William Blake-Life and Works

1
William Blake
William Blake—Life and Works
I. LIFE
The Family
William Blake, mystic, poet, and artist, was born in London on November 28, 1757. His father
was a hosier, living at 28, Broad Street, Golden Square. The family consisted of four sons and a
daughter, William being the second son, and the only one to achieve distinction. The eldest,
James, succeeded his father in the hosiery business. The third, John, died young after leading a
dissolute life. The youngest, Robert, who showed considerable capabilities as an artist, was greatly
loved by William, and was nursed by him through the illness of which he died at the age of 21.
Another boy, Richard, died in infancy.
Early Training and Poetical Attempts

William showed his artistic tastes at an early age. At the age of ten he was sent to a drawing
school in the Strand. At fifteen he was apprenticed to an engraver. He also made drawings of the
monuments in Westminster Abbey. He was greatly influenced by the Gothic style. His creative
faculty found an outlet in the early years in poetry, some of which has survived in the thin volume
of Poetical Sketches, printed for him by his friends in 1783. These pieces were composed between
his 12th and 20th years.
As a Professional Engraver
In 1779 Blake set out to earn his living as a professional engraver. He did a lot of work in this
line for the booksellers and publishers. During the next twenty years or so he supported himself
largely by this means.
Marriage
In 1781 Blake met Catherine Boucher, the illiterate daughter of a market-gardener, and
married her in August, 1782. She made a perfect wife for him. She learned to draw and paint well
enough to be able to help him in his work. She remained childless, and survived him by four years,
dying in 1831.
A New Method of Printing
During the years 1783-87 Blake met a number of distinguished persons, but this society soon
disgusted him, and he ridiculed it in a satire known as An Island in the Moonwritten in 1785. In
1788 he began to experiment with a new method of printing from etched copper-plates. It is
related that the secret of this process was revealed to him in a vision by the spirit of his brother
Robert. The first results of this process were the small dogmatic works: There is No Natural
Religion and All Religions are One. It developed further with the production ofSongs of
Innocence, which consisted of simple lyrical poems etched on copper with decorations coloured
by hand.
The volume was finished in 1789 and was sold for a few shillings. This was the prelude to the
remarkable series of books in "illuminated printing" which occupied Blake in some degree for the
rest of his life.
Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

2
Mysticism and Philosophy

Blake was now living in Hercules Road, Lambeth. Here he completed the works entitled The
Book of Thel (1789); The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793); America(1793); Visions of the
Daughters of Albion(1793); Songs of Experience (1794); Europe(1794); Urizen (1794); The Book
of Los (1795);The Book of Ahania (1795); and The Song of Los (1795).
During this period Blake was deeply under the influence of his visionary powers, and
mysticism and philosophy emerged as his dominant interests.
Colour-prints
Blake's output as an artist was considerable. In 1795 he produced his stupendous series of
large colour prints which can scarcely be matched in the whole history of art for imaginative
content and magnificence of colouring. These include "Nebuchadnezzar", "The Elohim Creating
Adam", and "Newton". By 1797 he had completed his series of 537 water-colour designs for
Young's Night Thoughts.
The Problem of Earning a Livelihood
Blake's circle of friends had become a little wider now, and included Thomas Butts. It was
chiefly Butts's patronage which enabled Blake to earn a livelihood while devoting much time and
energy to his symbolical works which never produced any adequate return by their sales. He even
laboured over a long poem, The Four Zoas. It is a poem of the greatest significance for the
understanding of Blake.
Life and Work at Felpham
During the seven years from 1793 to 1800, Blake's creative output was enormous. In 1800,
Blake moved with his wife and sister, from London to Felpham in Sussex in order to work at some
engravings for William Hayley. But three years later he returned to London with a great sense of
relief. At first he had been able to work happily enough at Felpham, but soon he became more and
more irritated by Hayley's patronizing airs and lack of understanding. He also experienced much
spiritual discomfort at Felpham because of the visions that he incessantly saw. He was forced to
lead a double life, submitting on the surface to Hayley's vanities and developing in secret his own
imaginative faculties. The Felpham period was, therefore; a strangely mixed output of second-
rate engravings for Hayley, of fine paintings, and of mystical poetry of great power, which was
mostly embodied in the poem Milton. In January,1804 Blake was tried on a false charge of having
used treasonable words against the King, and was acquitted.
Association with Cromek
In 1805 Blake joined the engraver Cromek in a scheme for the production of a series of
engravings for Robert Blair's The Grave. But here he was again deceived, Cromek paid him a small
sum for the designs, and then employed another man to engrave them. Blake, already embittered
by neglect, felt still more embittered and suffered from fits of depression.
The Failure of His Exhibition
In 1809 Blake held an exhibition of his works at the house of his brother James in Broad
Street, Golden Square. Sixteen pictures were exhibited, including his large painting of Chaucer's
Canterbury pilgrims, and each visitor to the house received for his entrance to the house a copy of
the now celebrated "Descriptive Catalogue". The exhibition attracted very little notice, the only
criticism of it, which appeared in Leigh Hunt's The Examiner being malicious and unfair.

3
Years of Obscurity
During the years that followed, Blake fell into complete obscurity. It is not known for certain
how he earned his living during 1810-17. It has even been suggested that for part of this period he
was confined to a mental hospital. Some of his acquaintances, such as Robert Southey, who visited
him in 1811, did regard him as insane. But his intimate friends were convinced that he was not at
all mad. Throughout this period he was occasionally selling copies of his illuminated books. He
also executed engravings for various employers. He was occupied, too, with the 100 etched plates
of his greatest symbolical poem, Jerusalem.
"Illustrations of the Book of Job"
In 1818, Blake entered upon the last phase of his life, and until his death in 1827 was probably
happier with his friends and in his work than he had been at any other period. He was now able
to obtain more work, and became the centre of a circle of young artists who regarded him with
affection and reverence. In 1821, Blake moved from South Molton Street to 3, Fountain Court,
Strand, and here he executed his most widely known work in creative art, the "Illustrations of the
Book of Job". Though superficially illustrations of the Bible story, the engravings form one of the
most important of Blake's symbolical works. Their mystical content has not prevented the designs
from being the most widely known and generally appreciated of his works.
Illustrations of the "Divine Comedy", and Death
Blake was to make one more great effort in his art. In October, 1825, he was asked to make
illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedyand to engrave them. He completed a hundred water-
colour designs, of which seven were engraved, and he was still at work upon these when he died
on the 12th August, 1827. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Bunhill Fields Cemetery, the
approximate place being now indicated by a tablet placed there.
Blake's Character
Blake suffered from the defects of his qualities. His mind was never systematically cultivated.
His qualities isolated him from his contemporaries and drove his mind upon itself, so that the
interpretation of his message to mankind cannot be made with accuracy. But through all his
mental turmoil and difficulties in dealings with his fellow men he preserved his intellectual
integrity, and he never prostituted his art. Throughout his life he tried to exalt the things of the
mind, and for him the imagination was man's highest faculty. Ceaselessly he fought against
materialism. He was deeply religious, though in no conventional sense. In his later years Christ
became identified in his mind with Art, and this fact provides many clues for the understanding
of his doctrines. But perhaps the most illuminating revelation of his mind for most readers are
the aphorisms and didactic statements which he engraved about the year 1820 around a
representation of the Laocoon group.
Conclusion
Blake was not much understood by his contemporaries. He influenced them as little as he was
influenced by them, and for many years after his death his name was unknown. His first full
biography, written by Alexander Gilchrist, was published in 1863, and was reprinted under the
supervision of D.G. Kossetti in 1880. Since that time his power and originality have gained fuller
recognition, and he now holds a position as one of the greatest figures in English poetry and art.
A bronze bust of him was placed in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey in November, 1957 to
mark the bicentenary of his birth. Many of his pictures are to be seen in the Tate Gallery, London,
and collections of his illuminated books in the British Museum.

4
II
PRINCIPAL POETIC WORKS
"Poetical Sketches" (1783) Tiriel (1789)
”Songs of Innocence" (1789) The Book of Thel (1789-91) Visions of the Daughters of
Albion (1793)
"Songs of Innocence and of Experience, showing the two Contrary states of the Human Soul",
published in one volume (1794)
America, A Prophecy (1794), Europe, A Prophecy (1794), The Book of Urizen (1794),The
Song of Los, (1795) The Book of Ahania(1795), Vala or The Four Zoas (1796-1807),Milton (1804-
1815), Jerusalem (1804-1820)
An important work of Blake is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written in prose.
William Blake, the Theorist

"Poetry fettered", said Blake, "fetters the human race; nations are destroyed or flourish in
proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish."
Condemned Traditional Verse-forms

In theory as well as practice, the Romantic Movement began with the smashing of fetters. In
his enthusiastic rage, Blake condemned the verse forms which had become traditional. In the
preface toJerusalem he says: "I have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and
number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific
numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, and the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts,
and the prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other."
Opposed to Neo-classical Doctrines
Blake poured scorn upon all that he associated with classicism in art and in criticism. In the
preface to Milton, he says: "We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and
true to our own Imaginations." In his comments on Homer and Virgil, he says: "It is the Classics,
and not Goths nor Monks that desolate Europe with wars." The whole critical vocabulary of neo-
classical criticism had evidently disgusted him. He cannot endure it. In his favourite Scriptural
language, he declares: "Israel delivered from Egypt is Art delivered from Nature and Imitation."
He is irritated by any doctrine that has been handed down in the name of Aristotle. He says, for
instance: "Unity is the cloak of folly", and "Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with character."
Opposed to the Divorce of Imagination from Reason
Blake reacted strongly against conventional thought and customary morality, against blind
laws which extinguish individuality, energy, and spiritual delight. The great tragedy for him was
the parting of Reason and Imagination. "The Reasoning Power", divorced from the Imagination,
was:
An abstract objecting power that negatives everything. This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy
Reasoning Power, And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation.

5
Believer in Natural Energy

Blake wanted to sweep the hurdles out of the way and release man's natural energy. "Energy
is eternal delight", he said. He tried to make his "furnaces roar" in order that "Enthusiasm and
life may not cease". Art for him was not a side-issue. It was not a vehicle of formal instruction. It
was something that should "move" man in the fullest sense of the term. It was a vision of
fundamental living realities, as perceived not by the Reason, but by the eyes of the mind. He
denied the validity of ideas imposed by custom. He declared that his vision was a vision of truth.
Some of His Noteworthy Utterances
Some of Blake's utterances deserve special attention. For instance: "He who sees the Infinite
in all things, sees God." "Christianity is Art." "Human Imagination is the Divine vision and
Fruition." "I come in self-annihilation and the grandeur of Inspiration to cast aside from Poetry
all that is not Inspiration." Here is something from his Milton:
These are the destroyers of Jerusalem.....
Who pretend to Poetry that they may destroy Imagination By imitation of Nature's images
drawn from Remembrance.
Inspiration
According to Blake, no formal rules or external literary laws have any authority. The artist
must look within himself. Of many of his poems he said that they were "dictated" to him by spirits.
In this most literal sense he held that "inspiration" could come to the aid of a poet. When he was
inspired he made use of his Imagination or the Divine Vision. Energy and delight accompany this
expression of the Divine Vision.
The Poet's Aim is to Reveal
Blake holds that the aim of the poet is not to please or to offer rational instruction, but to
reveal: to reveal what is given to him as true. This means two things in Blake's actual practice. It
means that he presents through the sensible forms of art that which his "mind's eye" sees—a world
of reality, not as it can be judged by the reason, but apprehended in imaginative experience. This
is very different from trying to express in art an explicit account of a system of the universe. When
the poet attempts the latter task, he is confusing the task of the artist with the task of the
philosopher or theologian. And this, Blake often does. When he gives way to his impulse to
expound, he portrays knowledge, not Art. Then he regards Art not as an expression of the
individual, but as the representation of eternal truth.
Not the Method of Logic
But when Blake ceases to expound, to argue, to prove, to persuade, and is content to show us
his world, to reveal that in experience which is significant to him, then he is functioning as a poet.
It does not matter if the portrayal of his imaginative world lends itself to interpretation in the
logical terms of a metaphysical or mystical system. A work of art may stimulate logical judgments,
but its own method is never that of logic.
Blake the Artist Versus Blake the Poet
And here, precisely, Blake's theory is better than his poetical practice. He asserts that art
depends upon vision, perceptions, and the feeling of energy accompanying it, and not upon
ratiocination. Painting and engraving did not offer the same temptation to wander from the path.
Thus whilst his poetry is marred by the mystic's practice of mingling imagery and dogmatism, his

6
painting and engraving more consistently reveal his true artistic genius. There, the artist is seldom
confounded with the prophet and preacher.
William Blake as a Thinker

I
Blake's Christian Polytheism
Blake's pantheon, renamed and given the modern dress of his time and nation, is native not
only in Blake's imagination, but in those of his countrymen and contemporaries, down to this day.
He restored to the English nation a long-lacked pantheon, those gods whom he saw at their
immortal tasks in South Moulton Street, Lambeth, Battersea, and Hampstead, in Wordsworth's
Lake District, and on "Snowdon sublime".
It maybe said that all imaginative poets are polytheists insofar as they personify those energies
of the soul which antiquity named gods. The imaginative polytheism of Shelley and Keats is
explicit, of Milton and Spenser and Coleridge, implicit. But Blake is perhaps unique in the
explicit nature of his Christian polytheism. He restored the gods to England, Christianized one
and all.
The Holy Quality of His Visions
Blake combined the imaginative genius of the poet with the symbolic learning of tradition
and the psychological insight of modern mankind. His attitude towards his vision partakes more
of the intellectual truthfulness of the 20th century than of the pious obsurantism of the religion
against which he had so much to say. But the visions retain that holy quality which has at all times
characterized the religious thought of mankind. He stands as a bridge between the institutional
religion of the past and the tendency of the present time to seek the celestial powers within the
soul
His Theory of the Imagination
He admired Law and Wesley, and was himself, as a young man, a follower of Swedenborg. As
an old man his respect for the Catholic religion grew, perhaps through his love of Dante (whose
poem he so sublimely illustrated during the last years of his life). But his religion is of the
indwelling Logos, the imagination. He used synonymously "Jesus, the Imagination", the "Bosom
of God", the "Saviour", and the "Divine Humanity", and declared himself to have been at all times
a "worshipper of Jesus". The imagination is, for Blake as for Coleridge, the divine presence in
man; and his theory of the imagination is thus one that makes him, in the only significant sense,
a religious genius. His spiritual aim was the widening of consciousness and the destruction of the
"Satanic" kingdom of the selfhood or ego.
Views on Morality
To Blake conventional morality seemed almost entirely unrelated to the true nature of man.
Good and evil, as we conceive them, have little meaning in the world of the gods and goddesses,
of the unconscious regions of the psyche, that obey laws unknown to reason and convention. Blake
therefore became, as Swedenborg had never become, the courageous prophet of a new morality,
a "Marriage of Heaven and Hell", of "reason" and "energy", or we might say, of the conscious and
the unconscious halves of man's original wholeness. Legalistic morality is, for Blake, the greatest
of spiritual evils. His Jesus is the Divine Humanity—the potential human Self that lies beyond the
conscious ego and its moral formulations.

7
Imaginative Interpretation of Christianity

Painting, music, and poetry were for Blake man's "three ways of conversing with Paradise".
Jesus and his disciples were for him; "all artists" since they spoke from and to the imagination.
There are many who are prepared to accept Blake's imaginative interpretation of Christianity in
an age when theology has become discredited in the light of reason. Imagination, so he believed,
communicates its wisdom from a deeper source than reason; and the poet, rather than the
theologian, communicates knowledge of holy mysteries.
Regarded as artist, poet, or religions revolutionary, Blake is a figure whose stature is greater
than that of any but the greatest men of genius that England has produced.
II
Biblical Imagery and Rhythms
Some time between 1796 and 1800, the political undertone fades from Blake's poetry and its
mood becomes more and more Christian. About this time, his imagery and his rhythms, for
example in Vala or The Four Zoos, take on the Biblical airs, the visionary warnings, and the
unending swell which mark his later poems.
View of God and of Christ
Blake's later poems have given him the reputation of a Christian hermit who lived remote
from the world and was lost in his own mystic vision. Yet this picture of Blake is not strictly true.
His form of Christianity was heretical, for it identified Christ the Son with all spiritual goodness
and made God the Father a symbol of terror and tyranny. God to Blake personified absolute
authority, and Christ personified the human character; and Blake was on the side of man against
authority, at the end of his life when he called the authority Church and God as much as at the
beginning when he called it State and King. To him all virtue is human virtue, and in his most
religious poems he acknowledges no other Christianity:
The Worship of God is honouring his gifts
In other men and loving the greatest men best, each according To his genius which is the
Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other God than that God who is the intellectual fountain
of Humanity.
This is the unity between the early Blake and the late, the Radical and the heretic, and it joins
the lyric poems, whose meanings seem so much simpler than they are, to the tortuous and smoky
rhetoric of the later prophetic books.
III
Most religions, including Christianity, present more than one possible vision of the Divinity.
One view, the most often given in the "Songs of Experience", is that of a Jehovah-like figure, a
Nobodaddy who controls the universe from a vast distance according to laws which, like the
movements of stars, are fixed and only partly comprehensible. To man, this God's ways seem
tyrannical and unpredictable and, though he is the Father, He is a stern and forbidding one. His
children are ignorant; He regards their ways as evil, and they need the threat of punishment
constantly held over them if they are to be controlled at all. The "Songs of Innocence" present a
very different view of God. He is within the world, caring for it as described in the poemOn
Another’s Sorrow:
He doth give his joy to all
He becomes an infant small

8
He becomes a man of woe

He doth feel the sorrow too.
The speakers in the Songs of Innocence do not look upon our earthly state as sinful—how can
it be sinful, when God has become like us to share in our humanity? The innocent conceive God
as a lamb or as a child because, being without a sense of guilt, they are also without fear of
punishment.
A Brief Survey of William Blake’s Poetry

Saw Spiritual Presences
William Blake, though a poet and a mystic of the most extraordinary genius, had little or no
influence on his generation. The greater part of his message was so obscure, so wild, so
incoherently delivered, that even now, after much study, his commentators have succeeded in
making clear only a portion of what he wrote. He belonged to that type of mind which in
superstitious ages is described as being '"possessed". When a very young child he one day
screamed with fear because, he said, he had seen God put His face to the window. In boyhood he
saw several angels, very bright, standing in a tree by the roadside. In his manhood, the earth and
the air were for him full of spiritual presences, all concerned with his fate or with that of his
friends.
His Visual Imagination

With a metaphysical gift which made it natural for Blake to move in an ideal world, he
combined a visual imagination of abnormal, almost miraculous power, which enabled him to give
bodily form to abstractions, and to summon at any moment before him "armies of angels that
soar, legions of demons that lurk.'' Outwardly he led a regular, quiet, laborious life, all the while
pouring out poems, drawings, and vast "prophetical books" full of shadowy mythologies and
mystical thought-systems which show that his inward life was one of perhaps unparalleled
excitement and adventure.
His Fame as a Poet
Aside from the prophetical works, such as The Book of Thel and The French Revolution, his
fame as a poet rests chiefly on his Poetical Sketches (1783) and on hisSongs of Innocence (1789)
and Songs of Experience (1794). These little volumes contain some of the simplest and sweetest
as well as some of the most powerful short poems in the language. At his best, Blake has a
simplicity as great as Wordsworth's, and a magic which reminds us of Coleridge, combined with
a depth and pregnancy of meaning peculiar to himself. In him the whole transcendental side of
the Romantic Movement was expressed by hint and implication, if not by accomplishment.
Poetical Sketches"
The most admirable of Blake's poems are to be found in his earlier volumes—Poetical
Sketches (1783), Songs of Innocence (1789), and Songs of Experience (1794). These contain
matchless lyrics, which show him as almost entirely apart from the 18th century influence and
conventions. His models—as far as he has any—are the Elizabethans, though, in Poetical
Sketches, there are some pieces of rhythmical, poetic prose, whose inspiration is Macpherson. In
four lyrics on the seasons in this volume he describes Nature symbolically; others of the poems
are ballads; others are dainty little poems which might almost have come from an Elizabethan;

9
while others, again, with their talk of the "more than mortal fire (that) burns in (his) soul", sound
the note of the visionary, a note to grow deeper and deeper later on.
"Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience"
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are companion collections of lyrics, in which
there are many pairs of poems, each in a different mood. In Blake's words they were meant to
show "the two contrary states of the human soul". The tone of the first series is admirably sounded
by the introductory "Piping down the valleys wild". The volume contains such lovely lyrics as The
Lamb, Infant Joy, Cradle Song, andHoly Thursday, recording the happy procession of charity
children to St. Paul's Cathedral, and the picture of The Chimney Sweeper in which little "Tom was
happy and warm". But, in the companion series, the happy-songs are changed. The symbol is no
more the Lamb, "woolly bright", image of Christ, but the Tiger, "burning bright in the forests of
the night"; and Blake asks: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" Holy Thursday is now
viewed in the light of experience, and the procession of the children no longer gives the poet joy;
but he is miserable to see so many poor babes "fed with cold and usurous hand". The
Chimneysweeper, too, is nowseen "clothed in the clothes of death"; and Blake is bitter against
those who go "up to the Church to pray" while the misery of the innocent is around them.
"Auguries of Innocence"
The rest of Blake's poetic work does not have the same appeal. Auguries of Innocence,found
in manuscript, is not great poetry, but it is the expression of his love of all creatures which makes
him hate those who put "a robin redbreast in a cage" or hunt the hare, and of his intense mysticism
in which he sees all the world as symbolical of spiritual verities:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
"Thel"
Thel, in unrhymed rhythmical lines, has much lyrical beauty. Thel, "youngest daughter of the
Seraphim", laments until comforted by the Lily of the Valley, the Cloud, and the Worm.
Prophetic Books
The prophetic books were "dictated" to Blake by spirits. Some have seen a coherent
symbolism in them, but to the ordinary reader they are a non- sensical chaos, broken by flashes
of fine lyric or prose sentences enshrining in condensed expression deeply philosophical thoughts.
There is the well-known lyric in Milton in which concludes thus:
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental strife,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
In the prose work called Marriage of Heaven and Hell we have among the Proverbs of Hell
the following: "He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star." "The road of excess leads

10
to the palace of wisdom". "Exuberance is beauty." Though his oracular sayings are generally hard
to interpret, intense spiritual thinking lies behind them.
The Prophetic Books of William Blake

The Theme
Blake wrote his prophetic books just as the ideas and words came to him. He did not always
go back the next day over what he had written the previous day. So the prophetic books are
constantly in movement and changing: the surface is alive, the thought is never still, and the
symbols are never quite the same. These books, written night after night like a diary, are an
endless commentary on his spiritual and physical life. They are the expressions not of a system or
point of view but of a whole personality; and under their constant changes, the personality and
the subject are always the same. The subject is the distortion of man by the rigid frame of law and
society and the conventional systems; and the triumph is always the liberation of man by his own
energies. The subject is war, tyranny, and poverty; the triumph is human freedom. Under all the
obscure mythology, this is the single theme.
Ore Versus Urizen

The theme is expressed by Blake in two opposing characters. One is the jealous and fearful
God of the Old Testament, oppressive in State and Church, whom Blake calls Urizen. The other is
the perpetually young figure of Christ with the sword, overthrowing the established orders and
bringing danger and liberty in his two hands. Blake first called this character Ore, and later
divided him into two parts. One part is the male hero Los, who has to struggle with his own human
failing as well as against Urizen. The other is Los's more cautious female counterpart Enitharmon,
whose womanly shrinkings and whose tenderness to the natural world must be mastered before
humanity can fulfil itself. And if men and women do not fulfil themselves, if they shirk experience,
they are dead in spirit. This is already the theme of the early work, The Book of Thel.
Blake's Fear of the Industrial Revolution
These figures and beliefs in Blake grew out of his own experience. Los works at a forge and
Enitharmon at a loom. They take their craft from the Industrial Revolution. Blake saw the
Revolution around him, and he wrote about it and feared it. His own craft of engraving in the end
was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution. To Blake, the world of his poems was not a retreat
from, but an expansion of, his everyday world.
Their Chaotic Form
Blake's Prophetic Books are great mythological compositions. They are chaotic as regards
their form, but they contain magnificent passages which may be enjoyed in isolation. Their most
remarkable feature, however, is the dynamic symbolism of the myth, whose transformations and
revolutions express profound psychological truths. Blake was not struggling to analyse his own
psychology in these works, but the inner condition of the English nation. He was dealing with a
national mentality threatened by a domination of the scientific philosophy. He saw with an
astonishing insight the injurious effects of this rationalism upon the life of the soul. He employed
myth as the appropriate language for such material.

11
Blake's Mythology
It is amazing that Blake should have created, at the turn of the 18th century, a pantheon so
rich, varied, and complex, from his own visionary imagination. He created some dozen gods and
goddesses, defined their potencies, and set the whole pantheon in motion. He set forth the whole
subtle relation and inter-relation of these imaginative forces, these impulses that determine and
control human life from beyond the little world known to human reason.
The Poetry of Myth
The Prophetic Books are not to be read merely as exercises in the use of language. They must
be read as myth. As such they are among the greatest poetry in any modern language, and stand
beside the works of Dante, Spenser, Milton, or James Joyce. The art of reading myth, as myth,
must be re-learned if we are fully to understand such figures as Shakespeare's Caliban, Ariel or
Lear, Joyce's Anna Livia, or Blake's Four Zoas. But that taste once formed, we come to look in
poetry for the gods and their symbols. And if we do not find them, the finest verse seems insipid,
as if lacking a necessary dimension.
Creator of Symbols
This also explains why Blake worked with equal facility in two media (poetry and painting or
engraving). The poetic process in which he excelled was neither verbal nor visual. It was symbolic
and mythological. He was a creator not of pictures, not of verbal rhetoric, but of symbols, whose
potency does not depend solely on the medium through which they are expressed.
The Meaning of "Prophetic"
Strictly speaking Blake's only prophetic books are America and Europe, each of which is
subtitled "A Prophecy". But the term is often used for his long symbolic poems in general. They
are not prophecies because they prophesy the future, but because theyreveal what Blake believed
to be eternal truths.
The "Songs of Innocence" are an essential step in understanding Blake's more difficult
prophetic books. They are not necessarily a part of the same development, as Blake did not keep
to a rigid system of symbols and thought throughout his life. But they illustrate the essential
workings of his mind which remained constant however expressed.
I. "THE BOOK OF THEL"
The Book of Thel was the first of Blake's prophetic books. It is also the simplest of them. It is
the story of a human soul in a state of Innocence recoiling from the problems of experience, and
its theme is thus related to that of the Songs of Innocence. Thel, whose name is derived from a
Greek word meaning "will" or "wish", symbolizes the unborn soul. She laments the transitoriness
of Innocence, while attempts to reassure her are made by a Lily of the Valley, a Cloud, a Worm,
and "the matron clay". This last sings of the joy of motherhood and invites Thel to enter a house
in the world of experience: "...fear nothing, enter with thy virgin feet". Thel does as she is bidden,
and wanders through dark valleys until she discovers that she is seated beside her own grave. She
starts, and, with a shriek, rushes back to her spiritual world. The book opens with Thel's motto:
Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or love in a golden bowl?
It is a typical Blake verse, which opens with a couplet expressing the need of learning by
experience, and closes with two cryptic questions. These, however, present less difficulty when we

12
realize that the silver rod symbolizes love, the golden bowl the brain or wisdom. The verse asks
whether the eagle or mole knows best what is in the pit. Despite its mighty strength and soaring
flight, the magnificent eagle's experience is limited and different from that of the little burrowing
mole. Likewise wisdom is best dealt with by the brain, and love by feeling. In this way Thel's
experience is summed up—in her case. Innocence is best understood by innocence, Experience by
experience.
II. "THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL"
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell(written, unlike any of his other illuminated books, almost
wholly in prose) was partly a parody of Swedenborgianism. One of the main foundations of Blake's
philosophy is the reversal of conventional ideas. In order to understand the teachings, you must
overturn them. Blake held that materialistic logic is the hidden force of Heaven—the conventional
good, the Orthodox God—which forces man into a mould, restrains his instincts by rules, and
limits his spirit by measurement. On the other hand, energy and inspiration are the forces of
Satan—what the conventional call Hell or evil—which free man's instincts from rules and
measurement. It is only in such freedom that man's spirit can soar to its greatest heights, and
unite body and soul to achieve human genius. Blake urges man to allow his spirit to soar as high
as it can: "No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings." He will fall only if, like Icarus,
he uses borrowed or artificial wings. Similarly Blake allows no room for prudery: "The nakedness
of woman is the work of God," and nakedness is therefore only thought wrong by the prude. To
Blake, as is clear from the Songs of Innocence, it symbolized innocence and here he reiterates it
in different words. Moreover, the conventional priest, laying his curse on joys and insisting on
asceticism, is no better than a caterpillar laying its eggs on the best leaves, which its progeny will
devour. Even the wrath of the lion is divine, for it is the wisdom of God. All of this is worked up
into the book's final crescendo in the chorus of the Song of Liberty.
Again, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell we find Blake, as in The Book of Thel,insisting
that the experience of one being is not necessarily the same as another's; what, in short, is good
for the lion may not be good for the ox.
By reversing the usual meanings of God, Heaven, Satan and Hell, Blake opened up wider
vistas, claiming that each being should follow his nature.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a paradoxical statement of Blake's creed. It does much
to explain the symbolism of The Tiger and the main themes of the voluminous prophetic poems.
The Bible and sacred codes have divided man into body and soul. The body has been associated
with energy and evil; the soul suggests reason and goodness. He who follows his body (or the
energy) will face eternal torment. But this view is evidently wrong. The body is not distinct from
the soul. The body, says Blake, is "a portion of Soul, discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets
of Soul in this age." Energy is the only life and is "eternal delight". "The road of excess leads to the
palace of wisdom". "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and
the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man". "The tigers of wrath
are wiser than the horses of instruction". "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse
unacted desires". Blake's doctrines show a faith in the spontaneous goodness of man, and are a
sign of his naturalism. Blake denounces scientific and logical reason, and traditional ethics. He
condemns Newton, Locke, and Bacon who stand for the effort to confine cosmic and human
energies within mechanical rules. In place of rationalistic and repressive creeds and codes, Blake
exalts imagination, energy, love, as the divine inward guides. The poet is the only true man, and
every man is a poet, or would be if his vitality and creative power had not been cramped or
deadened by civilization, conventional religion, and science. Great rebels against artificial
authority are Christ and Milton (though it is hard to see what Blake means by that).

13
This gospel is set forth in the huge prophetic books, in terms of a complex and occult
mythology, and these poems are labyrinths that only scholars penetrate. Blake has been regarded
by many learned expositors as a supreme poet and myth-maker and as more of a Christian than
Christians. But the ordinary reader finds his symbolism in these poems to be baffling. Blake's
prophetic doctrine may be the great modern expression of a naturalistic, undiscriminating
worship of "Life". At any rate, though the power of his message is obscured by his esoteric manner,
Blake appears among the Romantic poets like a force of nature among men writing with pen and
ink.
III. THE GATES OF PARADISE
The Gates of Paradise is a powerful book and is closely related to emblem books. Each of the
plates is accompanied by an inscription. For instance one plate shows a little winged boy emerging
from an egg-shell which he has broken; it carries the inscription: "At length for hatching ripe he
breaks the shell". The egg represents the closed materialistic world, the mundane shell. The figure
has broken out of this into the outer and greater world of the imagination; it is a rebirth; therefore
he is shown as a child, and it is a rebirth into a spiritual world; therefore he has wings. Blake has
shown very expressively the look of wonder on the child's face as he breaks the shell. The work
begins with a Prologue in which Blake says that Jehovah has written restrictive laws which
imprison the imagination, but that He has repented and hidden them beneath his Seat of Mercy.
If Jehovah has hidden them, why do Christians continue to insist on their observance? As the
Epilogue points out, it is better to realize that even a harlot was once an unspotted virgin; that,
that which is often adored as religion, is evil, and that, that which is often seen as Jesus and
Jehovah, is really Satan.
IV. VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION
Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a poem protesting against the rigid sexual morality of
the time. The daughters of Albion are English women enslaved by conventional morality. Woven
into the theme, too, are Blake's protests against the evils of slavery, which in his view partook of
the same quality as the repression of womanhood. He was partly inspired by Mary
Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, which had been published in 1792, the year
before the Visionsappeared.
The story of the Visions is that of Oothoon, an innocent virgin, "the Soft Soul of America", in
love with Theotormon (Theo—"God"; and Tormon—"tormented", or according to some, "law").
Theotormon is the divine in man, tormented by the false god, or restricted by the laws of the false
god. Oothoon first hides in Leutha's vale and then plucks Leutha's flower (Leutha—awareness of
sin or guilt; or sex ruled by law). But while flying to Theotormon she is raped by Bromion
(Reason). Bromion afterwards throws Oothoon aside, boasting of his slaves, and treating her no
better than if she were one.
Bromion and Oothoon are bound back to back in Bromion's cave. Theotormon, following his
orthodox way, sits in the entrance to the cave, weeping and refusing to marry the raped girl. She
nevertheless justifies herself in the lamentations that follow, concluding like the Song of Liberty
(in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) with the words: "everything that lives is holy". The poem
ends with these lines:
Thus every morning wails Oothoon; but Theotormon sits
Upon the margin's ocean conversing with shadows dire.
The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, and echo back her sighs.
Blake also singles out, in this poem, the oppressiveness of orthodox religion. Like Oothoon
and Bromion, bound back to back in their cave, the slaves and children "bought with money"

14
shiver in their "religious caves" of cold ignorance, though the "burning fires of lust" burn above
them. (The cave symbolizes the ignorance of the conventional mind).
Again we are confronted with the comparison of the lots of the lion and the ox: "And is there
not one law for both the lion and the ox?" asks Bromion. Thus Bromion, dominated by a
philosophy which reduces everything to reason and measurement, can see only one side of any
question. But Oothoon points out that one law for the lion and the ox is oppression. Later, in a
beautiful passage, she sings of the joys of love in freedom (not, libertine love), which she contrasts
with the miseries of repression. To this she adds a curse on Urizen (who symbolizes the limiting
power of Reason).
V. AMERICA: A PROPHECY
In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the political factor was only a part of the theme, but it
dominates America: a Prophecy which is a poem dealing with American Independence. This
poem opens with a Preludium in which Ore, "the terrible boy", the spirit of earthly revolt, is shown
chained to a rock—the Rock of Jealousy—beneath the Tree of Mystery (a symbol of spiritual death)
while his parents—Los and Enitharmon—stand before him in horrified despair.
Los (probably an anagram of Sol: the Sun) is the spirit of poetry and of the creative
imagination. Enitharmon is spiritual beauty.
Ore breaks his bonds and rises from the Rock of Jealousy. He embraces Nature, the shadowy
daughter of Urthona, and the Spirit of Revolution is abroad. The Guardian Prince of Albion
(George III) "burns in his nightly tent".
In America, Washington speaks of the threat of oppression from England. Ore's voice is
heard, prophesying freedom. Albion's Angel (England's guardian spirit) challenges him, but Ore
is not to be stopped. Here again Blake's strictures on conventional religious thought are woven
into the poem. Ore points out that man's free and unbounded spirit was perverted by Urizen into
ten commandments. Ore also reiterates that key belief of Blake's "everything that lives is holy, life
delights in life."
Albion's Angel then calls for his war-trumpets to be sounded to "alarm my thirteen angels"
(the thirteen American States) and terrify them into submission. But it is unavailing. First
Boston's angel refuses to obey, and then he is joined by the other twelve. Albion's Angel still fries
to force them into submission, but fails. Finally, Albion's Angel sends plagues and blights on
America, but they only recoil on England. America gains her freedom.
Blake has again woven into the fabric of his revolutionary prophecy, the related idea of
freedom from conventional morality, for in reality one is impossible without the other. The doors
of marriage, the mystical marriage of Heaven and Hell, are open; the priests skulk in their "reptile
coverts"; and Ore kindles the spirit of true love.
America is one of the most fiery of Blake's works. The spiritual state that it describes is as far
removed as could be imagined from that described in the Songs of Innocence; it is a State of
Experience complete and unrelieved. Innocence does not give rise to the revolutionary fires of
Ore; it is something beyond and outside them.

15
VI. THE BOOK OF URIZEN

The theme of The Book of Urizen (issued also in 1794) is the creation, by Urizen, of the natural
world and of man. The poem begins with a description of Urizen's secret world, from which his
dark tyrannical laws and measurements are proclaimed. Urizen, the "Dark Demon" is opposed by
Los who, with terrific labour, binds him in human shape, until "ages on ages rolled over him". But,
"in terrors Los shrunk from his task" and "his eternal life/ like a dream was obliterated". Pity
began dividing his soul and, out of this, Enitharmon, the first female, was born:
Los saw the female and pitied;
He embraced her; she wept, she refused;
In perverse and cruel delight
She fled from his arms, yet he followed.
Eternity shuddered when they saw
Man begetting his likeness
On his own divided image.
From this union, Ore, the fiery spirit of revolution, who was later to oppose Urizen, was born.
Los grows jealous of Ore's affection for Enitharmon, and with Enitharmon, takes him to a
mountain top and chains him by his limbs to a rock (the position in which we discover him at the
commencement of America)
But Ore is not silenced:
The dead heard the voice of the child
And began to awake from sleep;
All things heard the voice of the child
And began to awake to life.
This can be read as revolt (Ore) being instinctively chained down by imagination (Los),
although the voice of revolt still makes itself heard, even to the dead. But Urizen continues, in
human shape, with his efforts to tyrannize through measurement and law, which he tries to
enforce in the Garden of Eden. However, even his children cannot keep his laws, for which he
curses them. He sees too, that life lived upon death— that is, animals are butchered to provide
human food. But Urizen has not yet finished. He invents a web and calls it the "Net of Religion".
The children of Urizen degenerate: "in reptile forms shrinking together". They are bound to the
earth by the restrictive rules imposed upon them. At the end of the poem the remaining sons are
called together by Fuzon (Fire) and they leave the earth, which they call Egypt (Slavery):
So Fuzon called all together
The remaining children of Urizen,
And they left the pendulous earth,
They called it Egypt, and left it.
VII. EUROPE: A PROPHECY
Europe', a Prophecy belongs to the same class as America, in that it is concerned with the
mythology of the world intertwined with contemporary politics. But it is a much more difficult
poem. In the chronology of Blake's myth it precedes America, but follows The Song of Los. It is
concerned with the period of the Christian era—about 1800 years—preceding the events related
in America.
The Prophecy opens with the Nativity of Jesus in the shape of Ore (revolt). But orthodox
Christianity falls into error, as Enitharmon (spiritual beauty; the female principle) is separated
from her eternal partner, Los (the creative imagination; the male principle), and comes under the

16
influence of Urizen (Reason) who has been "unloosed from chains", adopting the doctrine that
sex is Sin. Urthona (who is really Los) "takes his rest" and leaves Enitharmon in sole dominion.
She descends into Ore's red light (that is, revolts against woman's traditional place as the passive
partner) and calls upon her first and second sons, Rintrah (Wrath) and Palamabron (Pity), to
proclaim "that Woman's love is Sin":
Go! tell the Human race that Woman's love is Sin;
That an eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters
In an allegorical abode where existence hath never come.
In this speech, Enitharmon makes the promise of the churches, that, in return for the loss of
full sexual experience, the religions will be rewarded in heaven. But it is "an allegorical abode
where existence hath never come."
Enitharmon then falls asleep for 1800 years, for the whole of the Christian era, upto Blake's
time, during which the repressive laws of Urizen, "One King, one God, one Law," hold sway, while
the flames of Ore, the lightnings of Palamabron, and the legions of Rintrah provide an apocalptic
background to it all. Europe falls into the throes of revolution and its consequences. Finally Sir
Isaac Newton, who represented to Blake, the antithesis of spiritual values blows a blast on the
trumpet which completes the world of materialism. Enitharmon awakes and calls up four pairs of
her children: Ethinthus (the purely physical aspect of love), Manathu-Varcyon
(her consort: soft delusion), Leutha (awareness of sin or guilt), Antamon ("prince of the
pearly dew: the male seed), Oothoon and Theotormon (frustrated lovers), Sotha (war, violence),
and Thiralatha (starved imagination). Finally she calls upon Ore to smile upon her children:
Smile, son of my afflictions.
Arise, O Ore, and give our mountains joy of thy red light.!
This signals the revolution in France.
VIII. THE BOOK OF LOS
The Book of Los re-tells the story of The Book of Urizen from Los's point of view. It is also
Blake's version of Genesis, and ends with the creation of Adam, "a human illusion". This creation
results from Los's efforts to escape from the power of Urizen and to take on shape and form. He
creates light and the sun, binds Urizen to it, and forces him, too, to take on shape.
The significance of Los forcing a shape on Urizen may be stated as the forcing of definition
on error in order to overcome it.
The Song of Los takes the story of mankind a stage further, from the birth of civilization, to
the American Revolution. It also completes Blake's cycle of the continents, as it is divided into two
sections, "Africa" and "Asia".
The four harps in its opening lines represent the four continents of Europe, America, Africa,
and Asia:
I will sing you a song of Los, the Eternal Prophet:
He sung it to four harps at the tables of Eternity.
In heart-formed Africa.
Urizen faded! Ariston shuddered!
And thus the song began:

