Since William Blake wrote his poetry in the late 18th century, it has been admired by people of all ages. Two of his most well-known poems are undoubtedly "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience," which were purposefully simple but thought-provoking in order to portray two opposing and contradictory states of the human soul. Scholars have dug into his work over the years to investigate how he used the poems to denounce the social ills that plagued the nation at the time. This essay will analyze the two poems, focusing on the societal issues Blake raised and his suggested solutions. We'll also take notice of the criticisms he voiced. The “Songs of Innocence” introductory part sets the stage for the work. William Blake invites the reader to see a piper “Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee”, who ends up prodding the writer to pen the words. He decides to write; “And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen”.
The writer proceeds to pen the next poem, “The Shepherd”, which seeks to offer comfort and assurance to humanity by stating that the “shepherd follows his sheep all day”. The poem seems to heavily borrow from the words of the Bible, found in the book of Psalms. The sheep in the poems context refers to those who depend on God’s guidance.
In the third poem titled “The Lamb”, Blake begins with a rhetorical question, “Little Lamb, who make thee”, in a bid to answer the question of man’s origin. Blake infers that human beings were created by the one who is also called the lamb, who is the Christian incarnation of the supreme being- God. He proceeds to describe the tender qualities found in a lamb, and explains that these same tender qualities are the qualities inherent in God.
Perhaps one of the most striking works in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience is the forthright and ‘no-holds-barred’ attack that he leveled against the citizenry in England in the poem “The Little Black Boy”. The poem has been heralded as an anti-slavery voice. At the time of the poem’s publication in 1789, slavery was a flourishing trade and was legal. It would not be abolished for another half a century. Blake begins the first stanza by introducing the little black boy, born in the ‘Southern wild” (Africa);
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh my soul is white!
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.
Blake introduces the issue of color and race by juxtaposing the color black and white. White is usually associated with ‘good’ things, like purity and angels, while ‘black’ is associated with ‘bad’ things, like darkness (bereaved of light). The next stanza explains how the boy’s mother taught him ‘on her lap’, explaining how the sun rises in the East, the direction from which God dwells. The Love of God is also likened to the rays of the sun in the fourth stanza, “That we may learn to bear the beams of love”. The implication being that black people are so much loved by God, that their faces are sun burnt; “And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove”. The poem comes to a close with a conviction that one day, the black people and the white people will all be together with God, perhaps alluding to a near future where slavery will be abolished and racial tensions will reduce in England.
The “Chimney Sweeper” is another poem in the songs of experience collection that highlights the injustice that young chimney sweepers of London used to face at the time. The industrial revolution was just starting, and a large amount of smoke and smog covered factory chimneys.
As chronicled in the report made by the Parliamentary Committee on the employment of children as chimney-sweeps in 1817,
‘The climbing boys’ as young as four were sold by their parents to master-sweeps, or recruited from workhouses. As the average size of a London chimney was only seven inches square, to encourage the sweeps to climb more quickly, pins were ‘forced into their feet’ by the boy climbing behind; lighted straw was applied for the same purpose.
The poem continues to castigate the parents of a chimney boy, who have headed to church to “praise God and His priest and king”, yet they have sold their son into slavery. The ‘Chimney sweeper’ is a radical and sweeping critique of the social injustice of chimney sweeping at the time, propagated by parents, a unassuming church, and the state, all turning a blind eye to the injustice. Blake writes, “They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God and his priest and king”.
In the first ‘Holy Thursday’ poem found in the songs of innocence, the writer paints the picture of children marching “two and two”, in reference to the Biblical story of the Noah’s Ark, where animals walked in two by two. The description of the children, in ‘red and blue and green”, stands in complete contrast to the poverty that they live in. The practice was a mockery, trying to assuage and atone for the guilt of their rich handlers. The poem’s setting is on a customary charity school church service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, on a Christian holiday, Ascension Day. In this passage, the writer also seeks to draw attention to the shame of how a rich society like England can allow its children to starve and suffer.
Another revelatory poem in the Song of Experience collection is the poem London. The speaker is wandering through the streets of London, and comes face to face with despair and agony, written on the faces of the inhabitants. Human suffering and despair abound; written on the faces of the men, soldiers, chimney-sweepers, and harlots. He ends by mentioning a ‘marriage-hearse’, seemingly to juxtapose joy with destruction and misery.
I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
Another societal ill of the time that the writer sought to address was the school system that in his opinion, stifled the imagination and free spirit of children. In the poem “the Schoolboy” contained in Songs of experience, Blake details how the splendid joy of summer morning is driven away when the children are made to spend the day in learning institutions;
But to go to school in a summer morn, —
Oh it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.
Blake, who was himself a product of the informal education system (home schooling), prefers that the children be let alone to explore their talents and imaginative power, without being confined to the walls of a formal school for an entire day. He suggests through the poem that the education system has also destroyed the joy and innocence of the children. This is captured in the fourth stanza of the poem when he states;
How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring?
“A bird born for joy”, represents the children, who are likened to birds. The children are naturally joyful, hence are not supposed to be ‘caged’ in a classroom the whole day. The youthful spring of children.
References:
Blake, W. Songs of Innocence and Experience. Global Language resources. 2001
Parliamentary Committee Report on Employing boys as Chimney sweeper. 1817. London.
Herrin, M. Analysis of the Little Black Boy . 2013.
