Concepts: of Songs of Innocence and Experience

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      Introduction: Human nature is basically dual and without this duality it is a nonentity. We may consider the duality as consisting of two opposing emotions or temperaments such as kindness and hatred, love and contempt, mercy and cruelty or peace and war. These passions are dwelling side by side in the human heart. In our childhood, we display the affirmative ones and in our grown-up stage the other set - negative elements - predominates our nature. The childhood of man is thus termed in Blake as the period of 'Innocence' and the maturity one achieves in his later years in what Blake denotes by the phrase Experience.

William Blake

      Concept of Innocence: "Heaven lies about us in our infancy" according to Wordsworth. The freedom to play and sport is a prerogative of childhood. At that stage, the child espied God's hands in every object of nature and rejoices exuberantly. No speck of sorrow or sadness is felt by the child. It is imperative that a child's limitless vistas of imagination are left free for the child to enjoy. He is to be provided security and protection so that nothing may endanger his tree play or imagination.

      Illusions of Experience: But, unfortunately enough, this world is not a fit place for a child to be born because earth spreads a mesh of 'briars' for the children. Though the child may remain unaffected by the worldly vices in his childhood, as he grows older. he undergoes a slow process of change. He loses his power of imagination, the power of seeing God's splendour in nature, and this transformation is complete when he acquires the stage of a grown-up man. Instead of his innocence he imbibes experience. He experiences the wordliness that engenders new traits in him. In this newly acquired state, he becomes one among the many who have forged him into what he is now. He looks with suspicion at the innocent mingling of children, he rejects the love and passions and emotions whereas in his childhood he had given in to them instantaneously. No longer is there a divinity felt in such passions. Only the super-sensitive people sense this agony of growing older. What welcomes him in this new world of Experience is the 'Tree of Mystery' and 'A Divine Image'. This is precisely what Blake delineates in the second section, namely The Songs of Experience.

      Innocence and Experience in the 'Songs': Songs of Innocence start from the spiritual inspiration the poet derives from the "child on a cloud". His artistic revelation takes place in the valley and the poet continues to sing of Innocence. The Introduction is a typical poem that foretells the nature of the poems that follow:

"Pipe a song about a Lamb!"

So I piped with merry cheer

Piper, pipe that song again.

So l piped, he wept to hear.

      The stress on the innocence and spiritual element in the line, "Piper, pipe that song again", displays the essence of the section 'Innocence.' Since the tears are of joy, they also denote the sublime aesthetic or excellent artistic experience. The simplicity of the heart or the softness of the whole of Songs of Innocence gives to it the hue of pastoral beauty and loveliness.

      But in the 'Introduction' to Songs of Experience we are presented not with a simple seting or a poet of aesthetic sensitivity. There the Bard incorporates intellectual, cosmic and metaphysical powers. In Songs of Innocence, the valley provides a spiritual exaltation, but in Songs of Experience, what we see is the unpleasing sight of fallen Earth; in Innocence, the poet is a piper whereas in Experience he is a prophet. It is natural that the piper's point of view is prevailingly happy, he is conscious of the child's essential divinity and assured of his present protection. But into that joyful context the elements of experience constantly insinuate themselves so that the note of sorrow is never completely absent from the piper's pipe. On the other hand, the bird's voice is solemn and more resonant, for the high-pitched joy of innocence is now only a memory. One singer uses "mind and gentle numbers" and the other more "terrific tones".

      Striking and vivid is the contrast between the lamb and the tiger. The abode of the lamb is the pastoral setting, the abode of the tiger is the forest of experience. The lamb symbolises the soft aspects of life. The tiger is the symbol of energy and vigour, the lamb is meek and domestic. The milky fleece, after all, is another contrast to the sturdy sinew and the fiery stripes of the tiger. The beauty of the lamb is mild whereas the tiger has a 'terrible beauty.'

      There are two poems on titled 'Nurse's Song,' one cach in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. In the first of these, the nurse is generous and gladly allows the children to play more and the children leap about and laugh merrily. In the second, the face of the nurse turns green and pale, she thinks play to be a mere whiling away of time, she speaks of the dews of night, which will soon arise and also apprehends the advent of mature years of the children as a period of shame and deceit. The voice that echoes in this poem is not that of zest and love but of sour age to which play and sport are unsavoury experiences. No child's voice is heard in the latter 'Nurse's Song.' Experience, after all, thwarts free life and growth of the faculty of imagination and gives a mortal blow to the vibrant human spirit pulsating with life and vigour.

      Another set of antithetical poems is 'Infant Joy' and Infant Sorrow. The child of 'Infant Sorrow' is hardly angelic. It leaps into this world and at the very moment of its birth, it involves a spirit of unrest. It weeps, not out of joy or pleasure, but out of disgust, it is an added burden to its parents who weep at the delivery of the child. It feels the world to be a prison cell and itself a prisoner. It struggles hard to liberate itself from the knot of the swaddling clothes, but at last leaves the attempt seeing it as a vain effort.

      Another pair of poems forming a contrary relationship is 'The Divine Image' and 'A divine Image' or 'The Human Abstract.' ln the poem in Songs of Innocence, man embodies unremembered acts of kindness and love or say, mercy, pity, peace and love. Such a man himself is God. However, in the poems in Songs of Experience mercy and pity are cynically pictured as the virtues (or vices?) Promoting poverty and misery. Without poverty there is no chance for pity to be exercised and peace is nothing but a truce, a pretence of knaves to get rid of enemies. God enforces and pours evil and vices upon man because without them man may not remember God. If man does not remember God, there is no God. If everybody is happy, God disappears from the world.

To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love

All pray in their distress.

      We note the word distress - the condition necessary for men to pray to God. Hence we note that the outlook of the experienced man is already given expression, though in a distant echo of paradox in Songs of Innocence itself.

      Considering the sections of 'Innocence' and 'Experience' as two different entities, for the convenience of contrasting them, we may note some general elements of contrast which govern the two sections. Thus, in the Songs of Experience, Blake's mood is one of disillusionment. In the place of innocence, gaiety and security. Blake discovers hypocrisy, guilt, sorrow and tyranny in the world or experience. The guardian angels of 'Innocence' are evacuated and in their place rule tyrants - fearful deities like Urizen or "Starry Jealousy". This tyrant manifests himself in myriad concrete forms as the clergy, king, envious parents and nurse - and in abstractions such as jealousy, cruelty and terror.

      Conclusion: That Blake was a progressive thinker, is evident from his Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Years before the modern world learned and reacted against the repression of human instincts, Blake had conceived of such ideas. Long before Freud. Jung, and Adler. Blake had given the human psyche serious study. He was daringly revolutionary, boldly unconcerned at incurring the wrath of the mighty religious institutions of his period, and modern in his approach towards the fundamentals of man's life. He gave voice to hitherto unexpressed ideas and rediscovered a set of values that must be acknowledged by religion if religion is to be intelligible and coherent.