Innocence:
- Overall: Idealised view of nature and childhood, states of purity and innocence. Some poems hint at the perils of experience.
- A Dream: Themes of Lost and Found, Empathy and Guardianship. Boy's mother searches for her son, concern and care
- The Blossom: The wanting of sexual love and relations.
- Infant Joy: Infant born, loved and wanted by loving and wise parents.
- The Little Black Boy: Race and religion. Good vs Bad (White vs Black)
- The Echoing Green: Innocence, childhood and experience. The inevitable move into the world of experience.
- Nurse’s Song: The nurse’s role as the protector of the children allowing them more freedom and time to play with nature – symbolic of prolonging innocence. The coming darkness/night seen to be the world of experience creeping up on the children.
- Holy Thursday: The service may look appealing to the truth but the truth is that the children are forced to comply with the rules. Restricting their freedom and are beaten if they fail to comply with it.
- The Chimney Sweeper: Satire to express anger of treatment of children by maters, government and parents. Cruel exploiting of children because they value materialistic things like money
- A Cradle Song: Lullaby sung by loving and wise mother, wishes world of experience away from the child as she recognises that the infant will soon leave the state of innocence.
- The Little Boy Lost: Critical of fathers who don’t look out for their children and guide them/support them
- The Little Boy Found: God is there for his child. Blake suggests that a true father would respond to his child and stay close to him in the dangerous world of experience.
Experience:
- Overall: Evil and corruptions of the fallen, rationalist and materialist world prevails in Experience. Some poems resonate with the sense of absence of innocence and a sense of loss.
- The Chimney Sweeper: Good and Evil, White vs Black. The suffering of children inevitable during the industrial revolution in the UK
- The Little Girl Lost: Human race unite with nature and God (lion), Lyca is a place of innocence when stripped naked like Adam and Eve are naked in the Garden of Eden.
- The Little Girl Found: Parents suffering, worried for Lyca, search for her and led by the Lion to the cave. Parents from the world of experience followed child back into the world of innocence.
- Holy Thursday: Country of wealth ignores the real need of children and their suffering. The charity provided is given without genuine love or care.
- Infant Sorrow: Infant being born into a dangerous world and have an inevitable fate. Parents are jealous of the infant for they desire to have innocence.
- London: In the city there are marks of woe and suffering as a result of the industrial revolution (high poverty, increasing population, increase in exploitation and oppressive institutions). Little care for people’s health and well-being. People are chained up by manacles mentally in that they cannot be free thinking individuals and free to do things as they desire.
- The Schoolboy: Restricted education and Blake says this isn’t true learning as their thought process and creativity are caged and imprisoned like birds. Ought to learn from nature by playing and happiness.
- The Little Vagabond: Solace should be found in the Church but is instead found in the ale-house. Critical of the Church and their restrictive and oppressive ways. Church is meant to be loving and caring but they do little to nothing of the suffering of children and of the people.
- Nurse’s Song: Nurse wants to lead them into the world of experience as soon as possible. The adult jealousy of innocence.
In-Depth
Themes:
Christian
Beliefs:
- Blake attacks the future hope of solace in Heaven advocated by some Christians as a way of avoiding the uncomfortable reality of injustice and exploitation.
- This taught people to accept the present suffering (i.e in the Chimney Sweeper) because of a promise of bliss and the absence of all suffering in the world (i.e in Heaven).
- This is the distorted perspective of the fallen humanity.
- Religion was now a system of moral laws which bound people in shame or punishment.
- Religion as a form of social control akin to state intervention which was seen as absurd by Blake.
Nature of
Children:
- Where children born free and good as Rousseau believed or were they born deprived as some Christians believed?
- Or is this the opposition that humans fail to recognise the capacity for good and evil belonging to humanity
- Blake believed that the natural child was an image of the creative imagination which is humans spiritual core. This led to him being worried about the way the school system and parental authority crushed the capacity for imaginative vision.
- Some people believed the child was fully free because they had been in Heaven prior to their arrival on Earth. This led to children being images of God and God was their only “father”.
- Blake's idea that a young child can clearly see God echoes the Romantic sensibility articulated by Wordsworth, that children had an existence in heaven before the commencement of their earthly life
Inhibitions
Lying In The Mind:
- Inhibitions lie within the mind rather than in external factor.
- Society creates fear, guilt and shame into it’s rules.
- These are enshrined in social institutions such as the authority of parents, the Church and the State or Monarchy.
Attitude to
the Body:
- Blake believed that humans are essentially spiritual beings and that the body should be an expression of a person's spiritual nature. Yet he felt that people did not believe this. They believe that their bodies are purely physical and that reality consists solely in what can be understood via the senses. In this way, their senses trap them in a materialist approach to life and they are unable to experience themselves, including their bodies, as spiritual beings.
Parental
Care:
- In Blake's work, parents and others in a position of care are often perceived as inhibiting and repressing their children. Their own fears and shame are communicated to the next generation through the desire to ‘protect' children from their desires and their sexuality. According to Blake, parents misuse ‘care' to repress children and bind them to themselves, rather than setting the children free by rejoicing in, and safeguarding, their capacity for play and imagination.
Distortion
of Christian Belief:
- Blake opposed the way in which he felt the Church condoned the established social order without questioning it. Christian teaching about respecting authority led to the sense that being ‘good' meant accepting the status quo as though it had been designed by God to be that way.
Vulnerability
of Innocence:
- Innocence is frequently presented as freedom from constraint and self-consciousness. The innocent are full of trust in their world – both natural and human. The fragility of this state is also an aspect of this theme. Since it is, by its nature, unaware, innocence makes itself vulnerable to injustice and exploitation. For Blake, innocence was insufficient if it was also ignorant of the realities of the fallen world. Innocence is especially endangered when it is ignorant of the ‘woe' in life and of the possibility of failure and betrayal.
The Two
Contrary States:
- Humans think there is a marriage of Heaven and Hell but no says Blake, there is not. They are equals but we give Heaven more weight.
- Level 1 = Heaven, 2 = Pastoral, 3 = Earth and 4= Hell. But actually there is only one state (level) and that is our mind.
- Our mind has merely created all the levels so there is a notion of good = heaven and bad/evil = hell.
- This leads to us creating an imposing God who is oppressive. Blake uses Lyca to show that we have created oppression so we can uncreate it. We can uncreate the oppressive God and His social control.
Works
Cited: