A Study of Blake's "Introduction" to Innocence and Experience Jeff Holloway

William Blake's collection of illuminated poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience depict, as the title page explains, "the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul" (Blake 1). Although Songs of Innocence, written in 1789, was crafted five years prior to Songs of Experience both collections read as stand alone works of engraving art and poetry; however, the second work was created to accompany the first. The companion poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience establish a distance between the dissimilar states of pure innocence and world-worn experience. Blake's illuminated poems, "Introduction" to both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, feature a speaker whose inspirations, themes and tones highlight the dichotomy between the soul's states of both innocence and experience.

Blake's use of trochaic tetrameter in his "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence produces a sing-song rhythm akin to children's songs lending the poem a tone of childlike innocence. The Piper, Blake's speaker, begins the poem "Piping down the valleys wild" (1), a pastoral scene revealing the speaker as one unified with the natural world. The "valleys wild" and "songs...