Themes and related poems in the Songs of Innocence and Experience

Throughout the poem commentaries recurring themes have been highlighted. This section indicates those poems which show each theme worked out through a range of perspectives.

The list of relevant poems after each theme is not exhaustive and you may trace the ideas in other texts.

How the human mind sees the nature of the world and its creator

According to Blake, ‘contraries' are facts about the world and about the nature of the creative force behind it. For example, ferocious power and energy exist alongside what is fragile and tender. Humans falsify their understanding of the creator and of the human beings made ‘in his image' when one of these dimensions is excluded from the picture. This creates unnecessary questions and produces unhealthy splits between what are understood as forces of good and forces of evil.

According to the Bible, Heaven and Hell impinge on human experience. Thus, the powerful energies within the world and the energies and instincts within human beings are necessary and beautiful. They become destructive when they are either denied or seen as the sole factor in life and experience. Blake's sub-theme is that vision based wholly on experience is as incomplete as the inadequacy of ignorant innocence.

See, for example:

The Lamb
The Tyger
The Divine Image
Night
On Another's Sorrow
Introduction (E)
The Human Abstract
The Clod and the Pebble
The Little Vagabond
Infant Sorrow
A Divine Image

God in man's image

Blake disagreed with the creation of the image of an external God-figure, as simply being a projection of human needs and attitudes. Blake felt that merely human understanding created a limiting vision of the creator, simply as a projection of its own human qualities:

  • Those who see only gentleness and tenderness in nature and in themselves, produce an image of a creator who is mild and gentle but lacks energy and power
  • Those who have fallen into divided selfhood see the creator only in terms of their own capacity for jealousy, cruelty and possessiveness. They create an image of God as a tyrannical ruler and must be appeased
  • An innocent child can imagine only a tender, gentle creator because this is all he himself knows.

See, for example:

The Lamb
The Little Boy Found
A Cradle Song
Earth's Answer
The Fly
The Tyger
The Divine Image
The Human Abstract
The Clod and the Pebble
A Divine Image
The Chimney Sweeper (E)
To Tirzah

The child motif

Jesus with childrenOn account of their playfulness and freshness, Blake saw children as symbols of the imagination and artistic creativity. He also used them as an image of innocence and gentleness. The child motif emphasises the suggestions of simplicity and lack of sophistication. In the New Testament, Jesus says that the kingdom of God belongs to those who become like little children in their innocence and humility.

Much of the moralistic teaching of Blake's day stressed the infant and boy Jesus as a figure with whom children could identify. However, the Gospel accounts of Jesus' birth and childhood include experience of human violence and so emphasise the vulnerability of the child:

  • The Jewish ruler, King Herod wanted to kill the newborn child and ordered all boys under two to be slaughtered (Matthew 2:16-18). The child's parents had to flee with him to Egypt to keep him safe
  • Later, Jesus is acclaimed by an elderly prophet, Simeon, as one who will bring about the fall and rise of many (Luke 2:34-35).

Like the lamb, the child represents gentleness and innocence, together with vulnerability and openness to exploitation.

See, for example:

The Lamb
The Little Black Boy
The Little Boy Lost / The Little Boy Found
The Chimney Sweeper (I)
Infant Sorrow

The perception of children

  • Is the child born free and good, as Rousseau believed, or born sinful, as the Calvinist Christians believed?
  • Or is this opposition the result of [3fallen human beings' inability to recognise that the capacities for good and evil both belong to humanity?

Blake's idea that a young child can clearly see God echoes the Romantic sensibility articulated by Wordsworth, that children had an existence in heaven before the commencement of their earthly life. See The world of the Romantics > Making sense of the intangible world > Seventeenth and eighteenth attitudes to childhood.

Portrait of childrenBlake saw the natural child as an image of the creative imagination which is the human being's spiritual core. He was concerned about the way in which social institutions such as the school system and parental authority crushed the capacity for imaginative vision. The child's capacity for happiness and play are expressions of this imagination. Any restraint can feel like an attempt to stifle creativity. This is the dilemma of the child who is necessarily subject to the parent's care.

See, for example:

The Ecchoing Green
Infant Joy
A Cradle Song
Nurse's Song (E)
Infant Sorrow
A Little Boy Lost (E)
The Schoolboy

The nature and vulnerability of innocence

Innocence is frequently presented as freedom from constraint and self-consciousness. The innocent are full of trust in their world – both natural and human. The fragility of this state is also an aspect of this theme. Since it is, by its nature, unaware, innocence makes itself vulnerable to injustice and exploitation.

For Blake, innocence was insufficient if it was also ignorant of the realities of the fallen world. Innocence is especially endangered when it is ignorant of the ‘woe' in life and of the possibility of failure and betrayal.

