Revolutionary Aspects in Songs of Innocence and Experience

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Blake a Revolutionary Romantic :

      It is a popular and widely known fact that Blake forged his creation in the years immediately preceding the Age of Romantic poets. Like the Romantics, Blake viewed the Augustine period as an interruption or break in the normal native literary tradition of England. Like almost all the other eminent poets of the Romantic period (Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron being the most popular among them) Blake was a poet with a revolutionary zest.

William Blake

Blake's Political Outlook :

      In Blake's political outlook, one finds a radicalism of a common English type, which includes a strong individual or personal protest against institutional laws and rules. Blake was brought up in the centre of English social resistance, the city of London, in the period of Wilkes and the Gordon riots. His sympathy first with the American and then with the French Revolution placed him as far to the left as he could go and still continue to function as an artist. Yet his denunciation of what he called the 'Deism' of the French revolutionaries, and of the ideology of Voltaire and Rousseau, is nearly as strong as Burke's. At the same time his poems point directly at the English society of his time: even his most complex prophecies have a great deal in common with Charles Dickens.

Artistic Rebel against Social Institution :

      In breaking with all forms of social organization, however, "Blake is merely following the logic of art itself, whose myths and visions are at once the cause and the clarified form of social developments. Every society is the embodiment of myth, and as the artist is the shaper of myth, there is a sense in which he holds in his hand the thunderbolts that destroy one society and create another", says Northrop Frye. Being an artist. Blake's ways of fighting against the social vices is through the media of art. Blake has hardly set forth any kind of 'utopian' concept of society; his concept of society merely stresses on human liberty and freedom. This point of view can be reasonably justified with the help of some of the poems from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In 'London' we get a vivid and pungent picturisation of 18th century London. The cries of London are cries of misery. Its roads and river are chartered - indicating the tyranny that rules over the people. Its children are pathetic, its citizens victims of oppression by State or Church. A society has been created in which corruption has become so deep-rooted that marriage is without love and harlots curses lie heavily on the new born children. In 'The School Boy', we get a milder attack on the institution of education. Schooling, as Blake sees it, thwarts the child's natural impulses and binds him to rigid unimaginative discipline.

Prophetic Visions Springing from Realism :

      Blake is first and foremost a poet of visions and mysticism. But his visions are not confined to a narrow streamline of thought about futurity alone; they take the present into consideration and unfold those aspects of contemporary society detrimental to free growth of the mental powers of man. He ridicules the artificial ethos of religion that professes a complete negation of man's sensual life and vehemently argues for a more complete life which combines the senses and the spirit. He probes beneath the surface of things and exposes the roots of social vices, the hidden sores and scars of a tradition-bound society.

Blake Highlights Infantile Miseries :

      During the period of industrial growth in England children used to undergo the worst suffering. The poor people as a whole suffered. There was no healthy atmosphere in the factories most of which had not even proper ventilation. The workers were paid low wages and lett to suffer bad health and gradual loss of strength; this led to more poverty. At this juncture of affairs Blake was one among a few that fought to set the things right by highlighting the misery of the sufferers-especially the children.

      'The Little Black Boy' of Songs of Innocence speaks out against racial discrimination. The Society for the Eradication of the Slave Trade was established in 1787 and many artists, writers and social reformers took part in this campaign against slavery. Blake however attacks the very concept of racial and religious superiority. The little boy laments the black colour of his skin which makes him ignoble in the eyes of the white angelic English boy. But he learns from his mother that the skin is a cloud and it is the soul of man that counts. This comforts him and he figures out his advantage over the white boy before the brilliant radiance of God. There he can protect the white boy, who is unused to such brilliance.

      In the poem 'Holy Thursday' (in Songs of Innocence) the charity school children are brought to the annual service at St. Paul's on the first Thursday in May. The month of May brings out fresh flowers all over the countryside but here the lowers are the flowers of London town marching in a colourful pageantry of red, blue and green. They are forced to walk in line, and they follow the hydraheaded beadle's walking with wands as white as snow. All the dazzling colour and beauty is neutralised by the grey and white which, in a way, indicates death. Inside the church the children sit and sing their prayers. The sound reverberates among the seats of heaven like harmonious thundering. Now comes the mortal blow of the poet directed towards the arrogant administrators of the charity school. They - the wise guardians of the poor - sit beneath the children. Thus they are shown to be inferior beings. They are pitiless at heart and it is to us that the poet addresses the request to show pity on the children who are the angels of earth.

      In this poem the poet is not so angry as he appears, in the poem of the same title in Songs of Experience, but the irony is present. The poem The Chimney-Sweeper (Songs of Innocence) conveys to us an indictment of a society which throws the children into physical and spiritual slavery. They are promised heaven hereafter as a reward for meek and silent suffering on earth. Its conclusion in favour of 'duty' is acutely ironic. The poet touchingly delineates the infancy of a chimney-sweep in this poem:

When my mother died I was very young

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry, weep, weep, weep, weep.

So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

      The dream that occurs to Tom, one of the chimney-sweepers, shows his unlimited desire for liberty and freedom from the irksome tunnels of chimneys. But when he wakes up from the dream grim reality engulfs him and his friends, the reality that they are yet in the dark and have to go with their bags and brushes to work. But there is a change in mood, the change caused by the dream he saw the preceding night for we see that:

Thou' the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm.

      When we move to its counterpart in Songs of Experience, there is no angelic vision or note of hope. What startles as well as melts the reader's heart is the realistic conclusion of the sweeper who says:

And because I am happy, and dance and sing,

They think they have done me no injury

And are gone to praise God and His Priest and King

Who make up a Heaven of our misery.

      The poet's indignation against the parents dereliction of duly, their lack of love and affection and hollow practice of ritual finds striking expression in the poem. The style and tone of the poem 'Holy Thursday' in Songs of Experience is different. Here the poet's words are hurled straight out, at the face of the society, poet seems to be too impatient to stand the indifference of the society and so he says:

And their sun does never shine.

And their fields are bleak and bare.

And their ways are filled with thorns:

It is eternal winter there.

Blake's Revolutionary Concept of Religion :

      Blake is also revolutionary in his view of religion. The poet rejects the conventional codes of orthodox Christianity which denies freedom to the sensual aspect of life. But Blake blends the Rose and 'Cross' and the result is a new fragrant odour of happy life in which both the spiritual side and the sensual side of man's life is equally poised, stressed and intermingled for the ultimate perfection or salvation of human soul. In many poems we get a clear attack on the oppression caused by the "mind-forged" manacles of religion. 'The Garden of Love', 'A Little Girl Lost', 'The Human Abstract', 'A Divine Image', 'A Little Boy Lost' are some of Blake's most powerful poems showing his revolutionary view of religion.

Conclusion :

      Blake rebelled against the hollowness of the concepts that society accepted as the ultimate truth. He voiced his revulsion for hypocrisy and senseless ritual by creating his symbol of the Poison Tree and a divine image embodying the baseness of man. In words simple and full of feeling he indicts the society founded on loveless relationships, guilt and oppression.