Answer: Showing more than ‘the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience reveals a symbolic development which existed in opposition to conventional concepts of modernity and morality. Blake’s writings are an endeavor to loosen or break societies ‘mind-forged manacles’, which had been created through the edicts of a repressive church and supported by Parliament. Blake pointed to what he saw as the traditional values lost in the late 18th century. Through his poetry Blake fashioned an ideal form of human existence and weighed contemporary society against it. He found society wanting. Calling for the liberation of human energy and creativity, Blake’s Songs are scathing in their criticism of the prevailing mood of enlightenment rationality, a spirit of the age manifested in Newton, industry and conquest. Blake’s poems serve to damn those institutions which, by their advocacy of this rationality, sought to stifle divine energy with oppressive morality. This restrictive morality was anathema to Blake’s concept of the innate divinity of life, and a continuation of the practices which had separated man from God. Unity between energy, poetry and God was portrayed by Blake as an eternal ‘innocence’ while ‘experience’ came to embody that which had led man to fall from Eden – the invasion and subsequent enslavement of imagination by reason.
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience represents Blake’s theological and mythological development which culminated in a belief system both radical and deeply spiritual, causing some to dismiss his works as lunatic rantings. Blake was both poet and artist, and it is a mistake for any interpretation of his poems to ignore the central role his engravings played in creating meaning. The bird of paradise is a common image used in Blake’s works to symbolize innocence and creative freedom, yet it is only in the pictures accompanying Blake’s verse that the reader can observe it. Similarly, ‘experience’ is often shown as a dark forest in which mankind finds himself alone and lost. This image appears in the background of many of Blake’s engravings: it is the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ that separate rational man from the idyllic pastures which came to represent innocence.
While Innocence was published in 1789, it was not until 1794 that its companion Experience was released. Indeed, some literary historians have argued that Blake, when writing Innocence, did not intend for a latter series of antithetical poems to be created.8 Despite being written earlier, Innocence is not rendered irrelevant by its sibling, as it contributes equally to Blake’s vision of the spiritual and to his critique of the corporal world. In effect, it is by having these parallel texts that Blake can respond to the decay in human values. The state of purity and childlike perspectives, discussed in Innocence, establishes Blake’s ideal condition for humanity. Experience was born out of the political troubles – both in England and abroad – which, to Blake, exemplified the struggle of spirit against oppression.
Nonetheless it would be inappropriate to read the two collections in isolation. Blake published both Songs in one volume and the thematic development and harmony between the volumes and individual poems supports an interpretation which treats both Songs as contrasting elements of a single discourse. Similarities between Innocence and Experience are most evident in the titles of the poems, but this resemblance extends also to the subject matter and structure of the verses. Most poems in Innocence have an opposite in Experience. Thus the pastoral paradise of ‘The Lamb’ is juxtaposed with the industrial furnace of ‘The Tyger’ and the holy unity between man and God in ‘The Divine Image’ is offset by man’s malice in ‘The Human Abstract’. Blake’s poems can be analyzed as a response to a collapse in human innocence – his maxim ‘every thing that lives is holy’ challenging the status quo enforced by those who would ‘[bind] with briars … joys & desires’. Blake’s innocence was once possessed by all, when man and God were united in a common ‘divine image’. All souls in this state of innocence were ‘white’ – filled with the light divine. Now, however, the new-born babe has innocence swiftly stolen by the repressions of an age where children were damned to work as chimney sweeps or to morals founded on pronouncements of ‘Thou shalt not’.
Songs of Experience is an account of man’s cruelty and shrewd rationality, manifested in humanity’s current condition. It does not seek simply to damn humanity, however, as Blake creates a spiritual essence – the ‘Bard’ – which guides individuals towards paradise. The bard calls to Earth and fallen man to walk again ‘among the ancient trees’, an allusion to the unity that existed between God and human in the Garden of Eden. Earth, however, finds itself unable to restore divine unity alone as ‘Starry Jealousy’ has ‘Prison’d [it] on watry shore’. Throughout Blake’s poetry stars and mills come to represent Newtonian – in other words rational – thought, while water is used to symbolize chaos. Since its fall, humanity has been stumbling through a dark forest, Blake’s image for misguided materialism, and is held back from Eden by blind reason. It remains to humankind to liberate their souls and rejoin God in paradise. This will not occur, Blake states, so long as man ‘builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite’.
Expressed throughout Blake’s poetry is a theme of unity with the divine. ‘The Divine Image’ speaks of ‘Mercy Pity Peace and Love’ as the forces which bind man with God. At our best, argues Blake, ‘Mercy has a human heart’, while Pity is revealed in the human face. These ‘virtues of delight’, however, have become corrupted by false religions and oppressors of the soul. This decay is expressed in ‘The Human Abstract’ where the unifying forces of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love have become tools of repression – wielded by hypocritical priests and moralists. Building upon a theme developed in ‘The Chimney Sweep’ and ‘Holy Thursday’, Blake contends that ‘Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor’. Like many Londoners, Blake had witnessed the abject poverty and despair suffered by the working classes. Not only was it appalling to see children exploited, but this exploitative labour also separated them from God. Confronted by the misery of babes, Blake saw little of the purportedly ‘rich and fruitful land’ the propertied classes claimed to have created. Blake’s writings in Experience are at once a lament for the lost innocence of children and a rebuke to an industrialist class indifferent to their suffering, a group whose wealth was made from the blood, sweat, toil and tears of impoverished workers. Cut off from the divine spirit, the ‘sun does never shine’ for the children of England – the sun a recurring symbol of divine love. >> To Read The Full Answer, Click to the Source Link Bellow >>
