William Blake Flashcards

Question

Genre of "Songs of Innocence and Experience"?

Answer 1

poem / "songs"

Answer 2

The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from an adult perspective. Many of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the corruption and distortion of experience.

Answer 3

The Songs of Experience work via parallels and contrasts to lament the ways in which the harsh experiences of adult life destroy what is good in innocence, while also articulating the weaknesses of the innocent perspective (“The Tyger,” for example, attempts to account for real, negative forces in the universe, which innocence fails to confront). These latter poems treat sexual morality in terms of the repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and secrecy, all of which corrupt the ingenuousness of innocent love. With regard to religion, they are less concerned with the character of individual faith than with the institution of the Church, its role in politics, and its effects on society and the individual mind. Experience thus adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision while compensating for some of its blindness.

Answer 4

Songs of Innocence - TROCHAIC TETRAMETER / it's a narrative - tells a story / he was playing his pipe and a child comes on a cloud and asks him to play again / Romantics are great exemplars of joy - joy is an extreme and strong feeling / enlightenment didn't promote joy, but reason - Romantics as opposite Songs of Experience -

Answer 5

Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) juxtapose the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression; while such poems as “The Lamb” represent a meek virtue, poems like “The Tyger” exhibit opposing, darker forces. Thus the collection as a whole explores the value and limitations of two different perspectives on the world. Many of the poems fall into pairs, so that the same situation or problem is seen through the lens of innocence first and then experience. Blake does not identify himself wholly with either view; most of the poems are dramatic—that is, in the voice of a speaker other than the poet himself. Blake stands outside innocence and experience, in a distanced position from which he hopes to be able to recognize and correct the fallacies of both. In particular, he pits himself against despotic authority, restrictive morality, sexual repression, and institutionalized religion; his great insight is into the way these separate modes of control work together to squelch what is most holy in human beings.

Answer 6

Blake’s work shows a constant awareness of the ironies of publishing “songs” in written form—publishing poems that lay claim to an oral culture in a series of elaborately visual engravings. This awareness reflects the general Romantic preoccupation with the possibility of capturing in writing the rhythms, immediacy, and spontaneity of the spoken human voice. Blake seems, if not pessimistic, at least dubious about such a possibility, as can be seen in his Introduction to Songs of Innocence. Here, a child gives a wandering bard three commands: first to play his pipe, second to sing his songs, and third to write them. This progression may imply a decline, from the purity of music (without linguistic meaning), to orality (bound by meaning but still spontaneous and fleeting), to literacy (without need for human presence and perhaps less personal). The speaker’s pen, ambiguously, “stain[s] the water clear”; thus the image simultaneously implies both a purification (to “stain” it “clear”) and a corruption (to “stain” the “clear” water). On which process does the emphasis lie? Is writing part of the descent into experience?

Answer 7

Blake wrote in an era of great social and political upheaval. The democratic ideals of the French Revolution of 1789—the year of the first publication of Songs of Innocence—undoubtedly influenced him. But in politics Blake aligned with no particular system or idealism; he speaks always for the primacy of the individual and the imagination. Blake did attach importance to particular social reforms: one might extrapolate some of these from a poem such as “London,” depicting great suffering and oblivious social institutions, or one might consider Blake’s use of the plights of innocent children in a whole range of poems such as “Holy Thursday.” But a reading of Blake as social critic should always keep in mind the transcendent, humane values of the imagination and of the self unrestricted by narrow social convention; for these values formed the core of his moral code. This code stringently opposes an impersonal, conventional transcendence, and rejects the consolation of a life after this world—both of which are offered by the Church. See in particular the irony of “The Little Black Boy” for evidence of this last point.

William Blake Flashcards

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