Page 267 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 26: William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience

CONTENTS
Objectives

Introduction
26.1 Introduction to the Author

26.2 William Blake: Songs of Innocence

26.2.1 The Lamb
26.2.2 The Little Black Boy

26.3 William Blake: Songs of Experience
26.3.1 A Poison Tree

26.3.2 The Tyger

26.3.3 The Sick Rose
26.4 Summary

26.5 Keywords
26.6 Review Questions

26.7 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
• Explain the biography of William Blake
• Discuss briefly the analysis, summary and commentary of songs of Innocence and songs of
Experience.

Introduction

Songs of Innocence and Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared
in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William 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 Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. “Innocence” and “Experience”
are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton’s existential-mythic states of “Paradise” and
the “Fall.” Blake’s categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology
that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a time and a state of protected “innocence,”
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

260 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY