Rossetti Manuscripts and Innocence and the Songs of Experience

Many writes portray innoncence through poetry and some of the examples of this theme are shown in the poems Prayer befrore birth, Hide and seek, Once Upon A Time, Little red-cap, London and Child.

The style of Songs of Innocence and Experience is simply direct, but the rhythms and language are often deeply complex. Many of the poems are narratives, but some like, “The Sick Rose” use symbolism and abstract concepts to deliver a message. Blake often uses Biblical symbolism and language in his writing. He seems to enjoy applying simple, nursery rhyme meter to his unorthodox conceptions. This combination of familiarity with the unfamiliar is what keeps Blake’s work perpetually interesting (Erdman, David V. Complete Poetry and Prose. New York, 1982.

In his 1794 publication Songs of Experience, romantic poet William Blake describes the life of a child chimney-sweeper during the Industrial Revolution. Unlike his counterparts, in addition to discussing the distance from nature due to industrialization and mechanization, Blake spoke heavily against child labor; protesting the government, religion, and the dissimilation of family.

His enemies and critics equated Blake ‘with religious fanatics like Joanna Southcote and lunatics like Richard

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are collections of poems that utilize the imagery, instruction, and lives of children to make a larger social commentary. The use of child-centered themes in the two books allowed Blake to make a crucial commentary on his political and moral surroundings with deceptively simplistic and readable poetry. Utilizing these themes Blake criticized the church, attacking the hypocritical clergy and pointing out the ironies and cruelties found within the doctrines of organized religion. He wrote about the horrific working conditions of children as a means to magnify the inequality between the poor working class and

Songs of Innocence and Experience stand alone as a type of poetry which was never written before. Songs of Innocence, published in 1789, and Songs of Experience, published five years later, present a sharp contrast of innocent childhood to corrupt youth, highlighting the differences between these two stages of human life. For Blake, childhood is the epitome of innocence and purity, devoid of any moral corruption, whereas adult age that he has attributed to experience makes human beings morally and spiritually fallen. There is no denying that when Blake talks of innocence, he assumes childhood as clean and as pure as nature. Blake’s songs of innocence are fraught with references to nature and imagination, rendering his poetry a romantic touch

The poems focus on a problem which Blake felt was a very important one. Blake believed that children were deprived of their childhood, by being forced into labour early, and were shunned by those with a ‘seen and not heard’ attitude. These children were little better than slaves, as they were traded and abused. Blake wanted children to enjoy what time they had as kids, and felt it wrong that such an important time in their lives was held back from them. The Chimney Sweeper (experience) supports this by showing that the child was crying in the snow, having been abandoned, and being forced to don the clothes of death (perhaps

With regards to English Romantic poet William Blake, both his lyrical Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789-94) and his prophetic poems of epic length were conceived as an intermedial work made up of text and illustration.

In 18th Century Britain, the poets of what became known as the Romantic Period sought to communicate truth in a world where the lofty ideals of The Enlightenment were evaporating to reveal the harsh realities of a society that favored material progress over spiritual progress. In so doing, these poets embraced and drew inspiration from the beauties and mysteries of nature in attempts to draw parallels between the truths they found there and the inner experience of Mankind. Counted among the several writers who recorded their artistic and emotional responses to the natural world, William Blake explores the concept of life’s dualities and how this concept applied to life in 18th Century Britain, as well as to the relationship between the body and spirit, in his most popular works, Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794). Two standout poems, “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” respectively taken from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, demonstrate Blake’s meditation on how innocence and experience in life create a binary and complementary relationship that is observable in our outer world as well as in our inner being.

What is special about the poem is that it is open to various interpretations and points of view; the reader can think about it in one way today, and in another the next day, which is actually quite enthralling. Concerning the paraphrasable content, Paterson is talking about two men, one who had a clear image of what he is doing and took care of his trees, and another “who bought the house” who did not have a vision and messed up everything. Well, this is how it may seem from the first look; however, after being attached to the poem and reading it again, you will notice another aspect. You will notice that the poem is basically a long metaphor about relationships. It shows how a person can be devoted and dedicated to someone that they are mainly “rooted” to them; things will take their time, but once the two persons are “lashed tight”, all the good memories will happen, hope will always be there just like the “two lights in the dark leaves”, and moments will be mesmerizing just like “magic”. After that, conflicts and problems start popping up leading to separation and the end of the relationship. During this stage, Paterson uses jarring phrases such as “led him to take his axe and split the bole” demonstrating the cruelty of breaking up that it even buries the couple in “two holes”. Even though everything is just as close as “four yards”, yet it “lost them everything” and made them desperate to meet again. At the end of the poem, Paterson tries to contradict this long metaphor by saying “trees are all this poem is about”, but deep readers will know that it just an attempt from him to grab further attention to the idea! He uses rhyming couplets throughout the poem to enchant the readers and give the poem a sort of a tale feeling. Now the hypnotizing part is here! Succeeding a couple of deep readings, I have come to a quite

In 1794 William Blake’s work was known and published as a collection of poems that were put together as one book called Songs of innocence & Songs of Experience. In the collection Blake titles a poem, “The Chimney Sweeper”, and this one is viewed in two ways: Innocence and experience. In the book of innocence Blake shows how poor innocent children are being abused and mistreated during this time era. In Songs of innocence, “The Chimney Sweeper,” is about the way childhood youth is destroyed, taken away or ruined by selfish mean-spirited adults. Innocence to Blake was in a way not even in existence. He always believed that the world of one’s

By using this strong imagery he shows how horrendous their living conditions are and how being washed and made to sing in church is a small compensation for their lifetime of poverty. Another technique Blake uses is using rhetorical questions to ask the audience how natural and holy it is to see so many poor children. He leaves the morality up to the reader to ask themselves if this problem needs to be fixed. He only includes the questions in the Experience version because questioning things and looking deeper isn’t a theme in the Innocence poems. Innocence is about being content and embracing naivety. Blake also demonstrates how the children are being objectified in order to pity them and use them as a way to make the church seem charitable towards

The works of William Blake cannot be entirely discussed, so my project particularly focuses on 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'.

In the Songs of Innocence version, Blake writes a narrative from the point of view of a child laborer. The tone is full of youthful innocence, which harshly contrasts the somber truth of the speaker's situation. The speaker is a young child, as implied in clever onomatopoeia in line 4, “Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! ‘weep!” In these lines, the speaker means both literally a weep, as well as the word sweep, which, if said by a young child, may sound like “weep.” With this clever word choice, Blake invites readers to profoundly pity the poor child, as he is so young that he cannot even speak properly, yet sent to his death anyway. The child’s innocence continues to be of presence, shaping the poem. In later

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