The Difference Between Innocence and Experience in Poetry

In “The Lamb” by William Blake, you will see that, if analyzed closely, the lamb is a personal symbol which signifies God himself. The innocence of a child is like that of a lamb, and serves as a model for humans to follow. In the first stanza, the speaker is the child who is also the teacher. The child asks the lamb who gave him life and all his needs, along with a voice so "tender”. Then, the child declares that he will tell the lamb who their creator is. The creator shares the same name as the lamb, which is a reference to Jesus Christ. The end of the poem is giving way to a blessing which, gives an expression of the child’s adoration at the connection the lamb makes in child,

     According to the Bible, God created man pure and innocent, oblivious to good and evil. The serpent of evil lured them to the tree of knowledge, however, and its fruit proved too much of a temptation. With a bite, their "eyes... were opened," and the course of their lives, and the lives of mankind, were changed (Gen. 6-7, 22). Whether or not one accepts the Christian concept of creation, countless works of art are patterned on this account of the "fall from innocence." The novel Grendel by John Gardner shows us a side of the "beast" the epic Beowulf never considered - the child-like innocence before the brutality. The song "Country Girl" by Neil Young is a

EE Cummings was and is still one of the most well-regarded and unique poets of all time. His poems were unusual, but his strange way of writing is what grabbed people’s attention and made him so special. Many incidents in Cummings’ life affected his poetry, his experiences and his personality, which could clearly be observed in the poems he wrote. Cummings became such a well-known poet due to the effect of his life events on his poetry, his peculiar writing style and his strong connection with the topics of love and lust. The struggles and successes of his life developed his poetry in a huge manner.

For example, in “Infant Joy,” Blake demonstrates the child’s eye and sense of wonder that we find in the incorruptibility of infants. Blake presents a truly pure creature in the first stanza:

Thesis Statement: The Lamb written by William Blake is a beautiful spiritually enriched poem that expresses God’s sovereignity, His love for creation and His gentleness in care and provisions for those that are His .

Subject Matter: ‘The Wholly Innocent’ describes the emotions a foetus would have, from its point of view about the mother’s plan to get it aborted. The poem explains thoroughly how the foetus feels with detail that makes us feel empathic towards it. The summary of the poem in the last stanza is concluding the life the foetus had, before it was aborted, ending it in a tragic way. The poem does not mention anything about the mother’s point of view, mainly because the mother would only make excuses, which makes no difference to the foetus.

Everyday people face the hard decisions of what path to take and the consequences that may come after. On a daily basis people make these decisions, those decisions can dictate whether or not you keep your innocence. For some letting go of that innocence is hard and they can not cope with losing it and entering adulthood. Similarly, from the start of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger to the finish, innocence is questioned and tested. Holden is staying in New York trying to find a way to protect his innocence from adulthood that he feels is creeping up on him every so quickly. During his visit to New York Holden is faced with prostitutes, graffiti, and many adults. These factors tried to influence Holden's innocence,

In the Neo-classical novel Candide by Voltaire the theme of innocence and experience is prevalent through the protagonist, Candide, especially through his journey of finding the prescription of how to live a useful life in the face of harsh reality. In William Blake’s collection of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience the two characters, tyger and lamb, show how we lose our innocence to gain experience. Although the innocence and experience are paradoxical terms, we can solve the paradox by analyzing these two works.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton is a book that gave the word “love” many other meanings, such as impossible, meaningless and incomplete. There were many unbearable obstacles that Countess Ellen Olenska, one of the main characters, had to face because of love. She was treated badly by many people and always longed for love but never obtained it. With everyone cursing her, betraying her and hurting her, there was one person who was always there for her. Newland Archer wasn’t only sympathetic towards her; he also began to fall in love with her. The love she always wanted. He was the man who truly cared for her and always helped her make decisions. Out of all the selfish people in New York who

Blake begins the poem by stating that it is not possible to love another as much as yourself, and that thought is the highest of all human functions. This sets the stage for Blake's attack on religion's ideas of hierarchy and condemnation of rational thought. The next stanza describes the boy asking God, indicated by the capitalized "Father," how he could love him or another human more than a little bird picking up crumbs. The boy states that he loves God in and as much as a little bird. This echoes the naturalist ideas supported in the aforementioned poems. Blake seems to be saying that the proper way to worship and commune with God is by loving all natural beings, human and non-human. The priest, a symbol of organized religion that Blake so sharply critiques, overhears what the boy is saying and is infuriated by the idea that a person could worship God through nature, without ritual, politics, or human involvement, and that the boy dares use his mind to question what he has been taught. The priest makes the boy a martyr, preaching from his high pedestal of pomposity, and burns the boy, despite the cries of his family. The boy's curiosity and natural thinking have been squelched, and his imagination bound in iron chains. Blake closes the poem by asking if such

In the following plate, "The Little Boy Found," Blake reconciles the negative image of the priest and religion that was presented in the previous work. It begins by telling the tale of the boy who got lost by following the "wandering light," representative of the church's blinding standards for religion. God hears the boy's cries and comes to his rescue "like his father in white." This could be referring to God appearing as a human in the image of his father. God leads the child back to his mother. The mother had been looking for her child who had been led off track by the misconception of the "mind forged manacles" of religion.

William Blake thought the role of the child to be innocence. Witnessing two of his

Blake uses traditional symbols of angels and devils, animal imagery, and especially images of fire and flame to: 1) set up a dual world, a confrontation of opposites or "contraries" which illustrate how the rules of Reason and Religion repress and pervert the basic creative energy of humanity, 2) argues for apocalyptic transformation of the self "through the radical regeneration of each person's own power to imagine" (Johnson/Grant, xxiv), and 3) reconstructs Man in a new image, a fully realized Man who is both rational and imaginative, partaking of his divinity through creativity. The form of the poem consists of "The Argument," expositions on his concepts of the "contraries" and of "expanded perception" which are both interspersed with "Memorable Fancies" that explicate and enlarge on his expositions, and concludes with "A Song of Liberty," a prophecy of a future heaven on earth.

The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus. The traditional image of Jesus as a lamb underscores the Christian values of gentleness, meekness, and peace. The image of the child is also associated with Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a special solicitude for children, and the Bible's depiction of Jesus in his childhood shows him as guileless and vulnerable. These are also the characteristics from which the child-speaker approaches the ideas of nature and of God. This poem, like many of the Songs of Innocence, accepts what Blake saw as the more positive aspects of conventional Christian belief. But it does not provide a completely adequate doctrine, because it fails to account for the presence of suffering and evil in the world. The pendant (or companion) poem to this one, found in the Songs of Experience, is "The Tyger"; taken together, the two poems give a perspective on religion that includes the good and clear as well as the terrible and inscrutable. These poems complement each other to produce a fuller account

In Songs of Innocence, the dominant symbol is the child. The poems are narrated from the standpoint of a child and represent the early stages of the human imagination. At this point in its life, the imagination is not fully formed and does not yet contain its own distinctive character. The innocent's world view is one of "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love" where God the creator bestows meaning upon nature.