Songs of Innocence and Experience

"So, this book was published in two movements by Blake. First, the Songs of Innocence , which included poems like ‘The Lamb,’ which have a certain innocence. But even in that first collection, that charm is never quite so neat and tidy. There is a world of carefree, playful safety, but also, say in ‘Infant joy,’ an edge that makes you think about the fullness of what it is to care for a baby. So when he subsequently published the Songs of Experience , the coupling of many of the poems, the resonances set up with that first volume, completely made sense. It’s not a jarring shift, as if Blake suddenly grew up and realised that life wasn’t so good. It feels more like the completion of the earlier project. There’s even a sense of what you might call ‘triangulation’—because, for example, ‘The Lamb’ is clearly linked to ‘The Tyger’. The latter poem describes the big cat’s “fearful symmetry,” but also asks the question: Did he who made the Lamb make thee? So our minds are stretched by having to embrace not only our identification with the lamb of ‘The Lamb,’ where he writes: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Which is beautiful and consoling. But by asking how the divine creator made both the lamb and the tiger—which of course would slay the lamb. That adds what you might call sublime experience to the beauty of the earlier book. Blake says they describe “The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul,” and lead to a sense of a wider horizon, that we human beings are somehow connected to as well. Yes, Blake is one of these people who really has one idea that he tries to express in multiple ways, which is the presence of eternity in our lives amidst the minute particulars. Because of the events of his time—the very terrible Napoleonic Wars in Europe—he has to reach for different methods of communicating that divine presence, maybe because it becomes less obvious as the violence increases. But you still get a sense of that divine presence from the earliest work, particularly The Songs of Innocence and Experience . So it is genuinely a good introduction to Blake, and once you tune into his way of seeing, you can carry that perception through the later, more complex images and poems."