The Songs of Innocence and Experience, much like the Marriage of Heaven and Hell discuss conflicts that we experience. One cannot be both innocent and experienced.
For Blake, we can only experience innocence as children: it is a faculty adults do not possess. We are always in a state of experience.
Innocence
Poems in Songs of Innocence focus entirely on pleasure seeking and fun:
‘Sound the flute!
Now it’s mute.
Birds delight
Day and Night’
This is taken from the poem ‘Spring.’ (Carabine, 1994, p.64) It demonstrates how innocence equates to freedom: no rules, no restrictions and no reason. ‘Spring’ like other Songs of Innocence is a childlike poem that sounds like a nursery rhyme, full of small observations and little meaning.
Blake argues that we are always in a contrary state: innocence or experience, and neither one can understand the other. Songs of Innocence reads to us as nonsensical rhyming, because we are in a state of experience.
Experience
Songs of Experience contain much darker subject matter. Perhaps the best example of this is the poems London and A Poison Tree.
The poem London walks us through the capital, observing poverty, degradation and sin everywhere: ‘How the youthful harlot’s curse, Blasts the new-born infant’s tear, And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.’ (Carabine, 1994, p.88) Blake also refers to ‘The mind-forg’d manacles,’ (Carabine, 1994, p.88) and the ‘Black’ning church.’ (Carabine, 1994, p.88) emphasising his anti-clerical stance.
A Poison Tree tells a tale that reads like a parable: it warns of an argument between two friends. The narrator says that he does not tell his friend, now his foe, of his wrath. The anger the narrator feels for his friend grows into a metaphorical tree, which bears an apple:
‘And into my garden stole
When the night had veil’d the pole
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree.’
(Carabine, 1994, p.82)
These two poems talk of anger, hate, vengeance, prostitution, diseases, bondage and the negative influence of the church. Comparing these poems of experience to those of innocence demonstrate just how vast the difference is, making the reader wish he could be innocent again.
Urizen
Blake develops the idea of ‘reason’ into a character called ‘Urizen.’ This is interpreted as ‘your reason’ or ‘horizon.’ Urizen is featured in many of Blake’s etchings: in each he has the same physical characteristics. Urizen has long, flowing white hair and is blind.
He features in one of Blake’s most famous and recognizable paintings, ‘The Ancient of Days.’
He is shown in etchings as drowning, one arm up stretched from the water, another where he is sitting on a book, yet unable to read it, one where he is crouched with his wrists and ankles bound, He also appears in etchings from ‘Voice of the Devil,’ falling into hell.
Urizen is the embodiment of experience: reason, logic, rules and institutions, all of the things Blake rallied against. This is why he is depicted as drowning, blind and bound by chains.
To summarise: these sets of poems and illustrations of the character Urizen describe two contraries of the human soul: freedom in innocence and restriction in experience.
References:
(Carabine, K., (ed)., 1994, The Selected Poems of William Blake, London: Wordsworth Editions Limited)
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