Below are some brief comments on the Blake poems.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. In Songs of Innocence and of Experience Blake attempts to show the two contrasting states of the human soul.
"Innocence" and "Experience" refer to the two states of "Paradise" and the "Fall." These are terms referred to in the bible. Blake's categories are modes of perception. Childhood is a state of protected innocence rather than original sin. Innocence is characterised by childhood vitality and energy, confidence and openness, spiritual strength and physical vulnerablity. But the state of innocence is not immune to the fallen world and its institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes known through "experience," a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and inhibition, by social and political corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church, State, and the ruling classes. Many of the poems from the Songs display Blake's acute sensibility to the realities of poverty and exploitation that accompanied the "dark satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution.
