Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of illustrated poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases: a few first copies were printed and illuminated by 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 Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Blake was also a painter before the creation of Songs of Innocence and Experience and had painted such subjects as Oberon Titania and Puck dancing with fairies.Innocence and Experience are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of Paradise and Fall. Often interpretations of this collection centre around a mythical dualism where Innocence represents the unfallen world and Experience represents the fallen world.[2] Blake categorizes our 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.