Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Songs
of
Innocence
and
Experience:
Casebook,
to
Macias 2
Macias 3
groups his verses under two main headings, and there is plainly a
great difference of character between the two parts (139).
According to Bowra, in the first part (Songs of Innocence) Blake
provides an imaginative vision of innocence from a child's viewpoint,
however, in the second part (Songs of Experience) Blake showed that
experience destroys the state of childhood innocence and instead
many destructive forces take its place. Thus, what Blake intended
with this opposition of the two parts of the book is to show the two
contrary states of the human soul 4. Blake sees man corrupted by the
currents of thought and obviously by experience; these forces do not
allow man to think and therefore he does not see what goes on
around him, so man becomes another sheep of the flock. He found
that there was a lack of moral values precisely because of the
corruption of the most holy in the human spirit.
Despite being a firm believer of God, Blake illustrated in his
poetry his criticism on the abusive power that the institutionalized
church exerted mainly on the poor. This fact is distinctly reflected in
'Holy Thursday' of Songs of Experience. In the first part of the poem,
what can be drawn from it is that the care that these children receive
is far away from what it should be. What Blake criticizes here is that
the cold and usurious hand that nourishes the children is only
motivated by self-interest, rather than from compassion or love as
one may expect it to be. As it could be appreciated in the poem, the
children are participating in a public exhibition of joy but the reality
4
Macias 4
is that this does not reflect the actual circumstances of the infants. In
a scene where the kids are, apparently happy, attending church on a
holy day, what is behind their clean faces is another reality: the true
is that they were receiving a painful and precarious care. The public
presentation of children suggests only the hypocrisy of religion
institutionalized; the Christian charity which is presumed by the
rulers of the Church is far away from being compassion for the poor
but only pure appearance.
In the same sense, Blake produced a critique of the urban
poverty and misery suffered by the city of London, a city which at
first glance was developed politically and socially. Therefore, Blake
states that the misery of Londoners was not simply displeasure or
discomfort; he found that it was death following disease, disease
which could not be cured because it was neither acknowledged
socially nor understood. At this point, it is emphasized that the
author wanted to reach the ears of the people to make them aware
about what was happening in the 18th century English society. Blake
wanted to expose the reality of a society that boasted of being so
advanced when beneath the carpet there was only hypocrisy and
ignorance of contemporary social problems. In this sense, in the
poem London he gives his own view of that chartered liberty on
which
his
countrymen
prided
themselves,
and
exposes
the
Macias 5
Macias 6
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. Ed.
Lincoln, Andrew. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
ONLINE SOURCES
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-blake
http://www.enotes.com/topics/songs-innocence-experience/criticalessays
Macias 7