El: Songs of Innocence and of Experience Commentary (Patreon)

Decided to treat myself to some Blake before I got to work on Last War v4. Ended up quite mired in it, as it turns out organizing fifty poems into a coherent explanatory narrative is actually quite challenging. But here we are. On to the Marriage of Heaven and Hell and/or Violator vs Badrock.

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Having tamed illuminated printing, Blake turned to crafting projects for his new medium. First among them was a collection of poetry entitled Songs of Innocence. This work and its subsequent companion volume, Songs of Experience, are the Blake works that need the least introduction. If you have read but a single work by Blake it is surely “The Tyger,” with its eminently compelling fearful symmetry and forests of the night. It will not be long before our attention turns to startlingly difficult and alienating works of the sort that are the reason a commentary like this is a necessary part of creating a readable edition of Blake. The Songs, however, are tremendously accessible, with straightforward premises, catchy cadences, and a general lack of batshit seer lunacy. In short, not only are they in practice Blake’s big hit, they give every sense of having been intended as such.

The usual interpretation of Songs of Innocence, at least—which was initially published on its own in 1789, is that it was written for children. That’s easy enough to credit when you look at something like “The Blossom,” with its sing-song cadence of “Merry Merry Sparrow / Under leaves so green / A happy Blossom / Sees you swift as arrow,” or “Spring,” with its aggressively short three-syllable line length. And Blake was writing in the era where Books of nursery rhymes were cropping up—Songs of Innocence is roughly contemporaneous with the publication of Mother Goose’s Melody. But that was a traditional book, typeset in letter press with separate engravings. If Blake had been chasing the same market with Songs of Innocence then illuminated printing was an absolutely terrible way to go about it,

It is important to contextualize what “Blake’s big hit” actually meant, at least in terms of his lifetime. All told, Blake printed roughly two dozen copies of Songs of Innocence, another two dozen of the combined volume, and four bespoke copies of Songs of Experience. This barely fifty copy print run makes the Songs by some margin Blake’s most printed book—the next most popular numbers just over a dozen. The poems would not be given wide publication until some thirty-five years after his death, and then in a conventionally typeset version that excluded the illustrations. 

This is not surprising when one considers what Songs of Innocence and of Experience is. Blake was undoubtedly efficient in his process, but there’s only so fast you can make hand-painted engravings you’re printing from your 18th century home. Blake’s day job and lifelong obscurity both made matters worse, and he surely wanted more than the couple dozen sales he got, but even if the Songs had been a true hit they would have quickly swamped Blake’s capacity to produce copies. Blake’s fantasy in Island in the Moon of printing two thousand copies of an illuminated work was as willfully absurd as his mooted price point of a hundred pounds (roughly £18,000 today). The simple reality is that illuminated printing was a medium suitable for small print runs that treated the book as an art object. And yet Songs of Innocence gives every sense of being designed for this medium. Indeed, the case is easily made that the medium was designed for it: Blake included drafts of three of the songs in An Island in the Moon mere pages before he proposed his process. 

(Let us pause here to rubbish the oft-mooted idea that Blake intended these poems to be sung. Sure, plenty of people have set them to melodies, and some have even done so in ways that don’t simply sound embarrassing, but there is something faintly ridiculous about taking a book whose author designed an entirely new medium focused on the combination of printed text and painted image just to house these poems and to say “ah yes, these must have been intended to exist in some third medium entirely.”)

The willfully obscure nature of the medium, however, necessitates thinking about who, exactly, these two books are for. This is an unusual question to ask of Blake—once we get into the works that are widely labeled as prophetic, the question of audience will become faintly nonsensical, as the poems exhibit an at times defiant level of disinterest in it. But here, with the strange mismatch between the populism of the text and the populism of the medium, the question seems fundamental.

Let’s start at the beginning—the collection’s frontispiece, which shows a man carrying a hornpipe and looking up at a child who is flying amongst the tree branches. This scene is described further in the collection’s first poem, “Introduction.” The poem’s narrator describes how he was going about his business, “Piping songs of pleasant glee,” when he is confronted with a child on a cloud. This child demands a song about a lamb, and Blake obliges, to the child’s delight. He is then asked to put the pipe away and sing the songs, which once again he obliges. The child then demands, “Piper sit thee down and write / In a book that all may read” before vanishing, at which point Blake plucks a reed, fashions it into a “rural pen,” and gets to work. Yes, the poem seems at first glance to emphasize the possibility of a wide readership—it ends with the proclamation that these poems are written down so that “Every child may joy to hear” them. But it is worth remembering that the poem’s previous use of the word “child” was to describe what is plainly some sort of angel, who is the only actual audience these songs have within the context of “Introduction.” Were it not for the title page, which shows two children looking and pointing at a book in their mother’s lap, actual human children seem wholly incidental to the collection. As it is, they are tangibly a secondary audience; the book is meant for the divine.