17
After the creation, the children of Los pass on Urizen's false philosophy and religion to
mankind. The imaginative arts (represented by Har and Heva) are driven away, until such time
as Ore shall come and deliver the world from error, arising "like a pillar of fire above the Alps".
X. THE BOOK OF AHANIA

The Book of Ahania is really a continuation of The Book of Urizen. It relates how Fuzon (Fire)
relates against his father, Urizen, "moulding into a vast globe his wrath", which he throws at him,
"the cold loins of Urizen dividing". His Emanation (the female counterpart, that is, of the bisexual
male; broadly what Jungian psychologists call the Anima) is thus sundered, and Urizen names
her Ahania (pleasure) and hides her, calling her "Sin". Urizen smites Fuzon with a poisoned rock
(the Decalogue) propelled from a bow of a serpent's ribs (nature), and
On the accursed Tree of Mystery,
On the topmost stem of this Tree,
Urizen nailed Fuzon's corpse.
For forty years the living corpse of Fuzon remains on the Tree while arrows of pestilence fly
around it, though Los, who has forged iron nets, is able to trap some of them. The poem closes
with a lament by Ahania.
We may, indeed, wonder why Blake found it necessary to clothe his philosophy in such a
difficult and complicated mythology. For one thing he was introducing a completely new aspect
of the nature of man and creation, and no existing mythology or terminology could give him the
necessary subtlety to express it. Moreover he answered the question himself when he made Los
say, in Jerusalem: "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's". He expressed
himself in this way because he was Blake and no other.
X. VALA OR THE FOUR ZOAS
Vala or The Four Zoas is Blake's most complex poem. It is difficult to analyse and to
understand. Yet it remains one of the greatest of poems in English. It is in the same class as
Milton's Paradise Lost and Spenser'sFaerie Queene, for like them, it seeks an all-embracing myth
of man.
In form it consists of Nine Nights as described in its original title: "Vala or The Death and
Judgment of the Ancient Man, a Dream of Nine Nights". Blake later renamed it "The Four Zoas:
The Torments of Love and Jealousy in The Death and Judgment of Albion The Ancient Man”. In
Sir Geoffrey Keyne's standard edition of Blake's writings it occupies 119 pages. The manuscript is
in the British Museum.
Blake tried in this poem to combine into one great work all of the myths he had already
written. In the end he had to cast it aside, as it had become unwieldy, involved, and over-written.
Blake found it more congenial to put his ideas into his later works: Milton and Jerusalem; in any
case, those ideas had by then changed or been modified.
The plot concerns the warfare between the Four Mighty "Ones in every Man", the Four Zoas
and their Emanations. (The word Zoas, derived from Greek, means living creatures). The Zoas are
(1) Urizen (Emanation: Ahania); (2) Los, thus named in the temporal world, who becomes
Urthona in the eternal world (Emanation: Enitharmon) ; (3) Ore, thus named in the temporal
world, who becomes Luvah in the eternal world (Emanation: Vala); and (4) Tharmas (Emanation:
Enion). They have dozens of associations and meanings which change and multiply as the poem

18
develops. Most of them have already figured in the prophetic books already dealt with, but the
symbolic significances of the Zoas may be given here: Urizen: intellect (or, head). Urthona (Los):
Intuition or Imagination. Luvah: Feeling or Heart. Tharmas: Sensation or Loins. They thus give
us an indication of the poem's content which is the struggle of the various functions of Albion
(here representing mankind). The Emanations of the Zoas may thus be
interpreted: Ahania:Eternal Delight. Enitharmon Spiritual Beauty. Vala: Nature, or Visible
Beauty. Enion: Generative or Maternal Instinct.
Blake uses several other terms which also need explanation. All these are the parts of Albion
that in the poem struggle for supremacy, with Los as Albion's protagonist and Urizen as his main
antagonist. In this way, Los is its hero, and Urizen its villain (if the word is not too strong). But
Jesus appears as Albion's saviour, and his antagonists are Rahab and Satan. (Rahab is "Mystery,
Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots", and the personification of the false church.
The poem is enacted in a fourfold universe, the highest state of which is Eden (eternity), the
lowest Ulro (the material world). Just below Eden is Beulah (the sub-conscious world of dreams
and inspiration), and between Beulah and Ulro is the starry realm of Urizen (the world of
restrictive law and measurement).
There are many threads and layers in the narrative of the poem, giving it a dream-like,
illogical character without real continuity. Much of it is obscure and contradictory. Yet it is a
triumph of the imagination and a poetic rendering of man's own psyche, which itself is a mass of
obscure and contradictory threads and layers. But quite apart from its meaning and theme there
is much sublime poetry in it. The following lines may serve as an example. They are from a lament
of Enion:
What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the
street? No it is bought with the price Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his
children Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy, And in the
withered field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.
XI. MILTON
Milton is one of the greatest of Blake's prophetic books. It is concerned with the struggle
between the true and false in art and in man. Blake becomes possessed with the spirit of Milton
who in his life on earth allowed his poetry to be distorted by the dogmas of Puritanism. Blake's
long poem owes much to Paradise Lost, and its sub-title, "To justify the ways of God to man", was
taken from that work.
Milton is divided into a Preface and two books. The Preface opens with a dignified appeal in
prose to the "young men of the new age" to set their faces against the imitative classical art of the
Greeks and Romans. At the end of this prose passage Blake bursts into what is surely his most
famous song popularly but erroneously known as Jerusalem:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

19
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire.
I will not cease from Mental Fight
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
Blake means to say here that the Lamb of God was seen in England's green and pleasant
pastures because, in the days in which He appeared there, Ancient Man or Albion partook of the
divine nature of Jesus; therefore Jesus walked in that green and pleasant land in the person of
Albion. The "dark Satanic Mills" are not the commercial factories of the Industrial Revolution, but
what the Buddhists call the Wheel of Existence, of what Blake himself called the Mundane Shell.
By this Blake meant that materialistic existence into which, since those happier days, man's spirit
has fallen, to be ground, as in a mill and from which he cannot escape without building Jerusalem,
or, in other words, without realizing once again the divinity in his nature.
The First Book of Milton opens with one of the finest passages to be found in the prophetic
books, invoking the Daughters of Beulah, who may be equated with sexual fulfilment and
inspiration. The poem continues by telling how Milton, "unhappy though in heaven", decides to
return to earih to correct the errors he committed during his previous existence there, where
reason dominated him to the detriment of his emotional relationships with his wife and family.
And he is moved in this by a Bard's prophetic song which occupies much of the first book, in which
Blake's symbolic characters are the protagonists. It is a complicated and difficult passage, much
of it being based on Blake's relationship with Hayley at Felpham and being heavily veiled in
allegorical language. And it also deals, as does The Four Zoas, with the larger view of the nature
of man.
After the conclusion of the Bard's song the poem becomes comparatively easier to follow.
Milton descends to our world, accompanied by the Seven Angels of the Presence, passing through
Beulah where he "beheld his own shadow/A mournful form double, hermaphroditic, male and
female/In one wonderful body; and he entered into it/In direful pain." He sees, too,
the AncientMan, "Albion upon the Rock of Ages".
Milton's spirit enters Blake by his left foot which symbolizes the material world in which
Blake, as a mortal, was living; the right foot symbolizes the spiritual world. Blake is thus enabled
to follow Milton's earthly experience. Milton endeavours to move in the direction of the Universe
of Los (poetry) and Enitharmon (inspiration), but Urizen (reason) opposes his path. Milton tries
to make a philosophy but, in doing so, mistakenly uses only his reason.
Albion, the sleeping divine man, stirs under the influence of Milton's descent, and through
the image of a fly, we are again shown that "everything that lives is holy". Man is also compared
with the fly, and the hope is expressed that, like the fly, his gates of perception are not closed, that
he will seek his heavenly father in human beauty and not "beyond the skies".
Milton's spirit, by entering Blake's body, enables Blake to see and appreciate once again the
beauties of the material world, which he sees on his left (material) foot "as a bright sandal formed
immortal of precious stone and gold." Milton acts as an inspiration to Blake, so that he becomes
identified with Los, and walks "forward through Eternity".
Los commands Albion to awake, and, cries to him that Ore's blood and fire "glow on America's
shore". Albion hears the sounds of war, and "the covering cherub advances from the east". The

20
"covering cherub", a term taken from the Book of Ezekiel, is the Selfhood, the final error; in this
case it is personified as Satan, Albion's (and Milton's) spectre.
Los shows Blake the descent of souls to the material world and their evolution in Bowlahoola
and Allamanda. Bowlahoola is "the stomach in every individual man"; it is also the heart and
lungs. Allamanda is the nervous system. These form a trio with Entuthon or the physical frame of
generated man.
The Second Book of Milton opens with a description of Beulah. Milton's Emanation, Ololon
(the truth opposing his errors about woman), "a virgin of twelve years", now descends into Beulah,
"a place where contrarieties are equally true". She descends to Los and Enitharmon, unseen
beyond the Mundane Shell, southward in Milton's track.
In the meantime Milton discourses with the Seven Guardians or Angels of the Presence, in
the course of which Blake explains his view of human state and individuals: Blake now fully
perceives Milton's errors and their manifestations. Milton himself throws off his spectre (Satan)
who, however, still tries to possess him. But the Seven Guardians become a column of fire and call
upon the divine man to awaken. Then Albion arises. Here Albion represents not only the Divine
and Ancient Man, but also Britain itself. This introduces yet another thread into the already
complicated story: that Britain's soul and fate are identical with those of the Ancient Man, whose
body fills the whole land—Wales, Ireland, England, and Scotland.
Ololon annihilates her selfhood and flees "into the depths of Milton's shadow". The poem
moves to its resounding climax, with a Last Judgment. Blake falls into a momentary faint and
awakes to find his wife beside him. The beauties of the countryside become apparent as the lark
rises and the thyme tints the hills. Los and Enitharmon rise over the hills of Surrey and listen in
anger to the cry of the poor in London. Oothoon, too, reappears "weeping over her human
harvest", and Rintrah and Palamabron viewtheir harvest.
XII. JERUSALEM
Blake's greatest and last illuminated book was Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant
Albion. The theme of this work is man's recovery of his lost soul. Man is represented by Albion,
who is also a personification of England. Jerusalem is his Emanation (female counterpart) who,
at the Fall, was divided from him; in the course of the poem they are reunited and Albion's spirit
is liberated.
The poem presents, too, in this symbolic form, Blake's own spiritual, mental, and religions
struggle and his final mastery. And there are actual autobiographical elements, for among the
Sons of Albion are Scofield, Knox, and Hyle, who are none other than derivations of Blake's
Felpham accusers—Scholfield and Cock—and Hayley. Also featured are Quantock and Peachey,
two of the magistrates at Blake's trial. It is, apart from The Four Zoas, the most difficult of all
Blake's poems.
The work is divided into four chapters. The theme of the first chapter is a description of the
fall of Albion into the "sleep of Ulro" (materialism); the other three chapters deal with his passage
through eternal death and of the awaking to eternal life. Chapter II is addressed to the Jews, whose
religion is that of the jealous God and the Moral Law. Chapter III is addressed to the Deists who
substitute Nature for God, and keep the Moral Law. Chapter IV is addressed to the Christians who
have a mature religion, but one encumbered with sex guilt and false chastity. At the end of the
poem all errors are resolved and Albion recovers his perfect psychological and spiritual balance
and true union with God. The three religious groups addressed—Jews, Deists, and Christians—
correspond to Blake's three regions of childhood, manhood, and maturity respectively.

21
The preamble to Chapter II contains a beautiful poem of simple from which has much the
same kind of appeal as the famous lyric from Milton ("And did those feet in ancient time"). It
expresses mystical and symbolic ideas through familiar everyday scenes, a means of expression
in which Blake was particularly adept. The first six lines of this lyric poem are an evocation of the
age of Innocence when Jerusalem (spiritual freedom) was the common lot of man. The remaining
verses evoke the age of Experience in which Jerusalem is usurped by Satan (error), though his
victory is not permanent.
Chapter III is preceded by an introduction "To the Deists", and a poem in which a monk is
represented as an "image of his Lord". He is killed by the forces of abstraction, which have divided
moral law from forgiveness of sins. In this Chapter the Spectre (reason) proclaims, against a
background of war, that he is God. But the eternals attempt to correct his Utterance by electing
Seven "called the Seven Eyes of God". Then begins the ploughing of nations. In other words,
England ploughs the ground of the nations to receive the seeds of revolt which originated in
English thought. Meanwhile, the Living Creatures (Zoas) cry against abstraction and
indefiniteness:
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.
And not in generalizing demonstrations of rational power.
Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually,
On circumcision, not on virginity, O Reasoners of Albion.
To Blake, circumcision represented the sacrifice of selfhood, virginity the repression of
natural desires. In this Chapter, too, occur the following lines spoken by the Divine Voice:
Every Harlot was once a Virgin: every Criminal an
Infant Love. Repose on me till the morning of the Grave. I am thy life.
Chapter IV is largely concerned with the problem of chastity. Enitharmon (inspiration)
separates herself from Los and develops her own will. Los's love develops into desire. But
Enitharmon, repulsing him, speaks in scorn, saying:
This is Woman's world, nor need she any
Spectre to defend her from Man…….
At this a sullen smile breaks from the Spectre in mockery, and he declares:
The Man who respects Woman shall be despised by Woman,
And deadly cunning and mean abjectness only shall enjoy them.
For I will make their places of joy and love excrementitious
But the triumph of the Spectre does not last. Though once the guardian of truth, he is now
recognized as error.
England, who is Britannia, awakens from death on Albion's bosom. Her lamentations awaken
Albion, who arises. Jesus appears and Albion converses with him. Albion slays the Covering
Cherub, the last enemy, and the poem ends with the establishment of Eternity.
The poem is so difficult as to be almost incomprehensible except to devoted scholars. The
symbolism and character of the protagonists change with the events. Sometimes the poem is
concerned with the soul and mind of man; sometimes it has political overtones, as when war rages

22
and Luvah (whom some see as a representation of France) is crucified. All in all, the poem is man's
struggle with his nature, and the final resolution of that struggle.
Blake as a Poet Or Critical Approaches to Blake’s Poetry

I
Ruled by Instinct
As a writer, Blake is much less occupied with theory than Wordsworth, Blake's new
departures follow no set programme. No reformer was ever more thoroughly ruled by instinct.
That is why in certain directions, and at the very first attempt, he goes farther than Wordsworth.
He surpasses Wordsworth in the wealth of his prophetic gospel and in the simple purity of his
inspiration. But he lacks Wordsworth's sense of balance. Wordsworth is still in our eyes the leader
of a school; Blake remains a solitary figure.
Originality: Intuition; Symbolism

Blake's extreme originality kept him apart from the general public, and from official
recognition. Only a small group knew his genius or dimly felt his greatness. Never did a
temperament show greater individuality. He did feel some influences: but in his mode of thinking,
in his imagination, and in his artistic tastes, all his main decisions are solely his own. His drawings
bear the stamp of an inimitable vision. His poetry deals in the subtlest kind of symbolism with a
matchless skill. His philosophy is a series of intuitive flights into the regions of the Absolute. To
our minds his philosophic intuitions are presented as a group of strange, complicated symbols
which to him are the clearest, the most familiar realities. His mind works in open defiance of all
the normal laws of logic. The language which he speaks, in the latter part of his work, is sometimes
unintelligible.
Elements of Romanticism in his Early Poems
The first poems of Blake form a body of poetry different from every other. They show the
working of an inner light, and they show the working of mysticism. The predominant theme of
this poetry is the feelings of a child's impassioned soul. The language of this poetry is that of a
moving simplicity. Its emotions possess a pure ardour. These short poems have in them the
essence of Romanticism, whether the main subject be love and happiness, as in the "Poetical
Sketches" and the "Songs of Innocence"; or the note of grief and rebellion against a world given
over to evil be more pronounced, as in the "Songs of Experience". The universe is here seen
through the eyes of a child, felt through the senses of a child, and judged through the heart of a
child. The child is here the symbol of the most delicate and courageous intuitions in the human
mind. The elements of Romanticism are present in these poems, some of them in the highest
degree, such as the sense of wonder, the contemplation of Nature through fresh eyes, an intimate
sympathy with the varieties of existence most distant from the reach of our intelligence. Other
elements of Romanticism are found in a much lesser degree, such as the obsession with the past,
or the absorbing sense of self. The clear eyes which questioningly look at Nature, animals, and
man, show a single acuity of vision; but everything they see is bathed in a halo of mystery and
beauty; there radiates from them meek pity no less than holy anger. Blake's first style is in a way
a juvenile form of Romanticism.

23
Simple but Expressive Words

The words in these poems are as smoothly joined as the molecules of a liquid. They are
perfectly adapted to the thought because they are as simple as possible, and the thought itself is
simple. They do not strive after elegance, and yet they achieve it by means of their perfect
adaptation. They do not aim at being intense, and yet are expressive because they are soaked in
the feeling from which they sprang. They have the cadenced flow of natural music. Here is the
melody, somewhat thin but supremely spontaneous, of the soul in its moments of emotion. In the
poetry of Blake the dried-up spring of Elizabethan lyricism may be said to have flowed again.
Prosaic Touches
These first poems, however, are not all of an equal quality. They are not free from prosaic
touches. Jarring or weak notes are heard, traceable to the over-impatient ardour of the poet. Here
and there a painful feverishness invades and disturbs the quiet outburst of thought.
The Gospel of Liberty
The doctrine of Blake is a confused assemblage of desires and impulses. It may be compared
to a vast gospel of liberty. It shows a daring outlook, and embraces all the political ideas of the
French Revolution. It even goes so far as the bounds of anarchic individualism, free mysticism,
and the modern criticism of moral values. All established standards and beliefs are upset by Blake
at one stroke. Whether it be the orthodox religion of Christ, or the traditional notion of good and
evil, or again, rational and scientific beliefs, the same revolutionary spirit reverses the previous
order of things. On one hand, it reaches and even goes beyond the religion of a Swedenborg and
the beliefs of the mystics of the Puritan Republic; on the other, it foretells all the work of liberation
by which modern psychology has tried to overthrow moral inhibitions and restraints. Blake is the
prince of spiritual revolt, but his doctrinal ideas have wielded no influence.
Mythical Vision
A manifold and yet coherent symbolism expresses these ideas. The mythical vision of Blake
creates an original cosmogony. The metaphysical or religious concepts are imbued with life, given
a form, and clothed in a gigantic humanity. The work of Blake is an apocalypse, a realm of
darkness peopled by supernatural beings, where one and the same idea develops throughout a
continued series of signs and conventional equivalents, but where any attempt at a precise
interpretation would be risky.
Style in the Prophetic Books
Blake does not, in the "Prophetic Books", conform to any of the normal conditions of literary
or picturesque expression. To find a close connectedness between the successive terms is well-
nigh impossible. The style has often a biblical grandeur. The rhythm of the verse is ample, free,
rugged, but sometimes highly majestic. But the language, to be understood, demands a sight
practised and trained in interpreting it. And the "Prophetic Books" have had no influence except
on a small group of faithful admirers.
II
As a Lyrical Poet
"As a poet Blake is perhaps greater than he is as an artist. The small-scale and technical
limitations of his work as an artist must always make him seem provincial—not in vision, but in
achievement—in comparison with the great masters of Italy or France or Spain; but as a poet, in
the tradition of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton, he was working in a linguistic medium that
helped, rather than hindered, his genius. Blake, as a lyrical poet, is unsurpassed. His Songs have

24
often been compared to those of Shakespeare; and one might say that lyrical form in poetry is
what outline is in drawing, or melody in music—the contour drawn by imagination, the trace of
spiritual life. His vocabulary is as simple as that of a child, and his symbols—rose, sun-flower,
lion, lamb, beetle, ant, little girl, or little boy—are few, and universal. Every lyric is a window into
the imaginative world, and even in these early poems, his roses and lambs are more than
metaphorical; they are archetypal, symbols that focus multiple meanings, soundings into the
universal source of myth and oracle; hence their power. Simple as nursery-rhymes, they are as
profound as the Gospels, whose symbolism of corn, bread, wine, and fish was enough foundation
for an enduring civilization. Indeed the symbols upon which great religions and enduring
civilizations are founded are always of Blake-like simplicity and universality, as common as the
sun and stars, comprehensible to the unlearned, but for ever incomprehensible to the unwise."
III
The Lyrical Impulse
"There is a certain kind of lyric poetry which appears to require some bond with popular
poetry and with the traditional literary heritage of the common people, if it is to exist. After the
medieval period, there seem to have been only three English poets who have achieved greatness
in this way. Shakespeare whose link as a lyric poet is with the folk-song; Wordsworth whose was
with ballad in one of its kinds or another; and Blake who drew upon the wealth of the English
Bible and the Protestant hymn. In Wordsworth's lyrical ballads there is sometimes a strangeness,
a sense of the mysterious and uncomprehended, to which Blake's more decided mind seems to
have been closed; but Blake was before Wordsworth, and his lyrical work has a fullness and
variety, and also a whole-heartedness and absence of the reflective and diluted moralizing, which
is not to be found in Wordsworth. He has come slowly to be seen for what he is; but it is now surely
clear that it was he, more than any other poet of his period or just after, who recovered the lyric
powers that had largely been lost between Traherne's time and his own. Blake has only Hardy as
something of a successor in English. Perhaps this is because England is now a country virtually
without a rich literature of the common people such as it had in the past. Hardy aside, the only
great poet of a kind comparable to Blake has been Yeats, whose work belongs to another country
where popular culture still held the place it lost in our own."
The Value of His Poetry
"But lyricism such as Blake's is not a technical success. It arises out of a certain sense—
buoyant, joyous, and yet serene— of life itself; and of course, from one point of view, the lyric
product of that sense of life veritably constitutes what it embodies. It is the sense of life which I
value most of all in Blake, and why I should therefore put "Songs of Innocence", as a whole, above
"Songs of Experience". There is another point of view, though, and its strength shouts to be seen.
Blake not only had that vision; he smarted under a searing awareness of how the great ones of the
world rejected it or never glimpsed it. As a result, despite how the cruel time he lived in stifled his
work, he is incomparably our most important poet of social and political comment. Here again,
he has had no real followers; and our literature, and our present resources for writing, are
lamentably the poorer for that fact. On all these counts, Blake's value and importance are such
that they warrant the highest praise. It is not easy to think of a half-dozen English poets whose
work is more precious than his, or of many more than that, who are his equals."

