Song Of Innocence In William Blake's Songs Of Experience

“The Chimney Sweeper” (128): This version of the Chimney Sweeper is very upfront and saddening. The version that is presented in the songs of innocence is much more of a calm town and is not as straightforward, while this version is very short and to the point. In this version its very deep as the narrator basically just calls out the parents/church for doing these horrible things to the children. I really love all three stanzas of this poem because they all have a really deep meaning and Blake transitions through them very well. Reading this poem over and over I don’t know what to make of it other than it is an absolute horrible situation. I think it can be tied in to

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

The voice in this poem is one of pure happiness and innocence. In this state of joy, the infant is unaware of the world in which he lives and that awaits him. In these opening lines, we see Blake revealing the everyday modeling and structure that categorizes the world, but is absent in the simplicity and purity of childhood. The child has no name because joy needs no other name. Labeling and classification are products of organization and arrangement that the world uses to assimilate innocence into experience. Blake demonstrates that it is through this transition, that the virtue of child’s play is destroyed. Blake utilizes specific emotions such as “happy,” “joy,” “sweet,” “pretty,” “sing,” and “smile” to describe this uncorrupted state of being. There is no danger, darkness, or struggle for the infant. Instead, he exists in a care free state, free of guilt, temptation, and darkness. The birth of a child is celebrated by Blake and it stirs in us powerful emotions of peace, love, and hope.

William Blake was deeply aware of the great political and social issues during his time focusing his writing on the injustices going on in the world around him. He juxtaposed the state of human existence through his works Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), showing differentiating sides of humanity. The contrast between Songs of

The absence of the parents in both poems is noticeable. In Songs of Innocence “And my father sold me while yet my tongue” (line 2) and in Songs of Experience it stats “”Where are thy father and mother? Say! “They are both gone up to the church to pray.” (line 3-4). In Songs of Innocence the child’s mother died when he was young and his father had to sell him. However in Songs of Experience it does not stat much, but the reader knows, and can infer that both parents are

The idea of innocence loss is prominent in the last three stanzas because this is the part of the story where the child begins to understand the world. In order to make this transition, Thomas uses rhetorical situations such as tone and symbolism to convey the shift. In the fourth stanza, Thomas uses the child’s sleeping as a symbolism for the dark coming, meaning the idea of maturity and aging is hinted. This initiation equates the beginning of the world of maturity, and the end of youth. It also involves the loss of innocence, freedom, and purity. The loss of innocence also infers that the child’s unification with nature is no more, since the setting is referred to the Garden of Eden, the child’s ability to create and fantasize is no longer possible. Despite the clear transition where the child is starting to understand the implications of the world outside of his own, he continues to ignore its heavy presence. In the fifth stanza, the child continues to enjoy the paradise of youth, with the author describing his attitude as he “[runs his] heedless ways.” The author describes the child’s reluctant actions by using a rhetorical situation called register. Register helps the language of this poem to give it authenticity, and meaning to the themes. Thomas displays some of his Welch register in the poem, giving the poem a more genuine feel. In stanza five, Thomas uses a phrase “sky

Song of Innocence and the Song of Experience, both deal with the sense of the world, but talk about the world in a different sense. They both use the concept of sublime to talk about the sense of God and what humanity gives out. The Song of Innocence gives the positive effect humanity when corruption is still present. The Lamb talks about a creation that the Lord made. The poem gives a description on how the Lord gives life to beautiful and great things.

Blake's poems of innocence and experience are a reflection of Heaven and Hell. The innocence in Blake's earlier poems represents the people who will get into Heaven. They do not feel the emotions of anger and

Ground-breaking, momentous, and a time of great struggle, the Industrial Revolution was famous for its innovations and infamous for the sobering reality it inflicted upon the standard family. Mid-18th century Britain brought poverty to everyday urban workers. With it, came an increase in child labor like never seen before. In order for a normal family to survive in the urban lifestyle, all members of a family had to work. This included children as young as four years to work as chimney sweepers, miners, and most popularized in 18th century Britain, factory workers. By the year 1800, children under the age of 14 in Britain’s factories accounted for 50% of the labor force (“Industrial Revolution, Child Labor”). Though the number continued to grow, all did not go unaccounted for. Romanticism, an effort opposite the movement, gave recognition to the emotional conflicts overlooked. Romanticism shed light on the daily struggles of the everyday man, woman, and the most neglected up until that period of time, the child. Throughout history, others have written about childhood, but Romantic poets began to question what it meant to be a child. The question, though not answered directly, later became revealed in their works where it exposed their belief systems. The role of the child in British Romantic Poetry represents the early life of Romantic poets, and the qualities they possessed in childhood.

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

Religion has been present in the world for as long as man himself. People believe that natural occurrences could only be the work of higher beings. Multiple religions have different gods, traditions, and ceremonies, but they all have one thing in common; people take different viewpoints of a religion to fit into their mindset. William Blake uses this idea to express how he believes people see Christianity and God. In his series named “The Songs of Innocence and Experience,” Blake creates the image of opposing views of similar situations. The poems show the views of the innocent and the experienced. The innocent takes on the roles to show how naivety and children have a joyful and bright look on moments in life. The experienced poems,

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are contrasting views of the same events. Each contains a collection of poems that profile an idea, figure, or event. In Songs of Innocence the world is viewed through the Eyes of someone like a child, who has little life experience. In Songs of Experience the same world is looked at only this time from the standpoint of someone who has experience in life, most likely an adult. The major difference between the two viewpoints is the understanding for life and

In both of William Blake’s poems, “The Little Black Boy” and “The Chimney Sweeper,” an innocent-eye point of view portrays the stresses of society in an alternative way to an adult’s understanding. The innocent perspective redirects focus onto what society has become and how lacking each narrator is in the eyes of the predominant white culture. Each naïve speaker also creates an alternate scenario that presents a vision of what their skewed version of life should be like, showing how much their unfortunate youth alters their reality. From the viewpoint of children, Blake’s poems highlight the unhealthy thoughts or conditions in their lives and how unfortunate they were to be the wrong race or class level. These narrators were cheap laborers and were in no control of how society degraded them. Such usage of a child’s perspective offers important insight into the lives of these poor children and raises awareness for the horrible conditions children faced in the London labor force prior to any labor laws. The children of the time had no voice or platform on which to express their opinions on their conditions. Blake targets society’s lack of mindfulness towards the children using the innocent-eye point of view and illusions of what they dream for in life.

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

The first stanzas of both poems establish that the children have been forsaken by their parents and were left in the role of a chimney sweeper. The Innocence poem’s rhyme scheme consists of two couplets per quatrain. The couplets create a sound similar to nursery rhymes (which often mask dark events, like the Black plague). The Experience poem begins with rhyming couplets in a quatrain, but switches to ABAB rhymes in the second stanza. Some of the end rhymes are just barely off, which causes a slight feeling of uneasiness.