The other thing to note about this poem, obvious as it may be, is its pastoral quality. The piper is asked to “pipe a song about a Lamb,” and when he fashions a pen with which to transcribe his songs it is made from a reed, and is specifically a “rural pen.” This is unsurprising given Blake’s theme of innocence—the pastoral/childhood/Jesus nexus of symbolism is well trodden. But this sort of pastoral imagery will prove to be the core set of symbolism for Songs of Innocence, and so is worth noting. Indeed, it forms the core of the collection’s second poem, “The Shepherd.”

Well. I say “second.” In fact there’s no set order for Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake at one point wrote up a document providing a nominal order, but only a single copy actually follows it. At various times Blake followed “Introduction” with five separate poems, and that’s just taking the publicly available copies into account. I’ve sequenced the poems here in a relatively standard order, consistent with Copy Z specifically, but with a few exceptions sequence is simply not a useful way to consider these poems.

Still, “The Shepherd” provides a useful framework for understanding Blake’s relationship with Innocence. The poem considers its eponymous character and his “sweet lot,” which is to stay with his sheep, listening to “the lambs innocent call” and “the ewes tender reply” and praising them. The final couplet clarifies the relationship: “He is watchful while they are in peace, / For they know when their Shepherd is nigh.” It is almost too obvious to point out that the Shepherd is serving as an analogue for God here—Blake even capitalizes “Shepherd.” But what’s striking is the image of God as at once delighting in the sheep’s innocence and enabling it by watching over them. Innocence isn’t just a childlike naivete here, but something closer to a spiritual state of worship—a communion with the divine. 

The idea is developed further in “The Lamb,” which, given its title, is implicitly the song with which Blake so delighted the angel back in “Introduction.” Moreover, this poem is explicitly linked to “The Shepherd” not just by their titles but by Blake’s illustrations, both of which show a character interacting with a flock of sheep beneath a tree, with matching compositions. In “The Shepherd” this is an adult shepherd, whereas in “The Lamb” it’s a small child, nude, holding his hand out to feed one of the sheep. Where “The Shepherd” observes its eponymous character from a certain distance, however, “The Lamb” is offered as a direct address, opening by asking “Little Lamb, who made thee/ Dost thou know who made thee” before offering a praiseful description of the Lamb. 

The second stanza focuses things further, with the poem’s narrator making a first person intervention to promise “Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee.” The answer is worth quoting in full: “He is called by thy name / For he calls himself a Lamb/ He is meek & he is mild / He became a little child / I a child & thou a lamb, / We are called by his name.” Several things are interesting here. First is that God is both Lamb and child—the two primary images of Innocence that Blake is using. Second is the fusion of the three figures—the Lamb to whom the poem is addressed, the narrator, and God, once again clarifying Innocence as a spiritual state of communion with the divine. Third, however, is the narrator’s declaration that they are a child. One ought not recklessly conflate narrators and poets—most of the narrators in Songs of Innocence are, in fact, characters. And yet if one compares “The Lamb” to, say, “A Cradle Song,” which takes the form of a mother addressing her infant, what stands out here is how the poem is focused primarily on conveying the perspective of its narrator. The infant in “A Cradle Song” is held at some remove—the poem opens with the mother relating how “Sweet dreams form a shade / O’er my lovely infants head,” which notably declines to position the poem as an address to the infant, instead keeping the focus pointedly on the mother. The poem invokes the second person only in its fourth stanza, after the mother is well established, and her perspective never drops away.

“The Lamb,” on the other hand, foregrounds the Lamb to which it is addressed. Just as “A Cradle Song” holds back its direct address until the narrator is established, “The Lamb” does not offer any hint that the voice asking the question might matter until halfway through, and does not offer any information about this voice until its fourth from last line. This simply isn’t what Blake does when he’s introducing a signifiant narrative voice. Even in the Poetical Sketches, when Blake narrated through a character the poem focused on their interiority and perspective. Blake is a seer, and when the eyes he sees through are not his own he is as interested in the eyes themselves as what they see. And so the declaration “I a child & thou a lamb” seems to be offered by Blake himself. This may seem counterintuitive, but it fits with the sense of Innocence as a spiritual state. Crucially, it is not simply a primordial state of uncorrupted youth but something that can be re-attained. It is, in other words, not a naive state but a visionary one.