25
IV
Not to be Taken Literally
To the dull, unimaginative mind such a simple and sublime poem as "Little Lamb, who made
thee"? is almost idiotic. Literally speaking no child in its senses would think of addressing such a
question to a beast of the field, for the youngest child knows that the only articulate reply the lamb
could make would be "Baa". So that we have not very far to go in our reading of Blake before we
find that the literal use of words which suffices for newspaper and novel reading breaks down
altogether, and Blake is a sealed book to us unless we are prepared for a finer use of words.
Spiritual Truth
Blake drew and wrote to reveal spiritual truth. Spiritual truth does not lie on the surface of
appearances: indeed, it is often contradicted by appearances, and where Blake found that
contradiction he did not acruple to sacrifice the apparent fact for the unapparent truth.
His Influence
It has been said that Blake left no disciples and founded no school. But Blake's spiritual
disciples have been the most numerous and the most potent forces in art since his day. Blake freed
western art from slavish adherence to Nature. On poetry his influence is perhaps even more
obvious. Descriptive poetry has vanished. Poetry as rhyming journalism is a thing of the past.
Even poetry as a criticism of life no longer holds sway, but the trend of modern poetry is in the
direction first pointed by Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience", towards the creation of
images. Modern poetry endeavours, by suggestion, by implication, to create a reverie in which
mental images are presented. The prevailing style favours an economy of words and simplicity of
manner that is derived straight from Blake's earlier poems.
Poetry of Sight and Sound
"There is something of the medieval magician about Blake's manner of presenting his poetry.
Beautiful to both ear and eye, this poetry is for the first time the poetry of sight and sound. Each
poem is a jewel-casket, beautiful in itself. Open the casket a little way and you are dazzled by the
wealth within. Look long and you will see that every jewel has its place, and the casket within and
without is itself an image of something yet more beautiful and emits rays of light brighter than
the sun at noontide.
Blake's poems and pictures are not flat surfaces. Like the landscapes of Cezanne, it is their
depth that interests us, and the deeper we look the more the images come forth."
His Lyrical Faculty
Blake's position in the history of the art of England is peculiar owing to his double
achievement. It is moreover impossible to determine his place in either poetry or painting
separately, the two being inter-dependent both in his own mind and in the forms he used for their
expression. His impulse as a lyrical poet had shown itself before the age of fourteen and was not
quite exhausted until more than thirty years later. It is seen at its best in the volume of Poetical
Sketches, printed in 1783, in the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, produced in the
years 1789 to 1794, and in some of the later poems from manuscripts and letters; and this part of
his writings has justly been the chief source of his present popularity.
His Mysticism and Symbolism
Gradually this faculty gave way, as his mind developed, before a rising tide of mysticism
which strove to find expression through an increasingly complex system of symbolism. In

26
the Songs some symbolism and simple pictorial designs were added to lyrical poetry. In his latest
poems, Milton andJerusalem, the symbolism became predominant and its pictorial
representation more elaborate.
His Gift of Painting
As a painter Blake was entirely uninterested in realism, his favourite subjects being taken
from the Bible or from writers such as Shakespeare and Milton. He sought to express in a picture
the thing of the mind as much as in a poem, and it is to the mind of the observer that they appeal.
It is useless therefore to look in Blake's pictures for accuracy of detail. He laid great store by
firmness of outline, but hated to copy nature. His pictures live by their qualities of design,
colouring, and imaginative content, and his mystical poetry by the vigour of the intellect which
produced it.
VI
The Appeal of His Poetry
"The poetry of Blake is a poetry of the mind, abstract in substance, concrete in form; its
passion is the passion of the imagination, its emotion is the emotion of thought, its beauty is the
beauty of idea. When it is simplest, its simplicity is that of some 'infant joy' too young to have a
name, or of some 'infant sorrow' brought aged out of eternity into the dangerous world. There are
no men and women in the world of Blake's poetry, only primal instincts and the energies of the
imagination."
"His work begins in the garden of Eden, or of the childhood of the world, and there is
something in it of the naivete of beasts: the lines gambol awkwardly, like young lambs. His
utterance of the state of innocence has in it something of the grotesqueness of babies, and
enchants the grown man, as they do. Humour exists unconscious of itself, in a kind of awed and
open-eyed solemnity. He stammers into a speech of angels, as if just awakening out of Paradise.
It is the primal instincts that speak first, before riper years have added wisdom to intuition.
He is the only poet who has written the songs of childhood, of youth, of mature years, and of old
age; and he died singing."
He Stands Alone
"He stands, and must always stand, eminently alone. The
fountain of thought and knowledge to others, he could never be
the head of a school. What is best in him is wholly inimitable.
'The fire of God was in him'. And as, all through his works,
this subtle element plays and penetrates, so in all he did and
said, the ethereal force flamed outward, warming all who know
how to use it aright, scorching or scathing all who come
impertinently near it. He can never be popular in the ordinary
sense of the word, write we never so many songs in his praise,
simply because the region in which he lived was remote from
the common concerns of life, and still more by reason of the
truth of the 'mystic sentence' uttered by his own lips ..........
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know."

27
VII
A Modern Figure
"And certainly Blake is a modern figure, so much so that to relegate him to the ancient world
seems like sheer paradox. He has more to say to the present world than any other poet of his time,
and more to say about the issues of life than most poets of whatever time. He lived in an era when
modern problems were beginning to take shape. He brought to bear upon them a mind capable of
original and profound interpretation of the cosmic drama, richly endowed with irony, shrewdness,
and common sense, undeceived by the solemn plausibilities of the world, possessed, above all, of
keen psychological insight. The solutions which he reached are still cogent. His own age, which
he rejected except as it showed signs of regeneration, had the inestimable value of acting as an
irritant to his imagination:
I turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe, And there behold the loom of
Locke, whose woof rages dire Washed by the water-wheels of Newton; black the cloth
In heavy wreaths folds over every nation.
Beholding this, he turned his eyes to the past and the future, so that finally, after long
contemplation, he was able to say: 'I see the past, present and future existing all at once'. The myth
corroborates this assertion. It embraces the whole of human life, from the Fall to the Last
Judgment."
VIII
An Adverse Comment
In order that the student may have some idea of that is meant by hostile or adverse criticism,
here is a comment written in 1809 and published anonymously in a periodical called The
Examiner.
"When the ebullitions of a distempered brain are mistaken for the sallies of genius by those
whose works have exhibited the soundest thinking in art, the malady has attained a pernicious
height, and it becomes a duty to endeavour to arrest its progress. Such is the case with the
productions and admirers of William Blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal
inoffensiveness secures him from confinement and, consequently, of whom no public notice
would have been taken, if he was not forced on the notice and animadversion of The Examiner, in
having been held up to public admiration by many esteemed amateurs and professors as a genius
in some respect original and legitimate. The praises which these gentlemen bestowed last year
on or) this unfortunate man's illustrations of Blair's Grave have, in feeding his vanity, stimulated
him to publish his madness more largely, and thus again exposed him, if not to the derision, at
least to the pity of the public.
"The poor man fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some
of which are unintelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober characters by caricature
representation, and the whole blotted and blurred, and very badly drawn. These he call an
Exhibition; of which he has published a catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense,
unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain."
IX
Blake's imagery is the product of his vision which is the most private of all experiences. This
fact has two important consequences. At their best, his images are fresh and illuminating and
embody brilliant insights, but at their worst, they are cloudy, vague, and perverse, and they
obscure his meaning. With the double development of the sense of a prophetic function and of the

28
idea of the uniqueness of all things, the imagery more and more consistently operated as
symbolism.
Blake's Poetical Sketches, in their imagery as in their diction, are Blake's attempt to free
himself from the conventional, and there is at least as much of early seventeenth-century and of
eighteenth-century stock imagery as there is of the kind of original perceptions which are
generally associated with Blake. And among the conventional images ("flaming cars", "pale
deaths", and "deeps of Heaven") we come across his extraordinary innovations with a shock of
discovery:
Let thy west wind sleep on
The Lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver—
This image, one of the most astonishing in this volume, really represents a whole new way of
seeing in poetry. It is a way that his visions enabled him to explore, for he derived such boldness
in his pictorializations not from any traditional elements in poetry, but from his own early
visionary experiences. They supplied him, too with ready pictures. The lines in To Autumn:
...... joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees—
may intend to comment on birds, but they are also reminiscent of that childhood experience
recounted by his biographer Gilchrist, when Blake saw "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic
wings bespangling every bough like stars." It is impossible to tell what proportion of Blake's
images simply reproduce what he had beheld in his visions. But the fact that many of the images
were derived from his visions is corroborated by his pictures and drawings.
The content of Blake's vision is normally pastoral, with a Christian emphasis. In thePoetical
Sketches, even ships are sheep, and stars are already angels. From this primary inclination, Blake
moves in two directions. The imagery of pastoralism includes animals, but animals are wild as
well as mild, and the idyllic scene suggests its opposite. In other words, the vision darkens from
idyllic reverie to observation of natural fact. The Christian concern has its other side too,
inevitably suggesting mortality and the melodrama of death. It is from this concern that Blake's
apocalyptic imagery takes its start.
Blake's use of the device of the pathetic fallacy deserves notice. Such a line as "And the vale
darkens at my pensive woe" gives the clue to the real meaning of the imagery in the second stanza
of Mad Song where a dislocation of mind results in a dislocation of Nature:
Lo! to the vault
Of paved heaven,
With sorrow fraught
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of night,
Make weep the eyes of day;
They make mad the roaring winds,
And with tempests play.
The ease with which Blake animated the inanimate and mixed the animate with the inanimate
resulted in some of his happiest pictorial effects, but it was also the particular ingredient in his
talent that passed most rapidly out of his control and which then resulted in cloudy rhetoric.
The imagery of pastoral vision was apparently without such dangers for Blake. Here
something, perhaps the simplification inherent in all idealizations, kept the imagery pure and

29
clear. Consequently theSongs of Innocence and The Book of Thel,which expand this single strain
of imagery, are works without a single infelicity. TheSongs, however, have a defect of resonance,
a kind of attenuation which indicates that the visionary experience requires an infusion of
something from nearer home. That infusion comes in the Songs of Experience, poems that are
correspondingly richer. The visionary experience never ceases to operate but now it collaborates
beautifully with intellect:
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
That is, one would think, a Blakean vision in the most exact sense. Likewise, The Sun-flower.
Where the Youth pined away with desire
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their grave, and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
Yet in this example, and throughout theSongs of Experience, there is a new intellectual
element, observations on psychic friction and social pain that express themselves in the
deliberately developed imagery of sex, and of commerce, industrialism, and science. These
intellectual figurations lie outside the pastoral realm, and even outside the undiluted vision. They
are Blake's most original contribution to the history of English poetry. They are poetry's debt to
his determined independence—whole new fields of human experience relatively untouched by
imagery before him; and in these poems they sharpen his vision and weight it with meaning.
Without this further element, he could not have writtenLondon, certainly not these particular
lines which are among his greatest:
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls.
And without them he could not have conjured up his "system". When, in his prophetic poems,
these elements enter into his visionary experience, the imagery is successful, and when they are
neglected and the visionary experience operates alone, the imagery is unsuccessful. For it is the
intellectual element that keeps our general human experience in view, and that maintains the
balanced relationship between the world and the particularities of identity that is even more
essential to art than it is to happiness.
X
Hypocrisy: Its Symbolic Expression
One of Blake's remarkable symbols is good and evil wedded as one, and always loathed but
always fascinating. This symbol is the hypocrite. The hypocrite is the wrong-doer who knows his
wrong, and is therefore the silent witness to the knowledge of right. There is a poem by Blake in
which the hypocrite appears as an angel:
I asked a thief to steal me a peach:
He turned up his eyes.
I ask'd a little lady to lie her down:
Holy and meek she cries.
As soon as I went an angel came:
He wink'd at the thief
And smil'd at the dame,
And without one word spoke

30
Had a peach from the tree,

And 'twist earnest and joke
Enjoy'd the Lady.
Blake rewrote this poem in a number of ways, to underline the hypocrisy of its story. Here is
another poem by him, with the same theme:
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears—
Ah, she doth depart.
Soon as she was gone from me
A traveller came by Silently invisibly—
O, was no deny.
In both the poems, the writer himself fails because he makes love too honestly: he speaks. He
does not think himself wrong in this; yet neither is the traveller wrong, to play the hypocrite angel.
This is not merely how the world is: it is how the world must be—unyielding to those who remain
"trembling, cold".
Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

Magnificent Poetry
It is possible to read Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and to be so enchanted by
then that we do not stop to ask what in fact they mean. Such a procedure has the firm support of
a great modern poet who said of them: "The meaning is a poor foolish disappointing thing in
comparison with the verses themselves." This is of course true. The mere meaning, extracted from
the poems and paraphrased in lifeless prose, is indeed a poor thing in comparison with what Blake
wrote. The poems succeed through the magnificence of their poetry, and no analysis can take its
place.
Necessary to Know the Meaning

At the same time it is almost impossible to read and enjoy poetry without knowing what it
means, for the good reason that the meaning is an essential part of the whole and makes an
essential contribution to the delight which the poems give. When we know what Blake means, we
appreciate more fully his capacity for transforming complex states of mind into pure song and for
giving to his most unusual thoughts an appeal which is somehow both intimate and delightfully
exciting.
Two Contrary States
Blake grouped these poems under two main headings— "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of
Experience"—and there is plainly a great difference of character between the two groups. He
described these songs as "showing the two contrary states of the human soul". In so arranging his
work, Blake followed his own maxim that "without contraries is no progression".

31
Architectural Order
This contrast meant much to him, and if we neglect it we do so at the risk of misunderstanding
his intention. So emphatic a division is not to be found in the prophetic books, and it shows that,
when he liked, Blake could impose a fine architectural order on his work.
Innocence and Its Destruction
The two groups of songs are contrasted elements in a single design. The first group sets out
an imaginative vision of the state of innocence; the second shows how life challenges and corrupts
and destroys it. What Blake intended by this scheme may be seen from the motto which he wrote
for the book but which he did not include in it. That motto (written in the form of a little poem of
eight lines) shows how the Songs are related to some of the most persistent elements in Blake's
thought.
The Main Theme
For Blake what matters is the active life of the creative imagination. He is opposed to building
philosophical systems on sense-perceptions instead of on "vision". He believes that the naturally
good are deceived by such systems and so corrupted by them that they cease to think for
themselves. When this happens, knavery, hypocrisy, and selfishness enter into the soul and the
state of innocence is lost. But for those who have eyes to see, the soaring spirit of the eagle is
visible in all its difference from the sleepy owl. This is the main theme of the Songs. In the first
group Blake shows what innocence means; in the second how it is corrupted and destroyed.
Innocence and Pastoral Life
Blake's state of innocence is set forth in symbols of pastoral life. At first sight he seems to
have something in common with what Vaughan, Traherne, and Wordsworth: say in their different
ways about the vision of childhood which is lost later in life. But Blake is concerned not with the
loss so much of actual childhood as of something wider and less definite. For him childhood is
both itself and a symbol of a state of soul which may exist in maturity. His subject is the child-like
vision of existence.
An Exposition and a Treatise
Songs of Innocence and of Experience showing the two Contrary States of the Human
Soul is a title which shows that we are not dealing simply with a collection of songs about
childhood and youth, but with a treatise and an exposition. And yet the word "Songs" tells us
truthfully that the form is poetry.
Three Categories
Many of these Songs, it is true, are simple enough. They are exactly what they seem; lyrics of
bird-like beauty and Arcadian charm. Others have a double beauty, a beauty of simple meaning
and an accompanying beauty of remoter thought. In a few the very poetry seems to recede into
magic caves, whence it can only be unearthed by deep study of the charms of Blake's magianry.
A Didactic Purpose
But both beauty and meaning are intended to serve a purpose, a didactic purpose. Blake has
set out to enlighten us about the soul of man, and to do this gives us a living realization of its "two
contrary states".

32
Double Vision
Blake at this time saw all things two-fold. If the soul had its contrary states, words and images
had their secondary, and deeper meaning, while vision itself, the organic faculty of speculation in
the eye, was often vividly two-fold. There were moments of exaltation when Blake quite literally
saw double. A tree by a stream in the sunshine was not only a tree, but a paradise of angels, and
yet still a tree. This ecstatic mystic experience is the foundation of Blake's power.
Blake's Fundamental Philosophy
Blake's system sometimes entangled him and helped to weave that vast complex of obscurity
which envelops his later poetry. But his fundamental philosophy, as we find it in the "Songs" is
singularly simple and sane. Joy he conceives as the core of life. We do not learn, or receive, or
derive this joy from something else; it is our being and essence. And yet no one better understood
the part played by sorrow in the expansion of the soul. Indeed, grief and misunderstanding may
be so bad as to destroy souls, so far as anything can ever be destroyed. In A Little Boy Lost and A
Little Girl Lost, we have the stories of innocence thwarted and destroyed at the very moment when
it was reaching out to experience. But every birth into a higher life may be through the portals of
pain and distress; so that radiant as our essential Being is, there is no place too dark or dire for
the mind to contemplate or for the soul to explore. If God is as manifest as the Lamb "by the
stream and o'er the mead", He can reveal himself equally "in the forests of the night" as the Tiger.
And when the night yields to day it is a greater day.
Blake's Child-like Qualities
And yet with all his maturity of meaning, Blake is in some ways singularly child-like. Indeed,
he might almost be described as the boy who grew up to be a genius, a prophet, without ever
"growing up". Taken separately a number of the strands which make up Blake's peculiar genius
are characteristically childlike things. Children love to draw pictures and then paint them in bright
colours. They make up little rhymes and sing them. They think it would be very nice if we all ran
about naked and played with the animals. They like to imagine dreadful and lovely things
happening. They are often very angry with the grown-up world. All these things Blake understood
not as an outsider but because he had them in himself. There is also something of the child in his
faith in the use of metaphor and symbol to explain and simplify the mysteries of being; and
certainly the visionary faculty itself is almost universal in some form with children.
Blake's Indifference to Being Understood
There are certain other child-like features of the Songs. One of these is Blake's perfect
indifference to being understood. He seems quite as happy talking to the angels as a child talking
to its dolls, without a thought of being overheard.
Intense Concentration of Meaning
A characteristic of Blake's, though not in itself child-like, is closely connected with things that
are child-like. This characteristic is his intense concentration of meaning. He has so much to say
that he can only express himself by using words that mean a great many things. His symbols are
often nothing else than bundles crammed with feelings and meanings, laboriously assembled. But
once completed these symbols are full of picturesque and dramatic possibilities, and are
indispensable to his intensely condensed expression. But he does not always use them with
success in the end. Jerusalem which is the noblest of his great prophecies and contains more
precious lumps of gold than any, is not only very obscure but is too full of gloom and of horror for
really great poetry. Much of what he had to say was for his own relief of mind, and it becomes a
burden upon our minds.

