Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience
By William Blake
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
"Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall." Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a state of protected innocence rather than original sin, but not immune to the fallen world and its institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes known through "experience," a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and inhibition, by social and political corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church, State, and the ruling classes. The volume's "Contrary States" are sometimes signalled by patently repeated or contrasted titles: in Innocence, Infant Joy, in Experience, Infant Sorrow; in Innocence, The Lamb, in Experience, The Fly and The Tyger. The stark simplicity of poems such as The Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black Boy display Blake's acute sensibility to the realities of poverty and exploitation that accompanied the "Dark Satanic Mills" of the Industrial Revolution.
CONTENTS
SONGS OF INNOCENCE
- Introduction
- The Shepherd
- The Echoing Green
- The Lamb
- The Little Black Boy
- The Blossom
- The Chimney-Sweeper
- The Little Boy Lost
- The Little Boy Found
- Laughing Song
- A Cradle Song
- The Divine Image
- Holy Thursday
- Night
- Spring
- Nurse's Song
- Infant Joy
- A Dream
- On Another's Sorrow
SONGS OF EXPERIENCE
- Introduction
- Earth's Answer
- The Clod and the Pebble
- Holy Thursday
- The Little Girl Lost
- The Little Girl Found
- The Chimney-Sweeper
- Nurse's Song
- The Sick Rose
- The Fly
- The Angel
- The Tiger
- My Pretty Rose Tree
- Ah, Sunflower
- The Lily
- The Garden of Love
- The Little Vagabond
- London
- The Human Abstract
- Infant Sorrow
- A Poison Tree
- A Little Boy Lost
- A Little Girl Lost
- A Divine Image
- A Cradle Song
- The Schoolboy
- To Tirzah
- The Voice of the Ancient Bard