And yet childhood is still crucial to the idea of Innocence;  Of the nineteen poems in Songs of Innocence, fully thirteen engage with the notion in some fashion. Most illustrative of these, perhaps, is “Infant Joy,” an ecstatic narration from the perspective of a newborn that opens with the triumphant declaration that “I have no name / I am but two days old,” proclaiming that “joy” is the only thing it is possible to call this infant. It is this first line that is most revealing, with its connection between Innocence and namelessness. Later in Blake’s work we will begin recurrently seeing the image of a fall into selfhood—the idea that identity is a falling away from the essential unity of the divine.

But if names and the ego are a negation of godhood then the Innocence that Blake offers, attained as it is through visionary experience, can only ever be a negation of that negation. And this visionary Innocence, having passed through negation, is aware that something other than Innocence exists. And indeed, several of the poems in Songs of Innocence address this. Consider “The Ecchoing Green”—one of the poems that ever follows “Introduction.” The poem opens by setting a pastoral scene—the Sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the Spring is rolling in—before turning at the end of its first stanza to a couplet that establishes the poem’s refrain, proclaiming that “our sports shall be seen / On the Ecchoing Green.” 

The second stanza, however, makes a surprising turn, opening with a description of how “Old John with white hair / Does laugh away care” sitting with “the old folk” as they watch the children playing, reflecting on when they “In our youth-time were seen, / On the Ecchoing Green.” The third stanza returns to the children as they grow tired, the sun sets, “and our sports have an end” and are “no more seen / On the darkening Green.” The overall effect is a poem that is very much about the way in which Innocence is haunted by the knowledge of death. 

And it’s hardly the only one. The poems “The Little Boy lost” and “The Little Boy found” similarly turn one eye towards mortality. The poems are, as their titles suggest, a matched set, a point further emphasized by Blake’s art, which show what is clearly the same child on each poem. The first poem ends with the child, hopelessly lost after losing track of his father, beginning to despair: “The mire was deep & the child did weep / And away their vapour flew.” And the second picks up at the same point—“The little boy lost in the lonely fen, / Led by the wandering light, / Began to cry.” Indeed, the poems overlap slightly, making the break between them slightly strange and ragged. The second poem, of course, sees him found by “God ever high” who “appeared like his father in white,” and leads him to his mother—notably not quite the parent the first poem came in on. There’s an elided death in the page turn here, nipping at the edge of Blake’s already strangely fretful Innocence.

Other things haunt the periphery of the collection as well. Consider “The Chimney Sweeper”—a fair candidate for the best poem in Songs of Innocence. The poem describes quite shocking scenes of child labor—it opens with its narrator explaining that “When my mother died I was very young, / And my father sold me while yet my tongue, / Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep / So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.” In the face of this, however, its narrator retains a fierce Innocence. When his friend Tom Dacre is left sobbing after having his head shaved he reassures him that “when your head’s bare, / You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.” Subsequently, as Tom sleeps, he has a vision of thousands of chimney sweepers “lock’d up in coffins of black” and of an Angel who opens the coffins, releasing them into a pastoral world where they can “wash in a river and shine in the Sun” before ascending to heaven. The poem concludes by describing how “Tom awoke and we rose in the dark / And got with our bags & our brushes to work. / Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm / So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.”

To put it mildly, this does not convince. Blake is employing an unreliable narrator, engineering circumstances so that all of his expressions of Innocence are actively undermined. For all the joy the narrator takes in Tom’s dream, it’s still a vision of mass childhood death, and whatever comfort is taken in the vision, it’s plainly inadequate to the cold dark pre-morning into which these children awaken. The poem is exquisitely discomfiting, and the image of dancing children squeezed into the bottom of the page, which Blake makes no effort to distinguish from each other in any of the extant copies, does little to dispel this sense.

These realities of urban poverty similarly lurk behind “Holy Thursday,” which describes the annual Ascension Day mass in which London’s charity schools traipse their students to St. Paul’s for mass—a scene where Blake focuses on the comparative holiness of the “multitudes of lambs” to the “wise guardians of the poor.” But perhaps the most striking instance of the political and material world impinging upon the pastoral Innocence comes in “The Little Black Boy.” This is, for obvious reasons, a more vexed poem than others in the collection. Blake was a lifelong and passionate opponent of slavery, but he was also a white Londoner with the biases that implies, and his approach to racial issues is unquestionably exoticizing and exploitative in its own way.

Most significantly, Blake approaches melanin as a spiritual condition. His narrator explains that “I am black, but O! my soul is white,” and makes an initial comparison between the angelic skin of English children and his own, which is “as if bereav’d of light.” But Blake evolves and iterates upon this concept as the poem goes on, first having the Black child’s mother relate how God resides in the sun “and gives his light, and gives his heat away,” suggesting that their Black skin is in fact evidence of the amount of this light they’ve absorbed—indeed, she explains that “we are put on earth a little space / That we may learn to bear the beams of love.” The poem ends with the Black boy imagining the final judgment, when he and the white English boy will be in the direct presence of God, declaring that he’ll “shade him from the heat till he can bear, / To lean in joy upon our fathers knee. / And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair, / And be like him and he will then love me.” It’s a heartbreaking line, both for its tacit acknowledgment that white children do not already love him and for the piercing naiveté of his fantasy of reconciliation. Once again, Innocence is rendered decidedly limited, and Blake puts considerable effort into making sure the reader never loses sight of what, exactly, his characters are Innocent of.

Which brings us to “On Another’s Sorrow,” printed here as the final poem in Songs of Innocence. This was not its position in any of the book’s initial copies, but it became relatively settled in sequence in Blake’s later printings, and with good reason. The poem departs from straightforwardly depicting Innocence, not merely by presenting a rich vein of ironic counterpoint but by actively depicting grief, pain, and mourning. He opens in a personal register, asking whether he can “see anothers woe / And not be in sorrow too” before avowing that “no, no never can it be / never never can it be.” He then develops his theme, this time asking whether “he who smiles on all” can similarly do anything but empathize with someone’s sorrow—not simply in the context of human woe, but also “the wren with sorrows small” or “the small birds grief & care.” Once again, Blake concludes that “no never can it be / never never can it be.” Indeed, Blake declares that God empathizes with everything that anyone feels, ending the poem with the claim that “he gives to us his joy, / That our grief he may destroy / Till our grief is fled & gone / He doth sit by us and moan.” This makes explicit what we already had discerned—that Blake’s Innocence is not a spiritual state of ignorance but defiance at a cruel world.

My point in all of this is to address a common interpretation of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience that treats the latter volume as an older and more embittered Blake turning on and rejecting his older work. In truth Songs of Experience was always latent in Songs of Innocence—an implicit second half of the vision. It would be five years, however, before Blake realized this possibility. By that point, in 1794, he was firmly a prophet—every other poem in this section and the next had been engraved, along with America a Prophecy. This was in fact the height of his Lambeth period—the same year he would craft Europe a Prophecy and The Book of Urizen. As we will see, these works marked a major turning point in Blake’s life as a seer, and explain much about why Blake was minded to revisit Songs of Innocence from this new perspective. 

Before dealing with Songs of Experience at large, however, there are four poems that ought be looked at separately. These are poems that Blake wrote and originally published in Songs of Innocence, but later  moved to Songs of Experience. This in fact happened in two waves. The first came in 1794 as soon as Songs of Experience was composed, and consisted of “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found”—a pair of poems published over three pages, with the middle page split between the two. In many regards these poems are an odd fit for either volume. “The Little Girl Lost” opens in a strangely epic register—“In futurity / I prophetic see,” Blake proclaims, before offering a vision of the earth arising from sleep and going to seek her maker. The poem then moves to a description of Lyca, a girl who followed some birdsong to become lost in the desert. No explicit connection is made between her and the awakened earth, and the detail of her being seven years old makes direct equation difficult, and yet it’s also challenging to come up with any other way to relate the first two stanzas to the rest of the poem. Lyca, in any case, wanders for a while before falling asleep, where she is watched over by lions, tygers, and leopards. The second poem picks up with Lyca’s parents, who wander the desert for seven days when they are confronted with the aforementioned lion, who is accompanied by a vision of “A Spirit arm’d in gold” who explains that he will lead them to his palace, where “Lyca lies asleep.” They do so, and the poem ends with the note that “To this day they dwell / In a lonely dell / Nor fear the wolvish howl, / Nor the lions growl.” 