33
The Use of Symbolical Metaphor

In the Songs the concentration is often as great as in anything Blake ever uttered. There is
comparatively little actual symbolism, but there is constant and abundant use of symbolical
metaphor, which must be understood if we are to enjoy either the meaning or the beauty to the
full. (When Blake uses the Serpent to represent the Priest, it has become a pure symbol, whatever
its origin. But when he uses a tree, or green leaves, to represent the flesh, it is a metaphor
expressive of the sweet earthiness of the unthinking life of man and animals).
Musical Qualities of His Verse
Much of Blake's verse suggests musical analogies. Almost all his greatest works are
harmonies, a theme with a deeper and sometimes several deeper meanings reverberating below
and within. The Blossom, for instance, is a pretty little song of the garden on the surface, but it is
also a lullaby or cradle song. Closely examined, it turns out to be a unique and exquisite love-song,
conveyed in symbol and closely associated with the exquisite inner theme ofInfant Joy. (In
conjunction with Blake's illustration of its theme, the poem becomes an essay on bodily love, its
beauty and its course in human life, and also its expression in art). All this is condensed into forty-
four words including the title, (twenty-seven if we omit repetitions).
Exquisite Qualities of the Songs
These poems are really unequalled in their kind. Such verse was never written for children
since verse-writing began. Only in a few of those faultless fragments of childish rhyme which float
without name or form upon the memories of men shall we find such a pure clear cadence of verse,
such rapid ring and flow of lyric laughter, such sweet and direct choice of the just word and figure,
such an impeccable simplicity; nowhere but here such a tender wisdom of holiness, such a light
and perfume of innocence.
The Beauty of "Night" and of "The Little Black Boy"
Nothing like this was ever written on that text of the lion and the lamb; no such heaven of
sinless animal life was ever conceived so intensely and sweetly:
And there the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold;
And pitying the tender cries,
And walking round the fold,
Saying, "Wrath, by His meekness,
And, by His health, sickness,
Is driven away
From our immortal day.
"And now beside thee, bleating lamb,
I can lie down and sleep;
Or think on Him who bore thy name,
Graze after thee and weep.
For washed in life's river
My bright mane for ever,
Shall shine like the gold,
As I guard o'er the fold."
The leap and fall of the verse here is so perfect as to make it a fit garment and covering for
the profound tenderness of faith and soft strength of innocent impulse embodied in it. But the
whole of this hymn of Night is wholly beautiful; being perhaps one of the two poems of loftiest

34
loveliness among all the Songs of Innocence. The other is called The Little Black Boy: a poem
especially exquisite for its noble forbearance from vulgar pathos and achievement of the highest
and must poignant sweetness of speech and sense; in which the poet's mysticism is baptized with
pure water and taught to speak as from faultless lips of children, to such effect as this:
"And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of
love’. And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
Other Wonderful Poems
Other poems of a very perfect beauty areThe Piper, The Lamb, The Chimney
Sweeperand Infant Joy; all, for the music in them, more like the notes of birds caught up and
given back than the modulated measure of human verse. One cannot say, being so slight and
seemingly wrong in metrical form, how they come to be so absolutely right, but right even in point
of verses and words they assuredly are. If further formal completion of rhyme and rhythm were
added to that song, Infant Joy, it would break up the soft bird-like perfection of clear light sound
which gives it beauty: the little bodily melody of soul-less and painless laughter.
The Great Qualities of the "Songs of Experience"
The "Songs of Experience" contain several pieces which are higher, for the great qualities of
verse, than anything in the "Songs of Innocence". If the "Songs of Innocence" have the shape and
smell of leaves or buds, the "Songs of Experience" have in them the light and sound of fire or the
sea. Entering among them, a fresher savour and a larger breath strike one upon the lips and
forehead. In the first collection we are shown those who have, or who deserve, the gift of spiritual
sight; in the second we are shown what things there are for them to see when that gift (of spiritual
sight) has been given. Innocence, the quality of beasts and children, has the keenest eyes; and
such eyes alone can see and interpret the actual mysteries of experience. It is natural that this
second collection, dealing as it does with such things as underlie the outer forms of the first
collection, should rise higher and dive deeper in point of mere words. These (the Songs of
Experience) give the distilled perfume and extracted blood of the veins in the rose-leaf, the sharp,
liquid, intense spirit crushed out of the broken kernel in the fruit. The last of the Songs of
Innocence is a prelude to this second collection; in it the poet summons to judgment the young
and single-spirited, that by right of the natural impulse of delight in them they may give sentence
against the preachers of convention and assumption.
"Introduction"
And in the first poem of the second collection he, by the same "voice of the Bard", calls upon
Earth herself, the mother of all these, to arise and become free: since upon her limbs are also
bound the fetters, and upon her forehead also has fallen the shadow, of a jealous law: from which
nevertheless, by faithful following of instinct and divine liberal impulse, earth and man shall
obtain deliverance:
Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, and Future sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word,
That walked among the ancient trees,
Calling the lapsed soul,
And weeping in the evening dew;
That might control

35
The starry pole,

And fallen, fallen light renew!
If Earth and the dwellers upon Earth will hear the Word, they shall be made again as little
children; they shall regain the strong simplicity of eye and hand proper to the pure and single of
heart; and for them inspiration shall do the work of innocence. Let them but once give up the
doctrine by which comes sin and the law by which comes prohibition. Therefore must the appeal
be made; so that the blind may see and the deaf hear, and the unity of body and spirit be made
manifest in perfect freedom; and so that to the innocent even the liberty of "sin" may be granted.
For, if the soul suffers by the body's doing, are not both degraded? And if the body be oppressed
for the soul's sake, are not both the losers?
O Earth, O Earth, return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn.
And the mom
Rises from the slumberous mass.
Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away?
The starry floor,
The watery store.
Is given thee till the break of day.
For so long, during the night of law and oppression of material form, the divine evidences
hidden under sky and sea are left her; even "till the break of day". Will she not get quit of this
spiritual bondage to the heavy body of things, to encumbrance of deaf clay and blind vegetation,
before the light comes that shall redeem and reveal?
"Earth's Answer"
But the earth, being yet in subjection to the creator of men, the jealous God who divided
Nature against herself—father of woman and man, legislator of sex and race—makes blind and
bitter answer as in sleep, "her locks covered with grey despair":
Prisoned on this watery shore,
Starry jealousy does keep my den;
Cold and hoar, Weeping o'er,
I hear the Father of the Ancient Men.
Thus in the poet's mind, Nature and Religion are the two letters of life, one on the right wrist,
the other on the left; an obscure material force on this hand, and on that a mournful impious law:
the law of divine jealousy, the government of a God who weeps over his creature and subject with
unprofitable tears, and rules by forbidding and dividing: the Urizen of the Prophetic Books,
clothed with the coldness and the grief of remote sky and jealous cloud. Here as always, the cry is
as much for light as for licence, the appeal not more against prohibition than against obscurity:
Does the sower
Sow by night,
Or the ploughman in darkness plough ?
In the Songs of Innocence there is no such glory of metre or sonorous beauty of lyrical work
as here. No possible effect of verse can be finer in a great brief way than that given in the second
and the last stanzas of the first poem here. It recalls within one's ear the long relapse of recoiling
water and wash of the refluent wave; in the third and fourth lines sinking suppressed as with equal

36
pulses and soft sobbing noise of ebb, to climb again in the fifth line with a rapid clamour of ripples
and strong ensuing strain of weightier sound, lifted with the lift of the running and ringing sea.
"The Tiger"
In the Songs of Experience is to be found also that most famous of Blake's lyrics, The Tiger, a
poem beyond praise for its fervent beauty and vigour of music. Nor has Blake left us anything of
more profound and perfect value than The Human Abstract; a little mythical vision of the growth
of terror; through soft sophistries of pity and faith, subtle humanity of abstinence and fear, under
which the pure simple nature lies corrupted and strangled; through selfish loves which prepare a
way for cruelty, and cruelty that works by spiritual abasement and awe:
Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the caterpillar and fly
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat;
And the raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
Under the shadow of this tree of mystery, rooted in artificial belief, all the meaner kinds of
devouring things take shelter and eat of the fruit of its branches; the sweet poison of false faith,
painted on its outer husk with the likeness of all things noble and desirable; and in the deepest
implication of barren branch and deadly leaf, the bird of death, with priests for worshippers ("the
priests of the raven of dawn", loud of lip and hoarse of throat until the light of love have risen),
find house and resting-place. Only in the "miscreative brain" of fallen men can such a thing strike
its tortuous root and bring forth its fatal flower; nowhere else in all nature can the tyrants of
divided matter and moral law, "Gods of the earth and sea", find soil that will bear such fruit.
"To Tirzah"
To Tirzah is a poem in which Blake has expressed his spiritual creed more clearly and
earnestly than anything else. Tirzah in his mythology represents the mere separate and human
nature, mother of the perishing body and daughter of the "religion" which occupies itself with
laying down laws for the flesh; which, while pretending (and that in all good faith) to despise the
body and bring it into subjection as with control of bit and bridle, does implicitly over-rate its
power upon the soul for evil or good, and thus falls foul of fact on all sides by assuming that spirit
and flesh are twain, and that things pleasant and good for the one can properly be loathsome or
poisonous to the other. In this poem Blake eagerly and directly appeals against any rule or
reasoning based on reference to the more sexual and external nature of man—the nature made
for ephemeral life and speedy death, kept alive "to work and weep" only through that mercy which
"changed death into sleep". Blake shows a strong reliance on redemption from such a law by the
grace of imaginative insight and spiritual freedom, typified in "the death of Jesus".
The Living Power of the Imagination
In the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, we get only hints of the final consummation
which shall restore men to the fullness of joy. These poems are concerned with an earlier stage in
the struggle and treat of it from a purely poetical standpoint. What Blake gives is the essence of
his imaginative thought about this crisis in himself and in all men. When he completed the whole
book in its two parts, he knew that the state of innocence was not enough, but he had not found
his full answer to his doubts and questions. From this uncertainty he wrote his miraculous poetry.
Against the negative powers, which he found so menacingly in the ascendant, he set, both in

37
theory and in practice, his gospel of the imagination. Strange as some of his ideas may be to us,
the poetry comes with an unparalleled force because of the prodigious release of creative energy
which has gone to its making. The prophet of gigantic catastrophes and celestial reconciliations
was also a poet who knew that poetry alone could make others share his central experiences. In
the passion and tenderness of these Songs there is something beyond analysis, that living power
of the imagination which was the beginning and the end of Blake's activity. Because Blake pierced
beyond the visible world to eternal powers ("an innumerable company of the Heavenly host
crying: Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty") and made them his daily company, he was
able to give to his poetry the clarity and the brightness of vision.
Rossetti's Comment
This is how Dante Gabriel Rossetti reacted to the "Songs of Innocence and of Experience":
"The first series is incomparably the more beautiful of the two, being indeed almost flawless
in essential respects; while in the second series, the five years intervening between the two had
proved sufficient for obscurity and the darker mental phases of Blake's writing to set in and greatly
mar its poetic value. This contrast is more especially evident in those pieces whose subjects tally
in one and the other series. For instance, there can be no comparison between the first Chimney
Sweeper, which touches with such perfect simplicity the true pathetic chord of its subject, and the
second, tinged somewhat with the common-places, if also with the truths, of social discontents."
Remarkable Lyrical Poems
In recent years scholars have tended to neglect the "Songs of Innocence and of Experience"
for the prophetic books, because the Songs look limpid and translucent, while the prophetic books
are rich in unresolved mysteries and alluring secrets. But the Songs deserve special attention if
only because they constitute one of the most remarkable collections of lyrical poems written in
English.
The Singer
Blake made in practice a distinction between poetry and prophecy. In the first place, he
recognized and maintained a difference of form. In the Songs he uses the traditional metres of
English songs and hymns without even repeating the experiment, of using lyrical blank verse,
which he made in Poetical Sketches. In the prophecies he uses what is in fact free verse, and his
reasons for this are given in the Foreword to Jerusalem. In the prophecies he speaks as an orator
and needs an orator's freedom. In the Songs he sings and needs the regular measures of song.
The Purpose
In the second place, his purpose differs in the Songs and in the prophecies. In the prophecies
he had a great message for his generation, an urgent call to awake from its slothful sleep, a
summons to activity and to that fuller life which comes from exerting the imagination. This is not
the spirit in which he begins the "Songs of Innocence" with a poem significantly
called Introductionwhich reveals a poet who sings because he must and not a prophet whose first
wish is to summon his generation to a new life. In the Songs Blake pursued a more traditional and
more lyrical art, because some deep need in him called for this kind of expression. There are
undeniable connections between the Songs and the prophetic books, but the Songs go their own
way in their own spirit. In the Songs he speaks of himself from a purely personal point of view. It
is true that he uses his own remarkable symbols, but not quite in the same way as in the prophetic
books, and certainly not with the same desire for a new mythology to supplement or correct that
of the Bible.

38
Blake's Conception of God

In the "Songs of Innocence" the symbols convey a special kind of existence or state of soul. In
this state human beings have the same kind of security and assurance as belongs to lambs under
a wise shepherd or to children with loving parents. Both the shepherd and the father of Blake's
poems is God. It is He who is Himself a lamb and becomes a little child, who watches over sleeping
children and gives his love to chimney sweepers and little black boys. In the fatherhood of God,
Blake's characters have equal rights and privileges. But by it he means not quite what orthodox
Christians do. Blake, despite his deeply religious nature, did not believe that God exists apart from
man. For him, God is the creative and spiritual power in man, and apart from man the idea of God
has no meaning. When Blake speaks of the divine, it is with reference to this power and not to any
external or independent godhead. So when his Songs tell of God's love and care, we must think of
them as qualities which men themselves display and in so doing realize their full, divine nature.
For instance, in the poem On Another's Sorrow, Blake's message seems to be that every sigh and
every tear of ours evoke a response from our divine nature and through this are cured and turned
to joy. Compassion is part of man's imaginative being, and through it he is able to transform
existence. For Blake, God is the divine essence which exists potentially in every man and woman.
Divine Qualities in Man
The power and appeal of this belief appear in The Divine Image. The divine image, of course,
is man, but man in part of his complex being and seen from a special point of view. The divine
qualities, which Blake enumerates in the poem, exist in man and reveal their divine character
through him. In mercy, pity, peace, and love he found the creed of brotherhood which is the centre
of his gospel. It is in the combination of these qualities that man is God. In the state of innocence,
life is governed by these qualities, and it is these which give to life its completeness and security
in that state. That is why Blake calls his Songs of Innocence "happy songs" which "every child will
joy to hear".
The Use of Symbols
What Blake describes are not actual events as ordinary men see and understand them, but
spiritual events which have to be stated in symbolic terms in order that they may be intelligible.
In the "Songs of Innocence" his symbols are largely drawn from the Bible, and since he makes use
of such familiar figures as the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God, there is not much difficulty
in seeing what he means. But in the "Songs of Experience" he often uses symbols of his own
making, and his meaning is more elusive. Indeed, some poems in this group are fully
understandable only by reference to symbols which Blake uses in his prophetic books.
Allegory Addressed to Intellectual Powers
Blake, then, anticipates those poets of a hundred years later who forged their own symbols in
order to convey what would otherwise be almost inexpressible, since no adequate words exist for
the unnamed powers of a supernatural world. Blake's own view of his method was thus stated by
him: "Allegory addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the
corporeal understanding, is my definition of the most sublime poetry."
Events in a Spiritual World
Since by "corporeal understanding" Blake means the perception of sense-data, and by
"intellectual powers" the imaginative spirit which is the only reality, it is clear that in his view
poetry is concerned with something else than the phenomenal world, and that the only means to
speak of it is what he calls "allegory". It is true that elsewhere he sometimes speaks
contemptuously of allegory, but that is because he distinguishes between true and false allegory.
For him allegory in the good sense is a system of symbols which present events in a spiritual world.

39
Songs of Innocence
The Spontaneous Happiness of Childhood
Blake was thirty years of age when he began to write the "Songs of Innocence". This is an
astounding fact, for the "Songs of Innocence" express for the first time in English literature the
spontaneous happiness of childhood. Now nothing in the whole world of emotion is of lighter
texture than the happiness of a child. Like the dew, it vanishes with the first rays of the sun, and
its essential quality, spontaneity, is a thing never to be recalled.
The Universal Quality of these Poems

The spontaneity of these songs is the spontaneity of art, not of nature, of imagination and not
of experience. Nothing but the purest imagination could give so stainless an image. The pure
expression of spontaneity has never been made before or since. Compare the "Songs of Innocence"
with Stevenson's "Child's Garden of Verses", and we are at once conscious of an immense
difference. Stevenson writes of his own childhood, making the reminiscent efforts and fanciful
condescensions of a grown man. Blake recaptures the child mind. He does not merely write about
childish happiness; he becomes the happy child. He does not speak of, or for, the child; he lets the
child speak its own delight and, what is most marvellous, there are no false tones in his voice.
Stevenson is particular: he writes memoirs of his own childhood: he expresses what he
remembers of his own wonder or fancy, his childish hopes and fears. Blake is universal; he
expresses the natural delight in the life of every happy child in the world. The cry of his "Little Boy
Lost" is the cry of every child at the first discovery of loneliness.
Their Symbolic Character
All this has been recognized. But what is not so widely recognized is the fact that these songs
are all symbolic. The Lamb is a symbol of "the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world."
The Echoing Green is not only the record of a happy day; it is a symbolic presentation of the
Day of Innocence from sunrise to sunset. Infant Joy, The Little Black Boy, andLaughing
Song symbolize the three ages of Innocence: infancy, childhood, and youth. A Cradle Song,
Nurse's Song, and Holy Thursday are symbolic of the same three ages of man, this time in
relation to society; and the remaining poems, which image the human soul in its quest of self-
realization, are all of even deeper symbolic import. Reading them in the order Blake once decided
they should be placed, we pass through consecutive stages of growth from infancy to self-
consciousness. It is a mistake to say that the symbolism of these poems is so unobtrusive that it
can well be neglected. Without that symbolism, these poems could not have been written, and to
ignore this fact is not the best way to appreciate them.
Blake's Theme
Blake's theme was the soul of man. His aim was to reveal the nature of the soul. This is
ultimately the concern of every true poet. Blake differs from others in that it was his whole
concern. His aim being clear to him, how was he to attain it ? Symbols, as Freud has shown, are
the only language of the soul. When Blake realized exactly what he wanted to write about he could
employ no other means but symbols. How else could the immaterial adventures of the soul find
sensible means of expression?

