Songs of Innocence and Of Experience quotes Flashcards
(12 cards)
Garden of love for enclosure
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen,
A Chapel was built in the midst
Where I used to play on the green.
Garden of Love for institutionalism
And the gates of this Chapel
And thou shalt not writ over the door
And I saw it was filled with graves
And tomb-stones where flowers should be
And priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds
And binding with briars my joys & desires.
Ecchoing Green for familial structure
Old John with white hair
Round the laps of their mothers
Many sisters and brothers
Such, such were the joys
When we are, girls and boys
In our youth-time were seen
On the Echoing Green
London
I wander through each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every infant’s cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear
How the chimney sweeper’s cry
Every blackening church appals,
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
William Weber Wanderlinde, 2021
Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony can be mapped onto Blake’s concepts of innocence and experience.
Innocent reading = Schlegel’s self-creation
Experienced reading = Schlegel’s self-annihilation
Reading of wise innocence = Schlegel’s self-restriction
Proverbs of Hell on religious restriction
As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
Proverbs of Hell on tying buildings to institutions of restriction
Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion
Marriage of Heaven and Hell on contraries
Without contraries is no progression.
Marriage of Heaven and Hell on human existence
Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy.
William Weber Wanderlinde, 2021 on the piper and the bard
The pipe and bard who open the Introductions of innocence and experience, respectively embody Schlegel’s naive and sentimental poets
Mark S. Lussier, 1996 on Blake’s ecology
Blake’s desire for a philosophy of wholeness, rather than the enlightenment’s focus on the body, was ridiculed in his day but finds favour in our postmodern ecological crisis.
