Songs of Innocence and of Experience
William Blake
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
51 chapters·1h 22m listening
4.09from 53,283 ratingson Goodreads
"Songs of Innocence and of Experience" by William Blake is a collection of illustrated poems combined in 1794. Blake hand-engraved, printed, and colored unique artwork to accompany each poem, exploring childhood innocence and experience as contrary states of the human soul. Originally published as separate volumes, the combined work shows pastoral harmony alongside subtle dangers of naiveté. Each page features distinctive illustrations that intensify the poems' meanings, making Blake's vision inseparable from both visual art and verse. The collection became a hallmark of Romanticism and has inspired countless musical adaptations.
Contains spoilers for the entire book
- Themes
- Atmosphere
About the book
William Blake etched, printed and hand-coloured Songs of Innocence himself in 1789, and in 1794 joined it with Songs of Experience under the title Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Each poem was designed as a page of words and image together, in the method he called illuminated printing. Many poems answer one another across the two books: “The Lamb” and “The Tyger”, and two poems each called “The Chimney Sweeper” and “Holy Thursday”. In simple, song-like verse, Blake sets a child’s trust beside the knowledge of a world of child labour, poverty and repressive authority, questioning the church, the state and the lessons they teach.
Characters
The Piper — The singer of Innocence
Who, at a child’s request, pipes, sings and then writes down the songs of the first book.
The Bard — The voice of Experience
Who sees present, past and future, and calls on the lapsed soul in the introduction to the second book.
The Lamb — Innocence
The creature a child questions about who made it, answering that its maker calls himself a Lamb.
The Tiger — Experience
“Burning bright”, the fearful creature whose maker the poem dares to question.
Tom Dacre — The chimney-sweeper
A small boy in the Innocence poem “The Chimney-Sweeper”, comforted by a dream of an angel setting the sweeps free.
The Little Black Boy — The child who speaks
Who tells how his mother taught him under a tree that God’s light will one day make all children equal.
Lyca — The little girl lost
A child who wanders into the desert and is found and protected by a lion.
About the author
William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker, born in Soho, London, the son of a hosier. He had little formal schooling, was apprenticed to an engraver at fourteen and later studied at the Royal Academy schools. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, who worked beside him for the rest of his life. He developed his own method of relief etching, which he called illuminated printing, to produce books of hand-coloured text and images, among them Songs of Innocence (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs of Experience (1794) and the long prophetic books Milton and Jerusalem. The preface to Milton contains the lines now sung as the hymn “Jerusalem”. Visionary and radical, he lived mostly in poverty and obscurity, and in 1804 was tried for sedition and acquitted. His late works include engravings for the Book of Job and illustrations to Dante. He died in London in 1827, and his reputation grew greatly after his death.