40
Technical Faults and Merits

Blake was in assured possession of the Golden Age within the chambers of his own mind. As
we read these poems, fugitive glimpses open of our buried childhood; we are given a new spiritual
sight. We encounter familiar objects, in unfamiliar, transfigured aspects, simple expression and
deep meanings, type and anti-type.
True, there are palpable irregularities, metrical licence, lapse of grammar; but often the
sweetest melody, most daring eloquence of rhythm, and appropriate rhythm. They
are unfinished poems; yet would "finish" have bettered their bold and careless freedom? Would it
not have brushed away the delicate bloom?
Would it not have destroyed that visible spontaneity, so rare and great a charm, the eloquent
attribute of the old English, ballads and of the early songs of all nations. The form of these poems
is a transparent medium of the spiritual thought, not an opaque body.
Divine Afflatus
There is in these poems the same divineafflatus as in Blake's Poetical Sketches, but now it is
fuller: a maturity of expression, despite the persisting negligences; and a maturity of thought and
motive. These poems have also a unity and a mutual relationship, the influence of which is much
weakened if the poems be read otherwise than as a whole.
"Holy Thursday"
Who but Blake, with his pure heart, his simple exalted character, could have transfigured a
common-place meeting of charity children at St. Paul's, as he has done in the Holy Thursday ? It
is a picture at once tender and grand. The bold images, by a wise instinct resorted to at the close
of the first and second stanzas and the opening of the third, are in the highest degree imaginative;
they are true as only poetry can be.
Other Poems
How vocal is the poem Spring, despite imperfect rhymes! From addressing the child, the
poet, by a transition infrequent with him; passes out of himself into the child's person, showing a
wide-ranging sympathy; with childlike feelings. We are made to see the little three-year-old
prattler stroking the white lamb, her feelings made articulate for her. Even more remarkable is
the poem called The Lamb. It is a sweet hymn of tender infantine sentiment appropriate to that
perennial image of meekness. To this poem the fierce eloquence of The Tiger in the "Songs of
Experience" is an anti-type. In The Lamb the poet again changes person to that of a child. Of
lyrical beauty, The Laughing Song is a good specimen, with its happy ring of merry innocent
voices. This and the Nurse's Songare more in the style of his early poems but of far maturer
execution. The little pastoral poem The Shepherd has a delicate simplicity. Noteworthy also is The
Echoing Green with its picturesqueness in a warmer hue, its delightful domesticity, and its
expressive melody. The touching Cradle Song is irradiated by a lovely sympathy and piety. More
enchanting still is the air of fancy and sympathy which animates The Dream; that
Did weave a shade o'er my angel-guarded bed;
of an emmet that had lost her way,
Where on grass me thought I lay.
Few are the readers who can fail to appreciate the symbolic grandeur of The Little Boy
Lost and The Little Boy Found, or the enigmatic tenderness of The Blossom andThe Divine
Image. The verses, On Another's Sorrow express some of Blake's favourite religious ideas, his
abiding notions on the subject of the Godhead, which surely suggest the kernel of Christian

41
feeling. A similar tinge of the divine colours the lines calledNight with its revelation of angelic
guardians, believed in with unquestioning piety by Blake. The poet here makes us conscious, as
we read, of the noiseless steps of the angels. For nobler depth of religious beauty, with a grandeur
of sentiment and language to suit, there is no parallel or hint elsewhere of such a poem as The
Little Black Boy:
My mother bore me in the southern wild.
We may read these poems again and again, and they continue fresh as at first. There is
something in them which does not become stale, a perfume as of a growing violet, which renews
itself as fast as it is inhaled.
"The Chimney Sweeper"
One poem, The Chimney Sweeper, still calls for special notice. This and Holy Thursday are
remarkable as an anticipation of the daring choice homely subject, of the yet more daringly
familiar manner, of the very metre and trick of style adopted by Wordsworth in such poems as The
Reverie of Poor Susan, The Star-Gazers, and The Power of Music. The little chimney sweeper's
dream has the spiritual touch peculiar to Blake's hand.
The tender loveliness of these poems will hardly re-appear in Blake's subsequent writing.
Darker phases of feeling, more sombre colours, profounder meanings, ruder eloquence,
characterize the "Songs of Experience" five years later.
[The designs, simultaneous offspring with the poems, which in the most literal sense
illuminate the "Songs of Innocence", consist of poetized domestic scenes. The drawing and
draperies are as grand in style, as graceful, though covering few inches' space; the colour pure,
delicate, yet in effect rich and full. The mere tinting of the text and of the free ornamental border
often makes a refined picture. The costumes of the period are idealized, the landscape given in
pastoral and symbolic hints. Sometimes these drawings almost suffer from being looked at as a
book and held close, instead of at due distance as pictures, where they become more effective. In
composition, colour, pervading feeling, they are lyrical to the eye, as the Songs are to the ear. On
the whole, the designs to the "Songs of Innocence" are finer as well as more pertinent to the
poems; more closely interwoven with them, than those which accompany the "Songs of
Experience".]
The Renascence of Wonder
Blake's "Songs of Innocence" carried his own peculiar blend of the earthly and the unearthly.
The first stanza of the first poem has a lilt and an imaginative naivete that belong to no one else:
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me………
It is Blake's lyrics which most completely fulfil the definition of romanticism as "the
renascence of wonder". The world of Nature and man is the world of love and beauty and
innocence enjoyed by a happy child, or rather by a poet who miraculously retains an unspoiled
and inspired vision. But in the "Songs of Experience" the serpent has corrupted Eden, and themes
that before had the radiance of spontaneous purity and joy are darkened by a knowledge of age
and evil and suffering and oppressive authority. The most striking, if not the most typical contrast
is that between The Lamb and The Tiger,between a primitive painting of the innocent child, lamb,
and Christ, and a fiery incantation, a symbolic hymn of wonder and terror and power. In The

42
Tiger Blake celebrates the untamed forces in man and Nature that must shatter unnatural ethical
restraints and mechanistic philosophies.
Gilchrist's Comment
This is how Alexander Gilchrist, who wrote an exhaustive biography of Blake, commented on
the "Songs of Innocence":
"As we read, fugitive glimpses open, clear as brief, of our buried childhood, of an unseen
world present, past, to come; we are endowed with new spiritual sight, with unwonted intuitions,
bright visitants from finer realms of thought, which ever elude us, ever hover near. We encounter
familiar objects, in unfamiliar transfigured aspects, simple expression and deep meanings, type
and anti-type. True, there are palpable irregularities, metrical licence, lapse of grammar, and even
of orthography; but often the sweetest melody, most daring eloquence of rhythm, and what is
more, appropriate rhythm. They are unfinished poems: yet would finish have bettered their bold
and careless freedom? Would it not have brushed away the delicate bloom? that visible
spontaneity, so rare and great a charm, the eloquent attribute of our old English ballads, and of
the early songs of all nations. The form is, in these songs, a transparent medium of the spiritual
thought."
Songs of Experience
From Innocence to Experience
From innocence, man passes to experience. Blake knew that experience is bought at a bitter
price. His Songs of Experience are the poetry of this process. They tell how, what we accept in
childlike innocence, is tested and proved feeble by actual events, how much that we take for
granted is not true of the living world, how every noble desire may be debased and perverted.
When he sings of this process, he is no longer the piper of pleasant glee but an angry, passionate
rebel. In Infant Sorrow he provides a counterpart to his Introductionand shows that even in the
very beginnings of childhood there is a spirit of unrest and revolt: "Struggling in my father's
hands", etc. At the start of its existence the human creature feels itself a prisoner, and, after its
first efforts to resist, angrily gives up the struggle.
The Destructive Effects of Experience

When experience destroys the state of child-like innocence, it puts many destructive forces
in its place. To show the extent of this destruction Blake places in the Songs of Experience certain
poems which give poignant contrasts to other poems which appear in the Songs of Innocence. For
instance, in the first Nurse's Song he tells how children play and are allowed to go on playing until
the light fades and it is time to go to bed. There Blake symbolizes the care-free play of the human
imagination when it is not spoiled by senseless restrictions. But in the second Nurse's Song we
hear the other side of the matter, when experience has set to work. The voice that now speaks is
not that of loving care but of sour age, envious of a happiness which it can no longer share and
eager to point out the menaces and the dangers of the dark. It sees play as a waste of time and
cruelly tells the children that their life is a sham passed in darkness and cold. The first and most
fearful thing about experience is that it breaks the free life of the imagination and substitutes a
dark, cold, imprisoning fear; and the result is a deadly blow to the cheerful human spirit.

43
The Sin of Hypocrisy

The fear and denial of life which come with experience breed hypocrisy, and this receives
some of Blake's harshest and hardest criticism. He regards hypocrisy as a grave sin, like cruelty,
because it rises from the same causes, from the refusal to obey the creative spirit of the
imagination and from submission to fear and envy. He defines it by providing an antithesis to The
Divine Image in The Human Abstract. In bitter irony he shows how love, pity, and mercy can be
distorted and used as a cover for base or cowardly motives. Speaking through the hypocrite's lips,
he goes straight to the heart of the matter by showing how glibly hypocrisy claims to observe these
cardinal virtues .
Jealousy, Cruelty, Etc.
In Holy Thursday Blake shows what this means, how in a rich and fruitful land children live
miserably. The horror of experience is all the greater because of the contrast which Blake suggests
between it and innocence. In The Echoing Green he tells how the children are happy and
contented at play, but in The Garden of Love, to the same rhythm and with the same setting, he
presents an ugly antithesis. The green is still there, but on it is a chapel with "Thou shall not"
written over the door, and the garden itself has changed. In the state of experience, jealousy,
cruelty, and hypocrisy forbid the natural play of the affections and turn joy into misery.
Restrictions which Kill
Blake was painfully and acutely aware of the restrictions which kill the living spirit of man.
His heart was outraged and wounded by the whole trend of contemporary civilization:
In London he gives his own view of that "unchartered liberty" on which his countrymen prided
themselves, and he exposes the indisputable, ugly facts. This poem shows the anguish with which
Blake faced the social questions of his time. In a corrupt frame of mind, selfishness and cruelty
flourish and are dignified under false names. This process wrecks the world. Harsh rules are
imposed on life through what Blake calls "Mystery" with its ceremonies and hierarchies and its
promise of "an allegorical abode where existence hath never come" (Europe). It supports those
outward forms of religion which Blake regards as the death of the soul:
Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head;
And the caterpillar and fly
Feed on the Mystery.
(The Human Abstract)
In this poem Blake re-creates the myth of the Tree of Knowledge or of Life. This tree, which
is fashioned by man's reason, gives falsehood instead of truth, and death instead of life.
The Loss of Love and Affection
Perhaps the worst thing in experience, as Blake sees it, is that it destroys love and affection.
On no point does he speak with more passionate conviction. He who believes that the full life
demands not merely tolerance but forgiveness and brotherhood finds that in various ways love is
corrupted or condemned. The Clod and The Pebbleshows how love naturally seeks not to please
itself, or have any care for itself, but in the world of experience the heart becomes like "a pebble
of the brook" and turns love into a selfish desire for possession. The withering of the affections
begins early, when the elders repress and frighten children.

44
The Anguish Behind the "Songs of Experience"

The Songs of Experience are more powerful than the Songs of Innocence because they are
born of a deep anguish, from a storm in the poet's soul. Blake knows that one kind of existence is
bright with joy and harmony, but he sees its place taken by another which is dark and sinister and
dead. But Blake was not content simply to complain or to criticize. He sought some ultimate
synthesis is which innocence might be wedded to experience, and goodness to knowledge. That
such a state is possible he reveals in the first poem of the "Songs of Experience", where he speaks
with the voice of the bard and summons the fallen soul of earth to some vast apocalypse.
The Link Between the Two Groups
Blake felt also that, although the state of child-like innocence and happiness is wonderfully
charming, it was not everything and it could not last. To reach a higher state, man must be tested
by experience and suffering. This is the link between the two groups of Songs—of Innocence and
of Experience. Experience is not only a fact; it is a necessary stage in the cycle of being. It may in
many ways be a much lower state than innocence, and this Blake stresses with great power, but it
is nonetheless necessary.
The Difference Between the Two Groups
The difference between the state of innocence and the state of experience is reflected in the
quality of Blake's poetry. Sweet and pure though the Songs of Innocence are, they do not possess
or need the compelling passion of the Songs of Experience. In dealing with innocence, Blake seems
deliberately to have set his tone in a quiet key to show what innocence really means in his full
scheme of spiritual development. He was careful to exclude from the first part of his book anything
which might sound a disturbing note or suggest that innocence is anything but happy. That is why
he omitted a striking verse which he wrote in the first version ofA Cradle Song. The illusion of
childhood and of the human state which resembles it must be kept free from such intruding
suggestions, and there must be no hint that innocence is not complete and secure.
The Lyrical Quality of the "Songs of Experience"
The "Songs of Experience" were inspired by violent emotions and have a merciless satirical
temper. In spite of that, they are in the highest degree lyrical. Indeed, no English poet, except
Shakespeare, has written songs of such lightness and melody. Yet Blake's subjects are not in the
least like Shakespeare's. He writes not about fundamental matters like spring and love and death,
but about his own original and complex views on existence. And the miracle is that in presenting
themes which might seem to need comment and explanations, he succeeds in creating pure song.
His words have an Elizabethan lilt, a music which emphasizes their meaning and conforms exactly
to it. Despite his strong emotions and his unfamiliar ideas, Blake keeps his form miraculously
limpid and melodious. This success is partly the result of a highly discriminating art. Blake made
many changes in his texts before he was satisfied with a final version, and these show how well he
knew what he was doing, how clear an idea he had of the result which he wished to reach. But this
art was shaped by a creative impulse so powerful that it can only be called inspiration. Blake
indeed believed that his words were often dictated to him by some supernatural power. As he said
about one of his prophetic books: "I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than
the secretary; the authors are in eternity". In the strange workings of the creative mind there is a
point at which words come with such force and intensity that they have a more than human
appeal. Though the poet may not receive them all at once but gradually find, as Blake did, the
exact words which he needs, yet these songs are miracles because their creation cannot be
explained and because with them we feel ourselves in the presence of something beyond the
control of man.

45
Separateness and Repulsion in their Unity

Some of the "Songs of Experience" produce an impression that, in respect of their mode of
poetic organization or structure, everything is held back from contact with everything else. If
they have a unity, it is that of a sustained negative conviction. Separateness and repulsion pervade
this unity. For instance, it is a sequence of separated, isolated people that Blake passes and
observes in London:
...... every cry of every man ……every infant's cry of fear
man and child, church and child sweep, palace and soldier, harlot, client (it may be), child, bride
and groom—each is the enemy of its counterpart; each is without a living relation to any of the
others. The verbs ("appals", "runs in blood down", "blasts" "blight" and the concealed actions of
fearing, cursing and weeping)—all show this same principle at work. In Infant. Sorrow, the child
is endangered by the world, struggles against the father, strives against the swaddling bands, sulks
against the mother. In A Little Boy Lost there is first the self-hood of the little boy, asserted over
the bond between him and his father and brothers: and then the priest who seems to be enemy as
much to the parents as to the child. Even between parent and child, there is no active relation,
only helpless weeping.
The Structure of the Opening Poem
The Introduction to the "Songs of Experience" is another poem that presents a universe of
disjunction and non-relation. Even the initial image of the divine presence (the "Holy Word")
walking among the trees is an illustration: its essential structure is not unlike that in London, of
the poet walking among his fellow-Londoners and noticing them one by one. Both the divine
presence is calling the soul that has "lapsed" away from it: and, whether it is the divine presence
itself or the divinely inspired "voice of the Bard" that is in question, the starry pole that "might"
be controlled but is not, and the "fallen" light that this might renew but does not, are "lapsed" into
disjunction as well. When the "voice of the Bard" speaks, as it seems to do through the second half
of the poem, what it speaks of is also opposites and unrelateds: the "starry floor" (of heaven) and
"watery shore", and the morning that "rises from" the "slumbrous mass" of the darkened earth.
More remarkable still, even what the poem calls for (as against what it unhappily
diagnoses), seems to come in similar terms:
O Earth, O Earth, return!
Arise from out the dewy grass
The call is presumably to fallen humanity ("fashioned" out of clay), but that it should be called
on to "rise from out" of the ground from which it was made is something that follows the reiterated
movement of the poem. Similar again is at least the suggestion by the closing lines:
The starry floor,
The watery shore
Is given thee till the break of day.
If the esoteric, symbolic meaning of the poem be taken into account, this probably means that
at the moment of his spiritual rejuvenation, man will repudiate, and be withdrawn from, the world
of the senses and move into the intelligible world. But the poet has found means to refer even to
this event (which, in his own terms, would be restoration of harmony) along the lines of the poem's
recurrent pattern: what is stressed is the break-up of an integration, the seeming cancellation of
a bond. "Turn away no more": that is how the stanza begins. What the poem as a whole depicts,
and what it mirrors in its own mode of organization, is a world of universal "turn away".

46
The "Songs of Experience" are poems belonging to that period of man's development which
succeeds the joyful state of Innocence, and takes its form in bitter disillusion, brought about by
moral conventions and sordid realities. The happy and confident child becomes the jaded adult;
the joyful bride becomes the hard-worked house-wife; the idealistic youth becomes a man of the
world.
The poems may reflect, too, Blake's own changing views. The 'Songs of Innocence'
represented his outlook when they were written; but as he grew older he became painfully aware
of the shortcomings of the life surrounding him—poverty, oppression, injustice, were but a few of
the sores of contemporary society. And although he was successful as a journeyman engraver, his
imaginative work found little recognition, his idealistic messages fell unheeded. The 'Songs of
Experience', therefore, in seeing every innocent joy paralleled with a sorrow, may indicate Blake's
own state of mind at the time. Thus the innocent lamb is paralleled by the terrible tiger, in one of
his greatest poems.
Blake asks a series of questions in The Tiger. He himself could have supplied one answer to
these questions if he had quoted his own words from America and elsewhere: "Everything that
lives is holy"—everything, including the tiger. "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" The answer
is decidedly in the affirmative, and He must have smiled "his work to see", who had created a
world so rich that it contained both lamb and tiger, each different in kind, yet each, in its own
terms, holy: "One law for the lion and the ox is oppression". But the dreadful nature of the tiger
remains; it was an act of daring even for a god to create such a being.
The first two lines of the penultimate stanza appear at first to be somewhat cryptic:
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
It is thought that these lines refer to the fall of the angels as described by Milton inParadise
Lost,
They, astonished, all resistance lost,
All courage, down their weapons dropt.
In Blake's conception, when they were driven into hell, the fallen angels "watered heaven with
their tears" leaving them behind as stars. All of this has obvious relationships with the fall of man,
and the introduction into the world of death, and such terrors as the tigers. The angels and man
have fallen into Experience.
Orthodox religion also is castigated in some of the poems, as may be seen in The Garden of
Love, where priests are shown binding joys and desires with thorns:
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
Blake’s Illustrations to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience

By profession Blake was an engraver and an artist. Only his first volume of poems, "Poetical
Sketches" (1783), was printed and published by a bookseller in the ordinary way. Blake's usual
method of publication was an artistic process which he invented himself and which he called
"illuminated printing".
The "Songs of Innocence" and the "Songs of Experience" were a product of this process. The
process was quite an elaborate one. Blake wrote on copper plates the text of his poems in

47
reverse, and embellished each page with pictorial decorations. The text of his poems was neatly
written, the letters being sometimes separate, sometimes joined, in a script which resembles
Roman and sometimes italic types. Perhaps he wrote and drew in some acid-resisting ink, such
as engraver's varnish, and then reduced the surface of the rest of the plate by immersion in a
bath of aquafortis until the text and design stood out in relief.
The plate was dried, and inked; and then from the inked plate an impress was made on a
sheet of paper which became one page of the volume in preparation. After printing, the pages were
coloured by Blake and his wife in delicate water-colours, and were then bound in a slim volume
by Mrs. Blake.
Thus each copy of Blake's "Songs" had its own individuality. As the process was laborious and
necessarily slow, the volumes were produced for each client as required, and few have survived.
The "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" are all illustrated. Blake's purpose was that both
poem and picture should contribute to the reader's appreciation and enjoyment. Sometimes the
illustrations merely create an atmosphere, but sometimes they also reinforce the poem by
reference to something outside it, or help to explain it by a significant detail or symbol. It should
be noted also that some of the illustrations were made five or six years after the corresponding
poems were written, so that the pictures do not always accurately represent Blake's emotions and
attitudes at the time of composition.
Illustrations to some of the "Songs" are described below to give the reader some idea of the
purpose which they were intended to serve:
Introduction (to the "Songs of Innocence")
The illustration represents the poet as a shepherd-boy dressed in blue, bare-footed, and
carrying a shepherd's pipe. Behind him, his flock of woolly sheep are grazing upon the grass. He
stands between two trees, gazing upwards to a golden-haired cherub who is floating on a cloud
with his arms outstretched, as if urging the shepherd-lad to "pipe that song again".
The Lamb
The picture which decorates this poem represents the cherub or child of
theIntroduction speaking to a lamb, whilst the rest of the flock are either grazing or lying down.
The Shepherd
The picture here is once again the blue-clad shepherd-boy, standing under a pine tree, crook
in hand, watching the grazing of his flock.
Infant Joy
In the illustration, a stem curves round the text up to a large open flower with flame-like
petals, within which sits a mother with a baby upon her knee, receiving the blessing of an angel.
Holy Thursday (Innocence)
The design of the poem is like a sampler. At the head over the title, Holy Thursday, the boys
walk two and two, preceded by two beadles. At the foot, the girls in caps and aprons walk in pairs
behind one matron.
The Blossom
The decoration to this poem represents a tree of the flame of divine love, on a branch of which
sits an angel. Smaller spirits sport around her. One, which perhaps represents the merry Sparrow,

48
flies joyfully towards her; whilst another, perhaps the pretty Robin, crouches near the angel as if
in grief. It is difficult to see clearly whether the angel is nursing a baby, or whether the angel is
really a fairy.
The Divine Image
The emblem which illuminates the poem represents, at the foot, God raising fallen man and
woman; and from these figures rises a tree of the flame of divine love which curls and rises to the
top of the page where angels guard two praying figures.
Night
Two pictures accompany this poem. The first is a night-scene by moonlight with angels
visiting the earth. In the second, radiant human forms walk as in a garden by night.
Introduction (to the "Songs of Experience")
The frontispiece to the "Song of Experience" represents the shepherd of the
first Introduction once again with his flock of sheep. But now the shepherd has put away his pipe,
and carries the cherub upon his head. The poet is no longer a shepherd-boy piping, songs; he is a
visionary and inspired
Bard calling Earth to rise and free itself from its chains. In the illustration, Earth is
represented as a woman, lying with her back turned .
Nurse's Song (Experience)
The illustration depicts not the white-capped nurse of the first Nurse's Song, but a young and
rather stern-looking governess who is scolding a sad-looking boy with long hair.
The Angel
The illustration represents a young queen attended by a winged Cupid, who seeks in vain to
attract her attention away from her excessive modesty and shyness.
The Chimney Sweeper (Experience)
The illustration represents a sweep's boy, black with soot, walking the street in driving snow
and sleet, carrying a brush in his right hand and a bag of soot on his left shoulder.
Write a note on Blake's vision of childhood as depicted in the "Songs of

Innocence".
The world of the "Songs of Innocence" is largely a child's world. It is a world of simplicity,
purity, happiness, and security, though touches of the adult world of misery and guilt do
occasionally intrude here. The central situation in this world is that of a child or young animal
delighting in life. Fear is not necessarily totally absent from this world, but when danger threatens,
a parent-figure (father, mother, God, or angel) is at hand to console and to comfort.
The keynote of the world of the "Songs of Innocence" is struck in the very opening poem
called Introduction which is a little pastoral but which is also an appropriate preface to the poems
that follow. Blake here thinks of himself as a shepherd with a pipe, playing songs of joy in the open
country, when he sees a "child" on a cloud. At the bidding of the child, he pipes first a song about
a lamb; and under its inspiration he writes "happy songs" which "every child may joy to hear".