See, for example:

Introduction (I)
The Ecchoing Green
The Lamb
The Little Black Boy
The Blossom
The Little Boy Lost / The Little Boy Found
Laughing Song
Night
Spring
A Dream
London
The Chimney Sweeper (E)
Holy Thursday (E)
A Little Girl Lost

The distortion of Christian belief about the future life

Blake attacks the approach of some forms of contemporary Christianity. This taught people to accept present suffering and injustice because of the promise of bliss and the absence of all suffering in the next world. Although this was a consistent teaching of the New Testament, Blake condemned it as the perspective of the ‘fallen' person. He felt it was used to encourage the denial of sexuality and other powers, which leads to permanent failure to attain human fulfilment.

See, for example:

The Chimney Sweeper (I & E)
Holy Thursday (E)
The Little Black Boy
Ah! Sun-flower
The Garden of Love
The Little Vagabond
The Voice of the Ancient Bard

The distortion of Christian belief that makes it a means of controlling people's behaviour

Blake opposed the way in which he felt the Church condoned the established social order without questioning it. Christian teaching about respecting authority led to the sense that being ‘good' meant accepting the status quo as though it had been designed by God to be that way. It is represented by a verse from a 19th century hymn:

The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate.
Mrs C.F.Alexander

Blake felt such a view was contradicted by the care for the poor and stance against injustice demonstrated by Jesus and the early church.

See, for example:

The Chimney Sweeper (I & E)
Holy Thursday (I & E)
London

Parental care and authority

Parents and childrenIn Blake's work, parents and others in a position of care are often perceived as inhibiting and repressing their children. Their own fears and shame are communicated to the next generation through the desire to ‘protect' children from their desires and their sexuality. According to Blake, parents misuse ‘care' to repress children and bind them to themselves, rather than setting the children free by rejoicing in, and safeguarding, their capacity for play and imagination.

See, for example:

The Ecchoing Green
Nurse's song (I & E)
The Shepherd
The Chimney Sweeper (I & E)
The Little Boy Lost (I)
A Cradle Song
A Dream
On Another's Sorrow
The Little Girl Lost / The Little Girl Found
Nurse's Song (E)
The Little Vagabond
Infant Sorrow
A Little Boy Lost (E)
A Little Girl Lost
To Tirzah
The Schoolboy

Attitudes to the body and the life of the senses

This connects with Blake's opposition to John Locke. (See Religious / philosophical background > Blake's religious world > Dissenting attitudes to Locke.) Blake believed that humans are essentially spiritual beings and that the body should be an expression of a person's spiritual nature. Yet he felt that people did not believe this. They believe that their bodies are purely physical and that reality consists solely in what can be understood via the senses. In this way, their senses trap them in a materialist approach to life and they are unable to experience themselves, including their bodies, as spiritual beings.

See, for example:

The Chimney Sweeper (I & E)
Earth's Answer
To Tirzah
The Voice of the Ancient Bard

The effects of ‘fallenness' on repression of sexuality and other emotions

Blake believed that inhibitions lie primarily within the mind, rather than in external factors. Society makes its fears, guilt and shame into rules and laws which are then enshrined in social institutions such as the authority of parents, the Church and the State or Monarchy.

See, for example:

The Little Girl Lost / The Little Girl Found
The Sick Rose
The Angel
Ah! Sun-flower
The Garden of Love
London
The Human Abstract
A Little Boy Lost (E)
A Little Girl Lost
The Voice of the Ancient Bard

The effects of the Fall

Human relationships are affected by the Fall of humankind. According to Blake, fallen, divided selfhood sees itself at the centre of its world, as something to be protected and defended. Its pleasures must be jealously defended and denied to others. One chief pleasure is exerting control over others, which can often masquerade as showing protective love.

See, for example:

Nurse's song (I & E)
The Human Abstract
The Sick Rose
My Pretty Rose Tree
The Angel
The Lilly
A Poison Tree
A Divine Image

Snares, confinement

Images of confinement abound in the Songs. Blake the revolutionary opposed the coercive strictures of the ‘Establishment' – the state, organised religion etc. – which sought to quantify and rule all aspects of human behaviour. He also opposed conventional morality when it confined the natural instincts of humanity. In A Poison Tree, Blake opposes the conventional idea that anger should not be expressed, and illustrates the distorting effect the practice of this idea has on the human soul. The resulting perverted outlook then creates snares for others (seen also in The Human Abstract).

However, he also saw that the human spirit was frequently the author of its own imprisonment, creating its own ‘mind-forg'd manacles'. It was because fallen humankind could no longer see truly that Blake the visionary needed to illustrate what he perceived as the truth about the creation and humanity's role within it.

See, for example:

The Chimney Sweeper (I & E)
Earth's Answer
A Poison Tree
My Pretty Rose-tree
Ah! Sun-flower
The Garden of Love
London
A Little Boy Lost (E)
To Tirzah
The Schoolboy

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