William Blake’s Songs of Innocence

Flakes use of the eclogue in Songs of honour and be intimate Put simply, Flakes Songs of honour and Experience Juxtapose the innocuous unpolished manhood of childhood against an magnanimous world of decadence and repression. The collection as a whole, by meaner of paired metrical compositions in honour and Experience (The Lamb, The tiger The Echoing Green, The Garden of Love/London The Nurses Song (l and E) Introduction (l and E) The lamp chimney sweeper (l and E), etc) explores the value and limitations of two different perspectives of the world. The same situation or problem is seen by means of the eyes or perspective of Innocence first, consequentlyce Experience.Blake stands outside Innocence and Experience, in a distanced position from which he recognizes and attempts to reverse the fallacies of both perspectives. He uses the eclogue, in many songs, to attack oppressive and ruinous authority (Church, King, p atomic number 18nts, fully grown figures), restrictive morality, sexual repression, established religion the formal Church, hearty inequality, militarism. The country is a literary style that presents an idealism and artificial picture of hoidenish life, the naturalness and innocence of which is seen in contrast with the corruption and artificiality of city and court.The country is often seen as a nostalgic feel back at a lost paradise, a lost Eden, a lost Golden Age. However, Blake does something different with the pastoral. Firstly, he passs the nostalgia of the ideal in put to cross-file the strong human condition. He does this by opposing pastoral ideal and urban ingenuousness both within the single assigns of Innocence and Experience and among the two states. (For example Introduction of Innocence, The Shepherd). Secondly, he radically redefines the congenator of the pastoral to the city because the Songs as a volume could be tell to take place in the city.Blake frames the obviously pastoral scenes within an urba n setting in a way that breaks down the conventional city/ country dichotomy and his criticism is aimed at not merely tender problems, but the source of these problems a limited way of seeing. Within Innocence, Blake takes us into the frame, or confinement of the pastoral space and explores internal tensions, exposing and attacking social problems. For example, in The piddling young woman Lost of Innocence, the pastoral setting is that of a vacate wild that becomes a garden mild.The reference is the biblical image in Isaiah 35 of an ideal mime in which the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. Lacy, the innocent child, lives In the southern clime/Where the summers prime/Never fades away (distinctly pastoral ). She had wandered oleo the wild birds song. Blake brings in a contrast amid Locals trust and her parents fright (that she is lost and will come to harm). For Lacy, at that place is no cause for distress, besides consideration of her arrives feelings (if my mother sleeplessly shall not weep).The other side of the fight is the parents veneration and concern As far as they are concerned, there is nowhere safe (Where can Lacy sleep? . Their concern becomes more and more self- centered, until it becomes emotional blackmail (oho can Lacy sleep,/elf her mother weep? ). A moral prescription is then introduced Lacy ought to be worried and we notice that this is only whenified only by the mothers distress, not by any real danger. By meaner of the command, Then let Lacy wake, Blake shows how fear turns into tyranny. The parents fear of nature has made them unreasonable They command their daughter to be unhappy, simply because they are.Stanza 8 resolves the conflict as Locals surroundings become transform the desert is bright. Locals positive perception dominates the rest of the poem The imperative, permit in the line, Let thy moon arise, underlines her opposition to her parents. The pivotal word, bright stands between Locals and her pa rents attitudes to nature (for the parents, it is a dark, dark world of fear for Lacy, it is safe and bright. ) The lion licks Locals bosom and the lioness Loosed her slender sever. The dress is a symbol of her parents upbringing, which Locals perception can cast off.She is naked, so daunt is removed (a reference to Adam and Eves nakedness in the Garden of Eden). In the ext poem, The Little Girl Found, the lions masculinity, his mane, was what frightened the parents (soon his heavy man/Bore them to the ground). So, the poem conveys the need for sexual freedom, natural postal code, sexual energy, feared by Locals parents. (In The Little Girl Found, the parents perception of the lion as fearful is transformed -then they stick toed/Where the good deal led- by meaner of transforming their vision, their perspective, the parents fear disappears (nor fear the wolfish howl,/Nor the lions growl).Within the pastoral frame of the Garden of Eden, Blake explores inner tensions, exposing an d attacking social problems. (In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which Blake wrote between the two part of the Songs, he stresses that mans instincts are not fallen (sinful from the moment of birth) and therefore to follow the instinctive liking for love and pleasure cannot be wrong The thought of sweet delight can never be defiled. On the reprobate, it is the frustrating of desire that leads to corruption and a warping of the personality Sooner instruction execution an infant in its cradle than nurse enacted desires.The conventional goodness of Flakes time, therefore, is Just a passive failure o act out desire and is not something to be admired, un give care evil which is evidence of positive energy. Good is the passive that obeys reason. Evil is the active springing from energy and Energy is aeonian delight. So, in the volume of Songs of Innocence and Experience, the tensions, oppositions or conflicts are within the frames of a song, as advantageously as between the two c ontrary worlds of Innocence and Experience.The Songs not only Juxtapose pastoral ideal with urban reality (echoing Greenwoods Echoing Green/The Garden of Love), but within the single state of Innocence, pastoral images are Juxtaposed with a flawed urban society. The oppositions too exist within the single states of Innocence and Experience. The Songs of Innocence begins with a distinctly pastoral Introduction followed by The Shepherd, The Echoing Green and, of course, The Lamb(in Flakes final order of the Songs). These songs show pastoral harmony between humans and nature.However, we are led out of (or in and out of, depending on the order of Songs), pastoral and into a disturbing world of social difference and unjustness through such lyrics as The Little Black Boy, The Chimney Sweeper(l). Yet even these songs eave a pastoral element. tom turkey Decree, in The Chimney Sweeper, is identified with the lamb of pastoral and of innocence through his hairs-breadth, That curled like a l ambs back. The black boys mother describes his body as a shady grove that enables the soul to bear the beams of love, identifying the time on world as a little space, akin to a pastoral retreat, rather than a time of preparation labor.The pastoral narratives in both poems stress to free the boys from the stigma of their blackness, but ironically that freedom, in the form of a pastoral paradise, is attainable only after death. In The Chimney Sweeper(l), an backer opened the coffins and set them all free. /Then down a common plain leaping, laughing they run,/And wash in a river and shine in the sun. In The Little Black Boy, Gods voice will call get along with out from the grove my love and care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.Only in death will the white boy be taught to reject his ignorant racist views And then Ill stand and stroke his silver hair/And be like him, and he will then love me. So, Blake uses the pastoral to attack social evils and injustice, but also e xposes the limits and inadequacies of the pastoral ideal. He transcends the pastoral to show the limits of pastoral innocence to criticism the human condition and to show a new vision. He does this by rejecting the nostalgia of the ideal to show the real condition by opposing the pastoral ideal with urban reality.The twofold presence of town and country, idealization and realism, celebration and regret provides the tension that is native to the pastoral space. The pastorals critical function is based upon the writers handling of internal tensions between oppositions. Flakes objective in Songs of Innocence and Experience is to show the wow contrary states of the human soul. He shows that we create our worlds by meaner of our perception of it. (Milton A brainiac is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven Paradise Lost).Our world is Innocent loving, meek and mild, delightful, protected, gentle if we perceive its manufacturing business as loving, c aring and protective. But there are limits to this vision we are vulnerable because we are ignorant of the dangers and threats that exist. The world of Experience is one that is dark, authoritative, oppressive, lumpish and repressive of enjoyment. We see ourselves imprisoned in this despair if we perceive its manufacturer as oppressive, cruel, punitive and Judgmental and if we perceive ourselves as imprisoned in Original Sin.The two worlds opposed are those of childhood innocence and adult experience. He uses iconic pastoral images (piper and muse, shepherds, rural idyll, innocence of childhood, the Garden of Eden, gardens and greens, lambs, unfortunate fallacy) and pastoral states (harmony, Joy, protection, care, love) and opposes these to urban images and states of adult authority and cruelty, state and church repression and authority, picaresque and destructive emotions.Blake sets up oppositions, in the frames of the poems (as artistic creations) between Innocence and Experi ence and within Innocence and Experience. Blake provides (in Songs of Innocence) pastoral images, but shows the limits of pastoral innocence. In Songs of Experience, he writes in anti-pastoral mode and uses pastoral images to show the destruction of innocence, as well as ways to regain innocence in a vision of a New World.Discussion of putting the complex into the simple Approaches discussion of The Lamb and The Tiger, pages 91 one hundred one Songs of Innocence and Experience can be regarded as anti-pastoral Blake exposes he limitations of a comfortable image of pastoral innocence by 1) redefining the relationship between city and country (Russ in rube the country in the city) 2) he uses the pastoral as a frame to expose social injustice and human suffering 3) he uses pastoral images to show true innocence, then subverts these, both in Innocence and Experience, to expose the dark world of adult authority and repression.Blake use pastoral, not to show the contrast between rural and urban, but to expose the injustices of the human condition. Blake was a poet of the city, of London, and his pastoral setting is in the greens, parks and gardens of London.