These poems are, in many regards, suspended between the volumes. There is an obvious echo to “Night,” another one of the Songs of Innocence, which describes how, when night falls, angels sweep over the world to watch over all creatures, man and beast alike, lingering over the “wolves and tygers,” whose hunger the angels try to abate, and if they fail “Receive each mild spirit, / New worlds to inherit.” The final two stanzas imagine these worlds, where the redeemed lion no longer preys upon the sheep but instead guards over them, and his “bright mane for ever, / Shall shine like the gold.” The opening stanzas of “The Little Girl Lost,” meanwhile, with its futurity and prophecy, evoke the tone with which Blake would open the Songs of Experience, more about which shortly. 

In 1818 Blake moved two further plates to Songs of Experience. The first of these, “The Schoolboy,” is a sufficiently obvious choice that one wonders why it didn’t happen in 1794—the poem is a denunciation of rote and tedious education, and while its ending yearns for the summer’s joy in a very Innocence way, its focus is plainly more on the horrors of drudgery. The other, “The Voice of the Ancient Bard,” is altogether stranger. It opens with a rapturous proclamation as the bard calls out the “Youth of delight!” to proclaim the dawn of a new age—the “Image of Truth new-born.” And yet over a couple of lines the poem turns sinister—“Doubt is fled, and clouds of reason, / Dark disputes and artful teazing. / Folly is an endless maze,” from which point the remainder is, as memorably described by E.D. Hirsch Jr., an “apocalyptic outburst” about how “Folly is an endless maze,” and how those lost within it “stumble all night over bones of the dead.” This was always an odd fit for Songs of Innocence, although it made rather more sense after 1794 when Blake began using it as the final poem in Songs of Innocence, not only because, like “On Another’s Sorrow,” its tone anticipates Songs of Experience, but because its narrator, the Ancient Bard, where it tidily sets up the beginning of Songs of Experience, the “Introduction” of which opens “Hear the voice of the Bard!” Likewise, after 1818 Blake generally used it as the final poem of Songs of Experience, the other position in which it can counterbalance the second “Introduction.”

Let us turn, then, to this second volume in earnest. As already established, it opens on a distinctly different note than Songs of Innocence. Most obviously, it’s not in the first person, instead serving as an invocation of the aforementioned Ancient Bard “Who Present, Past, & Future sees” and “Whose ears have heard, / The Holy Word, That walk’d among the ancient trees.” There are reasons to equate the Bard with Blake himself, but this isn’t entirely straightforward—Blake’s character work doesn’t usually entail inhabiting another seer. Equally, it doesn’t usually entail externalizing himself either, so this is pretty clearly a unique figure in either case. Blake recounts the Bard “Calling the lapsed Soul” and pleading “O Earth O Earth return!” before, in the final stanza, arriving at a despairing plea: “Turn away no more: / Why wilt thou turn away.” As with the Ancient Bard’s other appearance, there’s a clear sense of Cassandra-like frustration from the seer here, although the precise nature of his complaint is more obscure and symbolically laden this time around.

What is perhaps most interesting here, however, is the poem’s recurrent imagery of night. The Ancient Bard is described as “weeping in the evening dew,” and when he calls upon the Earth to return he implores it to “Arise from out the dewy grass.” Likewise, after his final plea that it turn away no more the poem ends with the note that “The starry floor / The watry shore / Is giv’n thee til the break of day.” This nocturnal setting is emphasized further in the art for the plate, which features a night sky full of stars and a single figure reclining at the page’s bottom. This contrasts the Songs of Innocence “Introduction” in two ways. First, that plate lacks a central image—just some indistinct figures in the margins. Second, however, that poem’s content, as discussed, picks up directly from the book’s frontispiece. Here, however, there’s no such continuity. The frontispiece and title page of Songs of Experience are both direct reworkings of their Songs of Innocence counterparts; the frontispiece shows the same figures as in Songs of Innocence one, but now the angel sits atop the man’s head as he walks out towards the reader, a flock of sheep grazing behind them—the implication being that the poet is now taking the angel out to see the world. The title page, meanwhile, features two figures, their heads in roughly the same positions as Songs of Innocence, only this time instead of young children reading a book at their mother’s knee they are older, and stand weeping over the bodies of their parents. These make compelling statements in relation to the other book, but they don’t engage with the “Introduction,” with no suggestion of the Ancient Bard or the nocturnal setting.

Night, of course, made several appearances in Songs of Innocence, most obviously in the poem literally called that. Much of what Blake writes about it is imagery of angels keeping watch over people during the night, but there’s a clear liminality to night, and an association with death, as in “The Ecchoing Green.” It’s also worth thinking back to “To the Evening Star” in the Poetical Sketches, which has similar imagery of protection, but also invokes a certain inchoate dreaminess. That the “Introduction” to Songs of Experience emphasizes it so heavily suggests a destabilization of the previous vision. It is an opportunity to look again at the world and see something new—indeed, through literally new eyes given the presence of the Ancient Bard. (Likewise, “The Voice of the Ancient Bard,” once positioned at the end of the book, becomes readable as an awakening from this dream, with the Ancient Bard futilely imploring people to heed the visions that have been related over the previous pages.)

Fittingly, several of the Songs of Experience are, like the frontispiece and title page, directly offering new perspectives on poems in Songs of Innocence. In addition to “Introduction” itself there are seven poems from Songs of Innocence that get reworked, although in one case, “The Divine Image,” the matter is somewhat complex. Two of these further expand the ongoing Little Boy/Girl Lost/Found sequence—“A Little Boy Lost” tells the story of a child accused of heresy for suggesting that “‘Nought loves another as itself,” with Blake describing how the child is violently arrested by a Priest (“all admired his priestly care,” he notes witheringly), tried, and ultimately burned “in a holy place / Where many had been burned before,” ending with the haunting demand to know, “Are such things done on Albion’s shore?” “A Little Girl Lost,” on the other hand—not to be confused with “The Little Girl Lost,” the poem transplanted from Songs of Innocence to Songs of Experience—sees Blake wrestling with feminine sexuality, a topic that will vex him repeatedly in his more openly prophetic work.

In some ways more interesting, however, are the ones that directly respond to and rewrite earlier poems. Several of these are so direct as to share titles with their Songs of Innocence counterparts. “The Chimney Sweeper,” for instance, amounts to a restatement of the original only without relying on any sort of irony-laden ambiguities—it opens with “A little black thing among the snow: / Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!” Asked where his parents are, the narrator explains that they’ve gone to church, bitterly noting that “because I am happy & dance & sing, / They think they have done me no injury: / And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery.” Similarly, a new “Holy Thursday” looks upon the scene of the original—poor children assembled at church for an annual mass—and immediately asks “Is this a holy thing to see / In a rich and fruitful land,” asking of the singing Blake had previously exulted in, “Is that trembling cry a song? / Can it be a song of joy? / And so many children poor? / It is a land of poverty!” Again, all of this was tacitly present in the Songs of Innocence version, only now instead of alluding to it Blake is screaming it right in the reader’s face.

Elsewhere, however, the disparity between the two visions is more than simply Blake’s directness. The most obvious of these is “Infant Sorrow,” a revision of the ecstatic “Infant Joy” that plunges straight into philosophical pessimism as the newborn babe describes how “My mother groan’d! my father wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt,” and how he struggled against being swaddled until “Bound and weary I thought best / To sulk upon my mother’s breast,” a line in which the word “bound” seems not simply to refer to the swaddling blanket but to the entire notion of material existence.

Similarly the Songs of Experience version of “Nurse’s Song” opens with a nearly identical couplet to its Songs of Innocence version, “When the voices of children are heard on the green, / And whisperings are in the dale,” only to pivot from the original’s declaration of peaceful contentment to the far more startling resolution that “the days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, / My face turns green and pale.” The second stanza works similarly, copying Songs of Innocence’s first two lines only to sneer to the children, “Your spring and your day are wasted in play, / And your winter and night in disguise” before cutting off abruptly, whereas the original continues for two further verses in the children’s voice. As with the notion of binding in “Infant Sorrow,” the word “disguise” points at a larger spiritual discomfort—a notion that adult life completes the fall into selfhood gestured at throughout Songs of Innocence. 

And then, of course, there is “The Tyger.” As with its Songs of Innocence counterpart “The Lamb,” the poem is a direct address to the title creature and its relationship with its creator. The difference is, well, much like the difference between a lamb and a tiger. There is no pastoral innocence to embrace here—the tyger is an object of fiery terror, “burning bright, / In the forests of the night,” and Blake imagines him being forged within a furnace, asking “What the anvil? What dread grasp. / Dare its deadly terrors clasp!” But Blake’s horror is no less religious than his joy at beholding the lamb’s soft wooly brightness. There’s a giddy frenzy to his language, perhaps best embodied in the infamously not quite rhyming “fearful symmetry” in which the tyger is framed, a phrase that captures not just horror but wonder. 

All of this is complicated somewhat by the image, which is, rather infamously, a bit daft. Bloom, in a rare outbreak of being right, describes it as “a mild and silly, perhaps worried, certainly shabby, little beast,” though he, typically, insists this is deliberate. Some critics have speculated that Blake’s model was a tiger cub seen at a zoo, or that he had simply only ever seen other drawings of the animal—certainly plausible. For my part, I’ll offer a third hypothesis: Blake was simply never much into drawing real world animals. His art always tends towards mythic abstraction—his depictions of human anatomy are intensely idiosyncratic, but work, in part because Blake drew hundreds of humans in his career and had time to develop his approach. But when drawing creatures that he’s not had that kind of practice with, he’s simply far outside his wheelhouse. It’s notable that his lambs in Songs of Innocence are likewise faintly goofy, getting away with it mostly because the poems don’t require them to be objects of sublime terror. 

More than the animal itself, however, Blake is clearly fascinated with the dread demiurge who crafted it, whose audacity at doing so is repeatedly cited (the word “dare” appears no fewer than three times in the poem). The poem ends, before looping back to repeat its first stanza (albeit with the final question changed from “could frame thy fearful symmetry” to “dare frame”), with Blake asking whether, after “the stars threw down their spears” and wept, “Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”, and his fascination with a figure who would craft both creatures—who would create both the beatific unity of Innocence and the much harsher and colder light of Experience. But this observation buries the more radical truth: Experience is a religious state as well.

This realization is central to understanding “Earth’s Answer,” a poem that Blake always positions second in Songs of Experience, immediately after the “Introduction,” and which is a direct response to that poem’s calling of the Earth to return, beginning in media res as “Earth rais’d up her head, / From the darkness dread & drear.” She proclaims that she can hear the Ancient Bard, but sneers at him, calling him the “Selfish father of men” and saying that only “Cruel jealous selfish fear / Can delight / Chain’d in night.” The poem ends with her own demand to “Break this heavy chain / That does freeze my bones around / Selfish! vain, / Eternal bane! / That free Love with bondage bound” This imagery of the Earth being imprisoned is striking in how it complicates the notion of the material world as something fallen. The Earth’s lowly condition is not because she is part of the material world, but because she been captured and bound. 

The poem is worth comparing to “To Tirzah,” which sees Blake inveighing with his most open fury against the condition of material existence. He addresses Tirzah—a Biblical name that Blake invokes somewhat unclearly, but who he plainly treats as an avatar of materialism, opening the poem with a combination of proclamation and interrogation, “Whate’er is Born of Mortal birth / Must be consumed with the Earth, / To rise from Generation free: / Then what have I to do with thee?”  Once again Blake turns to the image of material reality as a binding, addressing Tirzah as the “Mother of my Mortal part,” and levies the accusation that she “with false self-deceiving tears / Didst bind my Nostrils, Eyes, & Ears, // Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay, / And me to Mortal Life betray.”

Both here and in “Earth’s Answer,” however, the precise theology here is difficult to discern. In “To Tirzah” Blake ends the poem with another declaration/question: “The Death of Jesus set me free: / Then what have I to do with thee?” And yet he also suggests that “Mercy changed Death into Sleep;” a line that would also seem to refer to Jesus, but that is puzzlingly followed by “The Sexes rose to work & weep,” a line that only serves to muddy things. Similarly, the “Father of the ancient men” that the Earth upbraids in her answer must, structurally, be the Ancient Bard, and yet she seems to blame him for her bondage, which doesn’t really comport with how he’s portrayed in either the “Introduction” or “The Voice of the Ancient Bard.” Options for reconciling all of this exist, most obviously by treating the Ancient Bard as an unreliable narrator—indeed, this is roughly the approach offered by Bloom, whose commitment to imposing consistency on Blake is such that he even tries to reconcile the Ancient Bard’s speech with things Blake wrote a quarter century later in Jerusalem. I am not so much less concerned with this sort of thing than I am of the view that it is fundamentally hostile to Blake’s entire project; we’ll soon see him wielding irresolvable contradictions as a deliberate poetic strategy. Nothing about the drift in the understanding of the Ancient Bard between the two poems troubles me, and to the extent that it does the dreamy nocturnal landscape against which the poems are set provides sufficient explanation.

This nocturnal setting appears in several poems. “The Sick Rose,” for instance, is afflicted by “The invisible worm, / That flies in the night / In the howling storm,” while “The Angel” opens with its narrator proclaiming that “I dreamt a dream! What can it mean?,” and Blake’s description of his city in “London” culminates with the fact that “most, thro’ midnight streets I hear / How the youthful Harlot’s curse / Blasts the new born Infant’s tear.” And yet identifying some unifying strand through these poems is no easier than reconciling the Ancient Bard and the Father of the ancient men. “The Sick Rose” is famously cryptic, but is a story of corruption and rot, with the night providing the fecund loam from which the worm’s fatally “dark secret love” arises. In “The Angel,” meanwhile, the dream is a vision of the narrator as “a maiden Queen” who was protected and comforted by an Angel until she drove him away because she “hid from him my heart’s delight,” then “armed my fears / With ten thousand shields and spears,” thus driving the Angel away a second, more deliberate time, “For the time of youth was fled, / And grey hairs were on my head.” This is a very different approach, with the night serving as the source of dreams and visions.

It is striking, however, just how much the fleeting invocation of a dream destabilizes an otherwise straightforward parable about the loss of Innocence in adulthood. Essentially everything after the first two lines is an entirely coherent first-person narration that doesn’t require that opening framing of the poem. And the opening line questioning what the dream could mean is further strange. The narrator is clearly not Blake, for whom the meaning would be as clear as it is to the reader. The purpose of the rhetorical question, and larger framing of the poem as a dream, seems purely to make what would otherwise be emphatically clear into something far muddier and curious.

As for “London,” the poem is a harrowing account of wandering through England’s capital, where “In every cry of every Man, / In every Infant’s cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.” Aside from dropping one of Blake’s most famous lines, this stanza highlights a curiosity of the poem: Blake is focused almost entirely on how the city sounds, although he is in places synesthetic—he describes how “the hapless Soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls.” Mostly, however, he is feverish and doom-laden—the furious social rabble rouser of “The Chimney Sweeper” (which is directly referenced in the poem) and “Holy Thursday” wedded to the apocalyptic visionary of “The Voice of the Ancient Bard.” The night is less a source of visions than, it seems, a visionary condition afflicting the entire city.

Clearly Songs of Experience is a markedly less unified collection than its counterpart. But this broadly makes sense for its subject. Innocence, after all, is a state of unity with the divine—a state of purity and clarity. Experience, meanwhile, is a state of physical embodiment, with all the messy complexity that being a flesh and blood person involves. For it to be as straightforward and streamlined as its predecessor would, in fundamental ways, betray its subject matter. But this wide-ranging approach, wedded with the baleful fury that often proves Blake’s most compelling register, also allows him to craft a bevy of his best-known works.

Let’s close with a final poem—“The Human Abstract.” This is that “somewhat complex” reworking of “The Divine Image” mentioned earlier. A draft of the poem exists in Blake’s notebook from the time, first titled “The Earth” before getting retitled as “The Human Image” and put in conversation with the earlier work. By the time it appeared in Songs of Experience, however, it had been retitled a third time, moving it further away from “The Divine Image,” with the role of direct response going instead to a poem entitled “A Divine Image,” for which Blake engraved a plate but only printed once, in a single uncolored 1795 copy that sits in the private collection of bookseller Justin G. Schiller and has not been digitally reproduced, although “A Divine Image” itself has been. 

The echoes of “The Divine Image” remain in place, with a first stanza returning to the personified Pity and Mercy of the earlier poem, only this time from the far more cynical starting point that “Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody Poor; / And Mercy no more could be / If all were as happy as we.” But from there the poem gets markedly stranger, introducing a new character, Cruelty, who “sits down with holy fears, / And waters the ground with tears,” leading to the creation of Humility, which in turn grows into a vast tree—“the dismal shade / Of Mystery,” from which grows “the fruit of Deceit.” Blake ends by describing how “The Gods of earth and sea” searched the world for this tree, “But their search was all in vain: / There grows one in the Human Brain.”

It is a clear, if perhaps slightly overcooked allegory. But what is most revealing is the illustration of an old man with a long white beard ensnared at the base of a tree. The figure resembles the Ancient Bard as depicted in “The Voice of the Ancient Bard,” but more broadly represents the classic imagery of God the Father. Blake would return to the image of this man bound, as he would the Tree of Mystery—indeed, by 1794 when Songs of Experience was completed he was already hard at work on those more fully prophetic works.