49
The child in this poem seems to carry suggestions of (1) the Christ child speaking from Heaven (a
"cloud"); (2) an angel symbolizing innocence; and (3) the spirit of pastoral poetry. It is possible
therefore to treat the poem as an allegory, its subject being divine inspiration. The poem brings
divinity effortlessly to earth. The fact that the poem deals with divine inspiration in such simple
and natural terms makes it a highly appropriate introduction to the Songs of Innocence. The poet
shows himself setting out happily to record the joys of childhood which are pure and secure.
The Echoing Green is the record of a happy day. It is a little idyll of a village green on a warm
afternoon in late spring. But it is also a symbolic presentation of the days of innocence from
sunrise to sunset. Children, young folk, and the old people—all participate in an "unfallen"
enjoyment of life in a beautiful natural environment. The poem reminds us of the Biblical picture
of Adam and Eve before they sinned and were expelled from Paradise. Even the reminiscences of
the old people seem not to contain any regret. The end of the day brings rest and refreshment, not
fear of darkness.
The Lamb suggests the Lamb of God that "taketh away the sin of the world". What is vital in
this poem is the nature of the innocent creature of God. Innocence has a divine source. The
innocent lamb symbolises Christ, the incarnation of love and tenderness. The child who speaks in
the poem is also identified with Christ because Christ became a child and particularly praised the
innocence of children. The child-like qualities of this poem lie particularly in the little speaker's
unselfconscious and serious address to the lamb as to another little child, and on his delight in
repetition.
The Shepherd is a tiny pastoral which celebrates the happiness of rural responsibility and
trust. The Christian imagery of the Good Shepherd underlies the poem, but it is noteworthy that
the shepherd derives undoubted human pleasure from his job. Not only the shepherd but the ewes
and the lambs seem to have achieved a sense of fulfilment. An important idea here is that the
shepherd in no way restricts the freedom of the sheep: he follows them, and they are given
confidence by his presence. The sheep's security is the security of the child's world too.
It is better to regard Infant Joy as an imaginary dialogue between a parent (father or mother)
and an infant, than as a dialogue between a fairy and an infant. The poem is a tiny drama in which
the parent supplies, in the first stanza, fanciful words for the child to express its feelings, and in
the second stanza goes on to express his or her own feelings about the baby. According to another
interpretation the child who speaks is as yet unborn, and thus has no name; it has been conceived
two days within its mother's womb. If that is so, Blake seems to say that the life of children, born
and unborn, is joyful and brings joy to the parents.
The central idea of The Little Black Boy is expressed in the following two lines:
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
This idea may be derived from the Puritan tradition of life as a trial deliberately imposed by
God, but Blake has considerably refined it. The little black boy has the same human soul, and is
just as much one of God's lambs as the little white boy, says Blake.
Laughing Song admirably blends the world of humanity and the world of non-human
Nature. The green woods laugh joyfully, as do the stream, the air, the green hill, the meadows,
and the grasshopper. Mary, Susan, and Emily, with their "sweet round mouths" are hardly
distinguishable from the birds, and it is not certain whether the table is spread with cherries and
nuts for the birds or the small girls. The poem has aptly been called "a little rhapsody for a rural
picnic".

50
Spring is a true child's poem in the way it shows a child's selective delight in Nature. The
child speaks of birds, the nightingale and the lark and the cock, and he speaks to a little lamb,
besides speaking to a little boy and a little girl. But the poem is also an example of Blake's ability
to use natural symbols without removing them from the child's world of direct sensation.
Symbolically the poem shows the joyful unity of Nature and innocent man.
The nurse in Nurse's Song provides a background of love and security for the children because
she herself is quite confident and secure: "My heart is at rest within my breast". The nurse is not
weak, but benevolent; and she agrees without anxiety to the children's request for more time to
play in the evening. The natural background is tranquil and harmless. Night is simply a time for
rest. In subject this poem is a companion to The Echoing Green.
A Cradle Song is a lullaby sung by a mother over her child. The poem is a "miracle of motherly
tenderness". Among the "Songs of Innocence" this poem occupies a central position because
happiness is here complete. The child is here shown as being always in the presence of love—the
angel of sleep, the mother, or Christ.
In The Divine Image we are given a picture of human nature as a child would see it. Blake is
here saying: "This is life as seen through innocent eyes". The child's eyes see God truly, and see
that God and man share the same good qualities—mercy, pity, peace, and love. (These eyes do not
yet see that these virtues are corrupted in the adult world of the senses).
In Holy Thursday Blake speaks of the innocent faces of the children. They are children of
charity schools and Blake describes them as "these flowers of London town". "They sit with
radiance all their own". They are "multitudes of lambs". Thus the emphasis is on innocence,
purity, meekness, and radiance. Such is the world of children. The poem ends with a moral which
could have occurred only in the "Songs of Innocence". Cherish pity, says the poet to us, lest in
hardening your hearts, you drive a child away from your door.
The Blossom is a child's expression of delight in the birds like the sparrow and the robin. The
speaker seems to be a little girl whose motherly feeling for the birds is conveyed partly by the word
"bosom". The blossom, as well as the child, sees and hears the birds, giving an additional
impression of natural innocence and uniting the human child, the birds, and the plants in simple
harmony.
In The Chimney Sweeper, the little slaves, black with soot, become clean, free, and happy in
a green plain by a river in the sun:
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.
In spite of the obvious misery of their lives, the boys retain a vision of eternal happiness and
are sustained by it. Like Holy Thursday, this poem closes with a moral: "So if all do their duty
they need not fear harm". Whatever the poetic objections to this didactic statement, it strikes an
optimistic note.
Night contains pleasing pictures of angels watching over all creatures, animal and human. If
any sheep are killed by beasts of prey, the angels receive their spirits "in new worlds". In those
new worlds even the beasts of prey will be transformed: the lion will lie down with the lamb and
meditate upon Christ. Swinburne said that nothing like this poem was ever written on that text of
the lion and the lamb; no such heaven of sinless animal life was ever conceived so intensely and
sweetly.

51
In A Dream the speaker's own bed is guarded by angels, and the lost mother ant is helped to
return to her children by a glow-worm and a beetle. No creature, human or otherwise, is in serious
danger; fear will be dispelled by love.
On Another's Sorrow expresses the view that pity is both human and divine. No mother or
father can endure a child's suffering. Likewise God cannot witness the suffering of his creatures
without being moved to tears. God smiles on all and
He doth give his joy to all;
He becomes an infant small;
He becomes a man of woe;
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Indeed, this poem appears to be a summary of the central doctrine of the "Songs of
Innocence".
In the two poems which tell us of a boy lost and found, God appears to the boy in the shape
of his father and leads him home to his mother. The boy's father has somehow failed to protect
the boy, but help is at hand; the cry for love is answered by God who is "ever nigh". The boy returns
contentedly to his mother.
It is clear, then, that the world depicted in the "Songs of Innocence" is free from fear, anxiety,
care, guilt, repressive influences, and suffering. That is why we call it a child's world. Such is the
world a child inhabits. The poems of this group give us an insight into the psychology of a child,
but it is not the entire psychology of children that is revealed. We are given only the bright aspects
of child-psychology.
As has been hinted above, suggestions of cruelty, ugliness, injustice, and suffering are not
totally absent from the "Songs of Innocence". Here and there we get anticipations or
adumbrations of the world that is depicted in the later group (the "Songs of Experience"). The
little black boy's sense of inferiority to the white boy, for instance, clings to him even in paradise.
Even in paradise, the black boy must attend upon the white boy and serve him in order to win his
love. In A Cradle Song there is a reference to the "sweet moans" and "dove-like sighs" of the
infant; the mother weeps over the infant as he sleeps; Christ is pictured as weeping "for me, for
thee, for all". In Holy Thursdaythe fact that we are reading an account of children who depended
on charity cannot remain hidden, and we do experience a pang to think of them just as we
experience a pang when we read about little Tom Dacre in The Chimney Sweeper.
In Night suffering and death do exist and cannot be evaded. When wolves and tigers howl for
prey, the angels stand helplessly and weep to see the sheep being killed and eaten. The Little Boy
Lost, if read apart from its sequel, is really a tragic poem:
The night was dark, no father was there; The child was wet with dew.
Apart from the poem's poignancy, "dew" is used by Blake to symbolize materialism, and the
"vapour" in the same poem symbolizes perhaps man's reasoning power.
However, the predominant impression which the "Songs of Innocence" produce on us is, as
already stated, that of joy, gentleness, and purity.

52
Write a critical note on Blake's view of life as presented in the "Songs

of Experience".
The world as depicted in the "Songs of Experience" is widely different from that depicted in
the "Songs of Innocence". The world in the "Songs of Innocence" was largely a child's world, a
world of simplicity, innocence, happiness, and security. The world in the "Songs of Experience" is
a world of cruelty, tyranny, repression, evil, guilt, and suffering. The "Songs of Experience" are
poems which describe the woes and injustices of civilized society. Some of these poems are
satirical of the "mind-forged manacles of custom and law. The poems in this group show Blake in
a mood of sadness and bitterness. Experience seems to have taught Blake that men are
shortsighted and blind, and that they are ignorant of the spiritual nature of life. Men wrongly
prefer reason to the mystic vision, and they wrongly prefer law and morality to natural impulse.
The world of the "Songs of Experience" is full of dangers. It would seem that fear has infected
human beings in this world. The hope of obtaining any comfort from love seems remote. There is
too much of repression, including a repression of the sexual impulse. Any sexual expression of
love meets with particularly bitter opposition from the elders in society. In these songs references
to the fall of man from God's grace are unmistakable. A golden age in the past is looked at with a
longing. A possible return of bliss, either in another future golden age on earth or in heaven, is
occasionally hinted at or stated as the only hope of human happiness, as in the
Introduction, in The Voice of the Ancient Bard and in the opening stanza of The Little Girl Lost.
The two opening poems strike the keynote of the "Songs of Experience". In the Introduction,
the Bard, like an ancient prophet, has heard God's message. If mankind will only heal this
message, a new dawn of happiness will break. Man has "lapsed" or fallen from his original happy
state in the Garden of Eden, but there is a hope of recovering that state. However, in the poem
that follows, Earth says that she is imprisoned by her fears of the false god of conventional
religion. This false god is described as "Starry Jealousy" and "Selfish Father". (He is Urizen of
Blake's later poems). The law prescribed by this god is a series of prohibitions. Blake effectively
builds up here a picture of desolation, an atmosphere of darkness and of grey despair. Earth
laments the fact that her bones are "frozen around with a heavy chain" and that "free love is bound
with bondage". In the two opening stanzas of The Little Girl Lost, the Bard, in the person of Blake
himself, strikes an optimistic note, proclaiming a golden age in future when Earth will rise from
her sleep and live in accordance with the imagination, that is, by the Word of God. The present
world is, however, a "desert wild". In The Voice of the Ancient Bard, the poet again looks forward
to a new age, but the present world is full of doubt, dark disputes, folly, and "clouds of reason".
Blake was opposed to the dictates of "reason" and believed in "energy" or the "imagination". For
him the tiger symbolised that energy or imagination. The tiger represents the abundant life which
Christ tried to bring into the world. The tiger certainly inspires terror, and that terror is fully
conveyed to us by his poem, but the tiger is essentially Blake's symbol of regeneration and energy,
though it is a symbol also of the terrifying and violent forces within man.
Blake strongly deplores sexual repression in society. A number of poems have sexual
repression as their subject. A Little Girl Lost opens with a vigorous condemnation by the poet of
the suppression of love in the present time. In the story of the poem, Ona's father is shocked and
dismayed by her having made love to a boy. The father thus represents a restrictive influence. The
Sick Rose is perhaps Blake's most concentrated expression of the horror of repressed sexuality.
Sexual repression diverts enormous psychic force into destructive eflects. This poem also
illustrates his view that sexual repression is itself sexual in character. In the poem called, The
Angel, the subject is again sexual frustration. The angel seems to protect the maiden tenderly, but

53
frustratingly, from sexual experience. The maiden hides her sexual awareness, and the angel goes
away. She resolves to have sexual experience and arms herself against the angel. But it is too late,
for she has grown old.
The main theme of the poem, Ah, Sunflower, is the need for a free expression of sexual love.
The youth and the virgin, denied and denying, are virtually dead and buried. There is no doubt
that the poet looks at this state of affairs as deplorable. The Garden of Love is an attack on
negative morality, particularly that which lays restrictions on sexual love. The garden of love
represents spontaneous natural delight. But priestly prohibitions, destroy this delight and bring
death in its place. In other words, the loss of the capacity for delight is equivalent to death. Priestly
prohibitions are here conveyed through the words "Thou shall not" written over the door of the
chapel.
In The Clod and the Pebble, Blake expresses his disapproval of the love that seeks only to
please itself and to make a prisoner of the beloved. In this poem, the tyranny of love is the target
of attack as much as the repression of love in various other poems. In My Pretty Rose Tree, the
poet sacrifices the opportunity of enjoying a woman's love in order to remain faithful to his wife,
but even this virtuous conduct on his part produces hostility in the wife. This means that the poet
might as well have enjoyed the love that was offered to him by the other woman. The wife's
jealousy shows the kind of love that is deplored in the pebble's love in the poem already
mentioned. This jealousy is the tyrannical possessiveness which Blake finds to be often a
characteristic of women's love. In The Lily, the poet sees the possibility of danger and treachery
in love (represented by the rose and the sheep), but the poet also sees the possibility that genuine
innocence and love do exist (in the shape of the white lily). The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl
Foundconvey the idea that the passions which a growing young girl experiences should not be
condemned or treated as being harmful and dangerous. These passions, particularly that of love,
are symbolised by the wild animals who take charge of Lyca but do her no harm. Thus wild animals
represent the human passions or energies which are also treated symbolically in the poem The
Tiger. Lyca's parents are made to recognise that their growing girl has now gone under the
guardianship of Love, and is therefore perfectly secure.
Then there are poems of social protest. Blake is opposed to all kinds of oppression symbolised
by the conventional religion, social institutions, schoolmasters, and even a children's nurse. In
(he "Songs of Experience", the nurse has a negative approach to children's playing. She thinks of
play as a waste of time, and she anticipates the days of maturity which will be full of deceit and
suffering for the children:
Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.
The chimney sweeper's distress now distinctly arouses the poet's indignation. The little
chimney sweeper's parents have gone to the church to pray, thinking that he is contented and
happy. But the child is quite aware of the "injury" that has been done to him, and so he speaks of
the priest and the king as making up "a Heaven of our misery".Holy Thursday denounces a society
which permits conditions in which children have to seek charity. The poet refers to England as "a
land of poverty" even though it considers itself "a rich and fruitful land". Children can never be
hungry in a land where the sun shines and the rain falls, but there are hungry children in
England. London is another poem that depicts sordid and sad conditions of life. The poet sees
"marks of weakness, marks of woe" in every face. He hears "the mind-forged manacles" in every
voice, whether of man or child. Then there is the soldier who sheds his blood in obedience to his
king, and there are the blackened chimney sweepers. Lastly, there is the tragedy of loveless
marriages which compel men to go to prostitutes and beget illegitimate children.

54
A Little Boy Lost, depicts the cruelty of the church and its priests. A little boy is burnt to death
under the orders of a priest because he dared to think for himself. Blake here brings out the full
cruelty and pathos of the situation in which a small child is accused of heresy and then punished
with death. The child in The Little Vagabond is critical of the church which is too puritanical and
which imposes unnecessary austerities upon the people. He cannot see why God and the Devil
cannot be reconciled. Why should God not show love even for the Devil ? The Schoolboy shows
the frustration of a growing child's healthy instincts. There are things which can delight the mind
of a child, but the child is sent to a school which oppresses and limits him. The schoolmaster here
represents a tyrannical influence.
and the child has to spend his whole day under the schoolmaster's supervision:
Under a cruel eye outworn
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.
Then there are a number of poems which depict human nature as unpleasant and ugly. Infant
Sorrow shows the child as "a fiend hid in a cloud", struggling and striving in his father's hands. To
Tirzak shows the physical body of man as being unwelcome and unwanted in contrast with the
spiritual body or the soul. In The Human Abstract, we are told that mercy and pity are used as a
justification for the continued existence of poverty and misery. If mercy and pity cannot he
practised except by allowing poverty and misfortune to continue, they are no longer genuine
virtues. If we really pity miserable people, we would do our best to improve their condition. As in
the poem London, Blake is here pointing out that man is responsible for the evils of society. The
"caterpillar" and the "fly" in this poem are the various types of clergymen to whom Blake was
opposed. "Mystery" is the organised religion of which Blake was an enemy. Then there is the
poem A Divine Image. Here we are told that cruelty, jealousy, terror, and secrecy are human
attributes. (This can mean that God too suffers from such evils, because God made man in His
own image).
In short, the "Songs of Experience" give us a repellent picture of human nature and English
society, though we are not shut out completely from hope. Blake's opposition to Reason is here
quite apparent. Later on, he invented a god called Urizen to symbolise Reason. The attributes of
this god are an negative, attributes which hinder, such as jealousy, fearfulness, cruelty, secrecy,
hatred of life and of joy. His agents are priests and kings; but his agents also include parents,
nurses, schoolteachers, and others in positions of some authority; they also include men and
women whose love is selfish and tyrannical. The aim of Urizen is to bind, fetter, imprison, freeze.
The above survey of the "Songs of Experience" shows clearly how the restrictive influences of
Urizen operate upon human beings in various spheres of life, and especially in the sphere of sexual
love.
William Blake’s Theory of Contrariness

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of short lyric poems accompanied
by Blake’s original illustrations. The two sections juxtapose the state of innocence and
that of experience. Many of the poems in Blake’s words they were meant to show “the
two contrary states of the human soul”; the illustration of innocence and experience.
The tone of the first series is admirably sounded by the introductory “Piping down the

55
valleys wild” and that of second the dark picture of poor babes “fed with cold and
usurous hand”.
Blake is bitter against those who go “up to the Church to pray” while the misery of the
innocent is around them. His theory of Contraries is summarized in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion,
reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.” The essence of
Blake’s theory is that, in some paradoxical way, it is possible for the contraries of
innocence and experience to co-exist within a human being. The crime of “religion”
was its attempt “to destroy existence” by ignoring or minimizing the essential
oppositions in human nature. The word ‘contrary’ had a very specific and important
meaning for Blake. Like almost all great poets, he was an enemy of dualism. Western
thought has been intensely dualistic, seeing everything as composed of warring
opposites, head and heart, body and spirit, male and female as though the split
between the hemispheres of the human brain were projecting itself on everything
perceived. A study of the poems in the two groups shows the emotional tensions
between the two Contrary States.
“Piping down the valleys wild”

In the “Songs of Innocence”, Blake expresses the happiness of a child’s first thoughts
about life. To the child, the world is one of happiness, beauty, and love. At that stage
of life, the sunshine of love is so radiant that human suffering appears only temporary
and fleeting. In the Introduction to the first series, Blake represents a laughing child as
his inspiration for his poems. And in the poems that follow in this series, Blake gives
us his vision of the world as it appears to the child or as it affects the child. And this
world is one of purity, joy, and security. The children are themselves pure, whether
their skin is black or white. They are compared to lambs “whose innocent call” they
hear. Both “child” and “lamb” serve as symbols for Christ. Joy is everywhere—in the
“Joy but two days old”; in the leaping and shouting of the little ones; in the sun, in the
bells, in the voices of the birds; in the Laughing Song all Nature rejoices. But, above all,
there is security. There is hardly a poem in which a symbol of protection, a guardian
figure of some kind, does not occur. In The Echoing Green, the old folk are close by,
while the children play. Elsewhere there is the shepherd watching over his sheep;
there are the mother, the nurse, the lion’, the angels, and, most important of all, God
Himself. There is spontaneous happiness and delight in these groups of poems as “The
Infant Boy” illustrates, ‘‘I happy am/ Joy is my name’.

