TEXTS IN CONTEXT

Literary context Political and religious contexts

Blake chose the form of a children’s book for his Songs in order to The voices that speak out against all forms of authority in the Songs

Songs of Innocence
challenge the moral certainties of popular polite children’s literature,
such as Isaac Watts’ Divine and Moral Songs and Mrs Barbauld’s
Hymns in Prose. Blake ironically subverts their didactic approach, in
which the child is told exactly what to think, in Songs of Innocence’s
‘Holy Thursday’, and he often refuses to moralise at all, as in ‘The
Sick Rose’.
echo the resistance radical groups in London expressed towards
the Establishment in the 1790s. Blake was the son of a London
shopkeeper and an apprentice engraver, and during his early working
life he was on the edge of groups of radical skilled tradesmen. He
also had links with middle-class artists and writers, including Tom
Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

and of Experience
William Blake printed Songs of Innocence first in 1789, combining them into one
volume with Songs of Experience five years later, and inviting readers to compare and
contrast innocence and experience as ‘the Two Contrary states of the Human Soul’.
These lyrics resist obvious interpretation and still challenge readers today
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Children in Songs of Innocence are given their own distinctive voices
rather than being pitied or moralised over by adults. In ‘The Chimney
Sweeper’, for example, the child is unsentimental about his own
situation. The final line may appear to be an instruction to the reader
but instead invites an ironic and subversive response: ‘So if all do
their duty, they need not fear harm’. Blake refuses to engage with the
coercive strategies of the dominant culture that placed pity and duty
at the heart of its response to child exploitation.
The songs in Songs of Experience are more direct in their accusations
than those in Songs of Innocence. In ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, the
child points out his parents’ collusion with the corrupt Church and
state: ‘And because I am happy, & dance and sing, / They think they
have done me no injury:/ And are gone to praise God & his Priest
and King/ Who make up a heaven of our misery.’ Blake warns of the
dangers of repression in ‘The Poison Tree’ and the insidious effect
of the corporate control of the City of London, which corrupts the
whole of society, especially young people and children: ‘But most
thro’ midnight streets I hear/ How the youthful Harlot’s curse/ Blasts
the new-born Infant’s tear/ And blights with plagues the Marriage
hearse’ (‘London’).
Printing and production context
The experimental relief etching printing process that Blake developed
for the Songs combined his skills of painting, poetry and engraving.
Reversing the usual process of engraving, he painted directly onto
a copper plate with a mixture of salad oil and candle-grease that
then resisted the corrosive aqua fortis (a form of acid) which bit
into the plate for three or four hours. In this way he developed a
radical new form of relief printing in which the images and words
are created in a single process, rather than separately. He then
hand-painted each design so every ‘illuminated book’ is unique.
The whole process of Blake’s etching is anti-hierarchical (no single
art form has prominence), inspiring debate and dissent rather than
fixed certainties.
Through this process he wanted to resist the idea that the body and
soul are distinct: ‘this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by
corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent
surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid’ ( The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790, Plate 14). He also rearranged
the poems as he reprinted them, moving some from Innocence to
Experience, and varied the order of the plates, suggesting that he
was rethinking the Songs as he worked on them. The very pairing
of the poems across the two books — with poems with identical or
contrasting titles, such as ‘Infant Joy’ and ‘Infant Sorrow’ — invites
readers to enter into a dialogue of oppositions. The physical plate
on which the poems were engraved embodies this too, as many
of the Songs of Experience were etched on the back of the plates
for Innocence (though Blake was probably also trying to cut his
production costs).
Although Blake shared their support for the French Revolution
(1789–99), he was also critical of this intellectual group, especially
Wollstonecraft’s insistence on rational restraint. Consider his
illustration for her ‘Be Calm, my child’ (1791) in which one child looks
over her shoulder, away from the restrictive adult. In Songs Blake
celebrates the freedom and joy of children’s play, seeing it as a form
of revolution and change. He proposes an active and communal
resistance to government and all forms of restraint, most clearly in
the two ‘Nurse’s Songs’.
The writings of the visionary philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg
(1688–1772) at first gave Blake’s own ideas corroboration and
meaning. Yet in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) Blake
parodied Swedenborg’s religious doctrines and proposed instead a
vision from Hell that expresses divine energy.
Romantic context
Blake is one of the ‘first generation’ of Romantic poets, with
Coleridge and Wordsworth. Songs of Innocence and of Experience
can be compared with Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798). Both
works deal with similar subjects — childhood, poor people and
outcasts — and choose simple poetic forms. As with Blake’s
parody of children’s verse, Wordsworth offers an ironic version of
contemporary magazine poetry that tackled similar topics. ‘We are
Seven’ from Lyrical Ballads, for example, is a dialogue between a
pedantic adult and a defiant little girl who repeatedly insists that
‘we are seven!’, despite the fact that two of her siblings lie buried in
the churchyard. This echoes the outspokenness of the child sweep of
Experience.
Although Blake lamented the encroachment of buildings on green
spaces in London (in ‘The Garden of Love’), he was hostile to
Wordsworth’s insistence on the particular physical elements of the
natural world: ‘Natural Objects always did & now do Weaken deaden
and obliterate Imagination in Me’. Blake instead saw the spiritual,
natural and human world as one: ‘If the doors of perception were
cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite’ ( The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790, Plate 14).
RESOURCES
Ackroyd, P. (1995) Blake, Sinclair-Stevenson.
Glen, H. (1983) Vision & Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs &
Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, Cambridge University Press.
Makdisi, S. (2015) Reading William Blake, Cambridge:
https://tinyurl.com/bdhxzbm5
Cathy O’Neill is a freelance education consultant and teacher
consultant for English Review.

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