Blake because it was enjoyable how the author made a poem of innocence and experience

Songs of Innocence by William Blake collocates the naïve lives of children and loss of innocence of adults, with moral Christian values and how religion has the capacity to promote cruelty and prejudice. Blake was born in 1757, up to and after the French Revolution he wrote many works criticizing enlightened rationalism and instead focused on intellectual ideas that avoided institutionalization and propelled ethical and moral order. Blake’s collection of poem exposes and explores the values and limitations of secular and religious institutions. “The Lamb” focuses on children’s naivetés and innocence, but also curiosity in regards to faith, and ideas of nature and God.

In Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789 and 1794), William Blake arouses readers' minds and leads them into a path of finding their own answers and conclusions to his poems. He sets up his poems in the first book, Songs of Innocence, with a few questions as if they were asked from a child's perspective since children are considered the closest representation of innocence in life. However, in the second book, Songs of Experience, Blake's continues to write his poems about thought-provoking concepts except the concepts happen to be a little bit more complex and relevant to experience and time than Songs of Innocence.

During the Romantic Period, there was an overabundance of body hating within the mentality of the orthodox Christian society. William Blake had apathy for organized religion because of how restrictive it was. Orthodox Christianity impacts social and sexual issues, prevalent in sonnets My Pretty Rose Tree, The Sick Rose, The Garden of Love, Ah! Sun-flower and A Poison Tree. All these sonnets are from the experience section of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Each share common features of faltering innocence, experience, and deception. By comparing these sonnets, it is apparent nature is a metaphor for a religion which is at the pinnacle of social and sexual issues. Blake’s quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “as the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys” (l.16-17) links to the idea that nature indicates growth as a general idea from innocence to experience.

Theology is actually one of the many topics that frequently appears in a variety of work of English poet William Blake. A brief overview of some of the author's more noted works such as "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", "The Book of Thel", and Songs of Innocence and Experience readily attest to this fact. In Songs of Innocence and Experience, however, a number of the author's poems seem to integrate a decidedly Christian worldview within their text and the cosmology presented to readers through these works. This proclivity of Blake's is particularly salient in "The Chimney Sweeper" and "The Lamb". In fact, one can argue that most of the fundamental beliefs that Christianity is based upon are found within these poems, which serve as excellent examples of the author's tendency to write poems that adhere to a decidedly Christian viewpoint.

William Blake, an unconventional writer and artist in Romantic England, was known best for his unique printing method and claim to supernatural visions. In 1789, Blake published the “Songs of Innocence,” a collection of poems attributed with an innocent, romantic viewpoint, as the title indicates. One of the poems, “The Divine Image,” was used to identify the nature of God in man. “The Divine Image” speaker identifies the Mercy, Love, Peace, and Pity found in humans to be truly divine and of God. These “virtues of delight” are understood not only to be of God, but to comprise His very being. The “Songs of Experience” counterpart to this poem, “The Human Abstract,” reveals how religion perverts this pure connection by instating man-made

Songs of Innocence involves a Goat that is described as a strong,brave,and wild. But God also has the same characteristics which William Blake symbolizes the goat for God because they are both meek and mill. There was a little boy who was saved by God and felt whole again God is faithful and stepped up to be someone he didn't need to be.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which is written by William Blake, was published in 1794. Author wants to describe the contrary of two states of human soul: innocence and experience. While Songs of Innocence include is collection of poems about happy, or joyful world, Songs of Experience are a collection of poems about sorrows, or sufferings. The above selection text is from The Lamb which is a poem in Songs of Innocence. The first impressive about this poem is that it is as a song for children and describes the innocence state of human through the conversation between a child and the lamb. However, each poem could reflect the knowledge of author about something. Blake said that all he knew is in bible. His poems may be implying