56
“These flowers of London town!

Seated in companies they sit
with radiance all their own”
In the first Holy Thursday, poor children sit “with radiance of their own”; while in the
second Holy Thursday, the poet deplores the fact that there should be so many poor
and hungry children depending on charity in a country which is otherwise rich and
fruitful. The second poem is very moving, as it was intended to be. We thus have
pictures of contrary states. In the “Songs of Innocence”, the prevailing symbol is the
Iamb, which is an innocent creature of God and which also symbolizes the child Christ.
In the “Songs of Experience” the chief symbol is the tiger as expressed by the first
stanza:
“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night”
Where ‘forests of the night’ symbolize experience. The tiger burns metaphorically with
rage and quickly becomes for some a symbol of anger and passion. The poet asks a
crucial question here. Did God Who made the lamb also make the tiger? The lamb,
innocent and pretty, seems the work of a kindly, comprehensible Creator. The
splendid but terrifying tiger makes us realize that God’s purposes are not so easily
understood. The tiger represents the created universe in its violent and terrifying
aspects. It also symbolizes violent and terrifying forces within the individual man, and
these terrifying forces have to be faced and fully recognized. The two poems called
The Lamb and The Tiger do, indeed, represent two contrary states of the human soul.
No contrast could have been more vivid and more striking. Blake sees exploitation in
the songs of experience as exemplified by the following lines from, ‘London’.
“And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe”
The poems in the second group record the wounds and cruelties of the civilized world.
Some of them are bitter comments on the restraints forged by custom and law. Here
Blake deplores the dominance of reason, religion, law, and morality, and he deplores
the suppression of natural impulses, and more especially the suppression of the sexual
impulse. Instead of innocence, joy, and security, Blake finds guilt, misery, and tyranny
in the world. The protective guardians have disappeared and in their place are the
tyrants. The rigors of sexual morality are depicted in A Little Girl Lost, The Sick Rose,
The Angel, and Ah, Sunflower. The Sick Rose shows the destructive effects of sexual

57
repression. In The Angel, the maiden realizes too late what she has missed. Ah,
Sunflower shows the youth “pining away with desire”, and the “pale virgin shrouded
in snow”, because both of them were denied sexual fulfillment.
The contrasts Blake sets forth in the Songs are echoes of English society’s approach to
the social and political issues of his era—a time characterized, on the one hand, by
increasing desire for personal, political, and economic freedom, and on the other, by
anxiety regarding the potential consequences of that freedom for social institutions.
Several of the poems directly address contemporary social problems, for example,
“The Chimney-Sweeper” deals with child labor and “Holy Thursday” describes the grim
lives of charity children. The most fully-realized social protest poem in the Songs is
“London,” a critique of urban poverty and misery. Thus contrariness are a must. The
language and vision not just of Blake but of poetry itself insists that the contraries are
equally important and inseparable. ‘Without contraries is no progression’, wrote
Blake. He sought to transform the energies generated by conflict into creative
energies, moving towards mutual acceptance and harmony. Thus, by describing
innocence and experience as ‘contrary states of the human soul’, Blake is warning us
that we are not being invited to choose between them, that no such choice is possible.
He is not going to assert that innocent joy is preferable to the sorrows of experience.
William Blake’s Romanticism

William Blake is a romantic poet. The sparks of romanticism are vividly marked on
his poetry. The question arises what is Romanticism? The answer is that it is a
phenomenon characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of
approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature.
It was Schelling who first defined romanticism as ‘liberalism in literature’.
Though romanticism officially started by the Lyrical Ballads jointly penned by
Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1830, poets like William Blake made cracks to
classicism towards the end of the18th century. In Romanticism, a piece of work
could become, as Blake described, “an embodiment of the poet’s imagination and
vision.” Many of the writers of the Romantic period were highly influenced by
the war between England and Franceand the French Revolution. In the midst of
all these changes, Blake too was inspired to write against these ancient ideas. ‘All
Religions Are One’, and ‘There is No Natural Religion’ were composed in hopes
of bringing change to the public’s spiritual life. Blake felt that, unlike most
people, his spiritual life was varied, free and dramatic. Blake’s poetry features
many characteristics of the romantic spirit. The romanticism of Blake consists in

58
the importance he attached to imagination, in his mysticism and symbolism, in his

love of liberty, in his humanitarian sympathies, in his idealization of childhood, in
the pastoral setting of many of his poems, and in his lyricism.
“Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire”
The above lines from, ‘Jerusalem’ amply justifies the point. “Poetry fettered”, said
Blake, “fetters the human race”. In theory as well as practice, the Romantic
Movement began with the smashing of fetters. In his enthusiastic rage, Blake
condemned the verse-forms which had become traditional. He poured scorn upon
all that he associated with classicism in art and in criticism. “We do not want either
Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations”, he
said. The whole critical vocabulary of neo-classical criticism had evidently
disgusted him. He could not endure it. The visions that Blake started seeing in his
childhood and which he kept seeing throughout his life were doubtless a product
of his ardent imagination. His visions profoundly controlled both his poetry and
his painting. Of many of his poems he said that they were dictated to him by
spirits. In this most literal sense he held that, inspiration could come to the aid of
a poet. In a state of inspiration, the poet made use of his imagination. “Human
imagination is the Divine Vision and Fruition”, he said. Energy and delight
accompany this expression of the Divine Vision. All these views on the subject of
poetry spring from the intensely romantic nature of Blake. It is not merely the
revolutionary spirit that permeates his poetry. The subject of child is more crucial
to his art. We see in Holy Thursday I:
“These flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit
with radiance all their own”
The child is here the symbol of the most delicate and courageous intuitions in the
human mind. The elements of Romanticism are present in these poems, some of
them in the highest degree, such as the sense of wonder, the contemplation of
Nature through fresh eyes, an intimate sympathy with the varieties of existence.
Other elements of Romanticism are found in a much less degree, such as the
obsession with the past, or the absorbing sense of self. Everything that the eyes
of the child see is bathed in a halo of mystery and beauty. The words in these
poems are perfectly adapted to the thought because they are as simple as

59
possible, and the thought itself is simple. Blake’s first style is in a way a juvenile
form of Romanticism. The “Songs of Innocence” most completely fulfil the
definition of Romanticism as “the renascence of wonder”. The world of Nature
and man is the world of love and beauty and innocence enjoyed by a happy child,
or rather by a poet who miraculously retains an unspoiled and inspired vision.
Despite his strong emotions and his unfamiliar ideas, Blake keeps his form
wonderfully limpid and melodious. Besides love for children, imagination plays a
key role in his poetry as Tyger embodies:
“When the stars threw down their spears,

And watered heaven with their tears;
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he Who made the Lamb make thee?”
Symbolically, this poem is an impassioned defense of energy and imagination
which occupy a commanding position in Blake’s thinking. The tiger is Blake’s
symbol for the “abundant life”, and for regeneration. The poem effectively
conveys to us the splendid though terrifying qualities of the tiger. The climax of
the poem’s lyricism is reached in the lines which, though somewhat cryptic,
effectively produce and effect of wonder and amazement. Blake was a great
champion of liberty and had strong humanitarian sympathies. This is another
aspect of his Romanticism. Blake’s humanitarian sympathies are seen in such
poems of Experience as Holy Thursday, A Little Boy Lost, The Chimney Sweeper,
and above all London as in the following lines:
“In every voice, in every ban.
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear”
In London, Blake attacks social injustice in its various forms, as it shows itself in
the chimney sweeper’s cry, the hapless soldier’s sigh, and the youthful harlot’s
curse. He appears here as an enemy of what he calls “the-mind-forged manacles”.
Nor does, Blake show any mercy to the Church. The boy in Blake’s poetry finds the
church an inhospitable place, while the ale-house is warm and friendly because
the church imposes religious discipline like fasting and prayer. Pastoralism, too is
feature of poetry. The little pastoral poem ‘The Shepherd’ has a delicate
simplicity. It celebrates the happiness of rural responsibility and trust. Noteworthy

60
also is ‘The Echoing Green’ with its picturesqueness in a warmer hue, its delightful
domesticity, and its expressive melody.
Finally, it is established that Blake is a romantic poet. Blake is one of the major
Romantic poets, whose verse and artwork became part of the wider movement
of Romanticism in late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century European
Culture. His writing combines a variety of styles: he is at once an artist, a lyric poet,
a mystic and a visionary, and his work has fascinated, intrigued and sometimes
bewildered readers ever since. For the nineteenth century reader Blake’s work
posed a single question: was he sane or mad? The poet Wordsworth, for example,
commented that there “is no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is
something in his madness which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron
and Walter Scott”. Blake’s use of images, symbols, metaphors and revolutionary
spirit combined with simple diction and spontaneous expression of thoughts and
emotions make him a typical romantic poet.
William Blake’s Symbolism
Blake is a highly symbolic poet and his poetry is rich in symbols and allusions.
Almost each and every other word in his poems is symbolic. A symbol is an object
which stands for something else as dove symbolizes peace. Similarly, Blake’s tiger
symbolizes creative energy; Shelley’s wind symbolizes inspiration; Ted Hughes’s
Hawk symbolizes terrible destructiveness at the heart of nature. Blake’s symbols
usually have a wide range of meaning and more obvious. Few critics would now
wish to call Blake a symbolist poet, since his handling of symbols is markedly
different from that of the French symbolistes’, but the world inhabited by his
mythical figures is defined through quasi-allegorical images of complex
significance, and such images are no less important in his lyrical poetry. The use
of symbols is one of the most striking features of Blake’s poetry.
There is hardly any poem in the “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” which
does not possess a symbolic or allegorical meaning, besides its apparent or
surface meaning. If these poems are written in the simplest possible language,
that fact does not deprive them of a depth of meaning. The language of these
poems is like that of the Bible—at once simple and profound as the following
lines read:
“O Rose, thou art sick!”

61
When Blake talks of the sick rose, he is really telling us how mysterious evil attacks
the soul. Flower-symbolism is of particular importance in Songs of Innocence and
Experience, being connected with the Fall by the motif of the garden; and its
traditional links with sexuality inform the text of ‘The Blossom’ and the design for
‘Infant Joy’, which are taken up in Experience by the plate for ‘The Sick Rose’. ‘Ah!
Sun-Flower’ is a more symbolic text, and has evoked a greater variety of
responses. Declaring this to be one of ‘Blake’s supreme poems’, we can interpret
the flower as a man who ‘is bound to the flesh’ but ‘yearns after the liberty of
Eternity”. Harper claims that it describes the aspiration of all ‘natural things’ to
‘the sun’s eternality’. Identifying the speaker as ‘Blake himself. Blake travels from
flower-symbolism to animal symbols as in the ‘Tyger’:
“Did he smile his work to see
Did he who made the Lamb make thee!”
If the lamb symbolizes innocence and gentleness, the tiger is to Blake a symbol of
the violent and terrifying forces within the individual man. The lamb, innocent and
pretty, seems the work of a kindly Creator. The splendid but terrifying tiger makes
us realize that God’s purposes are not so easily understood, and that is why the
question arises “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” At the same time, the
tiger is symbolic of the Creator’s masterly skill which enabled Him to frame the
“fearful symmetry” of the tiger. But the lion described in the poem Night (in the
“Songs of Innocence”) offers an interesting contrary to the tiger of the “Songs of
Experience”. Both the beasts seem dreadful, but the lion, like the beast of the fairy
tale, can be magically transformed into a good and gentle creature: the tiger
cannot. In the world of Experience the violent and destructive elements in
Creation must be faced and accepted, and even admired. The tiger is also symbolic
of the Energy and the Imagination of man, as opposed to the Reason. Blake was
a great believer in natural impulses and hated all restraints. Consequently he
condemns all those who exercise restraints upon others. He states in Holy
Thursday II:
“And their ways are fill’d with thorns
It is eternal winter there”
The eternal winter are symbolic of total destruction of the country and the
perpetual devastation and ‘Grey-headed beadles’ in ‘Holy Thursday I’ are

62
symbolic of authority and it is they exploit children for their own material
interests. In the poem London, oppression and tyranny are symbolised by the king
(who is responsible for the soldier’s blood being shed), social institutions like
(loveless) marriage, and ‘”he mind-forged manacles”. Even further, personal and
social relationships have been symbolised as:
“In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree”
A Poison Tree is another allegory. The tree here represents repressed wrath; the
water represents fear; the apple is symbolic of the fruit of the deceit which results
from repression. This deceit gives rise to the speaker’s action in laying a death-
trap for his enemy. The deeper meaning of the poem is that aggressive feelings, if
suppressed, almost certainly destroy personal relationships. On the surface,
however, the poem is a simple, ordinary story. Thus symbolism is crucial to
understanding Blake as poet of earlier romanticism. What can be more symbolic
than the following lines from, ‘Auguries of Innocence’?
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour”
Thus, Blake’s poetry is charged with symbols. He has depicted nature and human
nature; animals and plants as simple but profound symbols of powerful forces;
“contrary states of the human soul” – for example, good and evil, or innocence
and experience throughout his poetry. What is different in Blake is that he is not
modeling after any symbols but his own. The symbols always have an inner
relatedness that leads us from the outer world to the inner man. The symbols live
in the ordered existence of his vision; the vision itself is entirely personal, in theme
and in the logic that sustains it. Blake is difficult not because he invented symbols
of his own; he created his symbols to show that the existence of any natural object
and the value man’s mind places on it were one and the same. He was fighting
the acceptance of reality in the light of science as much as he was fighting the
suppression of human nature by ethical dogmas. He fought on two fronts, and
shifted his arms from one to the other without letting us know—more exactly, he

63
did not let himself know. He created for himself a personality, in life and in art,
that was the image of the thing he sought.
In short, it is established that William Blake is a highly symbolic and even
allegorical poet. His use of symbolism is unique and cinematic. It paints a lively
and pulsating picture of dynamic life before us. Especially, the symbolic use of
‘Sun-flower’ gets so much stamped on the mind of the reader that it is difficult to
forget it. He mentions a tiger it becomes a symbol of God’s power in creation, his
lamb turns out to be a symbol of suffering innocence and Jesus Christ and his tree
is symbolic of anger and desire to triumph over enemies; the dark side of human
nature. Symbolism is the main trait of William Blake as a dramatist as a poet and
this has been well-crystallized in his legendary work, ‘The Songs of Innocence and
Experience’.
William Blake’s Religion and Vision

William Blake was a Christian, although he did not conform to any denomination
within the Christian faith. He was born and brought up a Baptist. When he was
married, he took on board some ideas of the Swedish scientist philosopher and
theologian, Swedenbourg, who believed in the idea of God as man. This idea is
illustrated in Blake’s poem, within the “Songs of Innocence”, “The Divine Image”
where he asserts that “Where mercy love and pity dwell, there God is dwelling too”.
He also says that love is “the human form divine”. However, Blake also believes that
there are two contrary states to the human soul, that a person makes their own
condition, although children are born “naturally good”. This runs against religious
thought at the time, which suggested that children were “naturally bad” due to
Original Sin. The contraries are apparent throughout the “Songs”, in Innocence versus
Experience. The contrary poem to “The Divine Image” is “A Divine Image” in which
Blake claims:
“Cruelty has a human heart,

And Jealousy a human face”
“A Divine Image” is much shorter than “The Divine Image” as it is only two stanzas
long; perhaps because “secrecy” is the “human dress” according to “A Divine Image”,
this may also be a suggestion of sexual restriction. It also emphasizes the contrast
more starkly. Children appear alongside religion in the “Holy Thursday” poems (one in

64
Innocence and one of the same name in Experience). In Experience, the reader is asked
“Is this a holy thing to see / In a rich and fruitful land, / Babes reduced to misery”. In
Innocence we meet the old men who are the “wise guardians of the poor”, although
this is probably an ironic description of these people by Blake, as they benefit from the
poverty. Blake was very concerned with the social condition of the Britain that came
with the Industrialism. Blake’s “Songs”, especially “Holy Thursday” (Innocence) show
how religion was used to keep the poor “in their place” and to prevent revolution;
although ironically, the majority of the poverty-stricken in Blake’s day were “children
of the Industrial Revolution”. He was a revolutionary and asked:
“And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?”
William Blake was a visionary (but not a dreamer), aware of the realities and
complexities of experience, particularly the poverty and oppression of the urban world
where he spent most of his life. He had an amazing insight into contemporary
economics, politics and culture, and was able to discern the effects of the
authoritarianism of church and state as well as what he considered the arid philosophy
of a rationalist view of the world which left little scope for the imagination. He
abhorred the way in which Christians looked up to a God enthroned in heaven, a view
which offered a model for a hierarchical human politics, which subordinated the
majority to a (supposedly) superior elite. He also criticised the dominant philosophy
of his day which believed that a narrow view of sense experience could help us to
understand everything that there was to be known, including God. Blake’s own
visionary experiences showed him that rationalism ignored important dimensions of
human life which would enable people to hope, to look for change, and to rely on
more than that which their senses told them. He religious values are more profound
than a priest actually practicing religion as he endorses:
“Then cherish pity, lest you drive
an angel from your door”
In the two Holy Thursday poems Blake offers contrasting perspectives on the social
situation in England. On the one hand, the poet describes a festive event in St Paul‘s
cathedral, in which children who are recipients of charity come to thank God. On the
other, there is a hard-hitting critique of what it’s actually like for most children, in “this

65
green and pleasant land”, with “Babes reduc’d to misery. Fed with cold and usurous
hand”. The Holy Thursday poems offer readers the opportunity to meditate upon late
18th-century England through the lens of a particular social event. Here is an example
of the focus on the “minute particular”, when one event opens up a different
perspective on the reality of a wider context. Blake’s vision was holistic. He criticised
the way in which people (especially those of a religious bent) separated sacred and
profane, instead of seeing each person as the place where these massive emotional
and political forces were in tension. He insisted in his most outspoken work, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that “everything that lives is holy”. So, he challenged
that view that there was anything special about the Bible, or a religious building, as
compared with other literature, or other places, which could equally manifest the
divine. His lifework was dedicated to exposing the extent to which infatuation with
habits of thought, which sunder and demonize, prevent human flourishing.
“And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy”
The Sick Rose illustrates, again, the horror of repressed sexuality. The rose may be
regarded as a symbol for a beautiful girl. In fact it represents a girl restricted by
excessive modesty. This quality was to Blake a vice, and a vice which leads to the kind
of frustration emphatically illustrated in this poem. The canker-worm destroying the
beauty of a rose-bud here symbolizes the repression which eats into the vitals of the
girl. The worm here may also refer to the priest as an exponent of the morality that
encourages formal, loveless marriages. In any case, a girl who does not give a free
scope to her senses is like a sick rose. The main theme of ‘Ah, Sunflower’ is, once again,
the need for an uninhibited expression of sexual love. Both the young man and the
virgin have been denied a fulfillment of their sexual desires. To all intents and purposes
they are dead and buried. To allow one’s desire to remain unfulfilled was the worst of
crimes in Blake’s eyes.
Blake’s vision was very different from those who appealed to the past. He was
concerned with human beings. The Bible was not to be a kind of holy rule-book,
therefore, according to which priests and rulers could police people, but a collection
of “sentiments and examples” which engaged the imagination. There was to be no
contracting out of responsibility for biblical interpretation to priests and scholars. All
people, inside and outside the churches, according to Blake, have the responsibility to
attend to the energetic activity of the divine spirit in creation, in history, and in human
experience. He wouldn’t have wanted his words to become a sacred text, any more

66
than the words of the Bible, but an ongoing stimulus to politics and religion in the
struggle to realize man can exist but by brotherhood. Blake does not believe that
salvation is possible through priests or through the morality preached by organized
religion. The life of the senses should be free, he says. To hinder or to chain to fetter
the senses is like murdering the human personality.

William Blake-Life and Works

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

William Blake-Life and Works

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

1

Early Training and Poetical Attempts

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Mysticism and Philosophy

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

William Blake, the Theorist

Condemned Traditional Verse-forms

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Believer in Natural Energy

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

William Blake as a Thinker

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Imaginative Interpretation of Christianity

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

He becomes a man of woe

A Brief Survey of William Blake’s Poetry

His Visual Imagination

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

The Prophetic Books of William Blake

Ore Versus Urizen

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

VI. THE BOOK OF URIZEN

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

X. THE BOOK OF AHANIA

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Blake as a Poet Or Critical Approaches to Blake’s Poetry

Originality: Intuition; Symbolism

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Simple but Expressive Words

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Had a peach from the tree,

Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

Necessary to Know the Meaning

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

The Use of Symbolical Metaphor

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

The starry pole,

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

Blake's Conception of God

Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan