Page 12 - GALIET THE HOLY WORD: Blake IV++

There is an exquisite synaesthetic fusion in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience’s fifty-four plates and poems. Their symbolic cosmologies, the riddle of becoming, sing to the “two contrary states of the human soul:” the innocent, pastoral landscape of childhood and its opposite, the corrupt, urban bustle of experience: adulthood. Their complex duality affirms Blake’s Mytho-poetic truth: contradictions and polarities are necessary to existence. Innocence and experience, the pure, the impure, are fearful symmetries mirroring heaven and hell in their tensions of light, of dark 3⁄4 these, forever, intricately wedded.
Engraved before the French Revolution’s outbreak in 1789, the pastoral images in Songs of Innocence 3⁄4 exuberant and adorant, yet never devoid of desolation and fear4 3⁄4 sojourn in lyricism’s spirit. When hopes for liberal reform quake, they joyously sing to childhood’s fairytale bliss, the forest’s windy hiss, its splashing stream, and all things beyond convention’s seams amidst nature’s verdant kiss. Its counterpart, Songs of Experience 3⁄4 bleak and stark 3⁄4 appears in 1794 in the midst of Robespierre’s tyrannical Reign of Dark. Tyranny and the
4 Although in his Songs of Innocence, Blake leads us to understand that he is indeed writing happy songs “every child may joy to hear”4, these songs do not seem to depict an all-too-innocent and joyous world. Instead, and perhaps in line with the etymology of “innocent” (from the Latin “nocere”) meaning “to injure, to harm”4, they swell in subterfuges of sorrow and melancholy: that intense fear of abandonment children suffer as in “father, father, where are you going...speak father, speak...or else I shall be lost” (The Little Boy Lost).
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. London: Tate Publishing, 1992.
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