William Blake – Songs of Innocence & Experience: Exam Notes

Romantic Period (late 18th–early 19th c.)
• Reaction against Enlightenment “Reason” & neoclassical formality.
• Emphasises imagination, emotion, originality, nature, political liberty.
Key political catalyst: $1789$ French Revolution → writers side with common people vs. oppressive ruling classes.
Blake (1757–1827)
• English engraver-poet; mixed visual art with verse.
• Radical in religion & politics; hostile to institutional Church, slavery, child labour.
• Saw imagination as a divine faculty; reason = restrictive, de-humanising.

Full title: “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”.
Two matched groups: Innocence (childlike vision, spontaneity) vs. Experience (fallen, social oppression, reflective awareness).
Neither state is final; both necessary, but imagination can reconcile them.

Simple, musical diction; heavy repetition, rhyme, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (esp. in Innocence).
Visual plates: text integrated with hand-coloured engravings.
Frequent biblical allusions (Lamb of God, Fall, Revelation, Job) re-imagined rather than doctrinal.

Innocence: joyous piper meets heavenly child; writing the song makes the child vanish ⇒ first hint that fixing inspiration (reason, print) ends pure imagination.
Experience: bard-prophet addresses fallen Earth; cosmic, prophetic tone; summons repentance; signals loss & potential renewal.

Lamb (Innocence): catechism-like Q&A; Christ as meek Lamb; child identifies with lamb & Christ.
Tyger (Experience): awe at a fearsome creator who forges a “fearful symmetry”; asks if same God made both lamb & tyger ⇒ confronts divine paradox, existence of evil, sublime power.

Innocence: child sweeps chimneys; vision of angel releasing dead sweeps; concludes “do their duty, they need not fear harm” ⇒ gentle tone masks social horror.
Experience: now bitter; parents at church while child suffers; religion & monarchy build “a heaven of our misery”.

Innocence: mother teaches heavenly equality; black skin = cloud shielding God’s light; boy offers to shade white child until he can bear divine beams.
Implicit critique of slavery/racism through tenderness, not denunciation.

Walk through “charter’d” streets/Thames; hears “mind-forged manacles”; images of chimney-sweep, soldier’s blood, infant-cursing harlot ⇒ systemic oppression, hypocrisy, sexual & urban decay.

Blake embodies Romantic ideals: originality, visionary imagination, political radicalism.
Songs use simple form to convey complex theological, social, psychological insights.
Paired poems reveal how perspective alters meaning (same symbols – child, lamb – read differently).
Recurrent critique: institutions exploit the weak; reasoned order becomes “mind-forged manacles.”
Remember flagship quotations:
• “Tiger, tiger, burning bright…”
• “Little Lamb, who made thee?”
• “In every cry of every man… the mind-forged manacles I hear.”
Link to wider Romantic themes: nature’s holiness, French-Revolutionary zeal, artist-as-prophet.