Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake: Complete Guide to the Contrary States

Overview

Songs of Innocence was first published in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. Songs of Experience was added in 1794, and from that point the two collections were always published together as a single volume with the subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The subtitle is the key to the work: Blake did not see Innocence and Experience as stages in a developmental process (childhood giving way to adulthood) but as permanent, coexisting, and equally necessary dimensions of human consciousness.

The collection contains 19 Songs of Innocence and 27 Songs of Experience, for a total of 46 poems. Many of the Experience poems are "contrary" versions of Innocence poems: they present the same subject (childhood, charity, creation, the church) from the opposite perspective. The effect is stereoscopic: by seeing the same reality through both lenses, the reader perceives a depth that neither lens alone can provide.

Blake produced each copy of the Songs by hand, using his groundbreaking technique of "illuminated printing," in which text and images were etched together onto copper plates, printed, and then hand-coloured by Blake and his wife Catherine. No two copies are identical, and each is a work of art combining poetry, painting, and printmaking in a single creative act. The original copies are now among the most valuable books in the world, with individual copies selling for millions at auction.

Who Was William Blake?

William Blake (1757-1827) was born in London, the son of a hosier. He received no formal education except in art, attending the Royal Academy for a time before becoming an engraver. From childhood, he reported seeing visions: angels in a tree on Peckham Rye, the prophet Ezekiel in a field, God putting his head against the window. These visions were not metaphorical; Blake experienced them as literal perceptions of a spiritual reality that most people could not see.

Blake was a radical in every sense. He supported the French and American Revolutions, opposed slavery, championed the rights of women and the poor, and attacked the institutions of his day, including the Church of England, the monarchy, the scientific establishment, and the industrial system, with equal ferocity. He was tried for sedition in 1803 (and acquitted) after a soldier accused him of making anti-government statements.

Despite his genius, Blake was almost unknown during his lifetime. He sold few copies of his illuminated books, earned a modest living as an engraver, and was considered eccentric or mad by most of his contemporaries. Recognition came only after his death, gradually building through the 19th and 20th centuries until he is now regarded as one of the supreme figures of English literature and art.

Blake's other major works include The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), The Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804-1810), and Jerusalem (1804-1820). These longer "prophetic books" develop a complex personal mythology that expands the themes introduced in the Songs. But the Songs of Innocence and of Experience remain his most widely read and loved work, the entry point through which most readers encounter his vision.

Illuminated Printing

Blake's technique of illuminated printing was his most original technical achievement. Dissatisfied with conventional letterpress printing (which separated text from illustration), he developed a method that allowed him to combine words and images on a single copper plate, creating a unified visual and verbal experience.

The process involved writing text backwards on the copper plate in an acid-resistant medium, surrounding it with decorative borders, vines, figures, and other illustrations, then etching the plate in acid so that the lettering and images stood in relief. The plates were then inked and printed, and each impression was hand-coloured with watercolours, often by Catherine Blake working alongside her husband.

The result is a form of art that has no real equivalent in Western culture: each page is simultaneously a poem, a painting, and a piece of graphic design. The illustrations do not merely illustrate the text; they extend, comment on, and sometimes contradict it. A poem about innocence may be surrounded by images of confinement. A poem about experience may contain hidden images of liberation. The relationship between text and image is always dynamic, never merely decorative.

The Contrary States

The subtitle "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul" establishes the philosophical framework for the entire collection. Blake's concept of "contraries" is central to his thought and appears throughout his work:

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence." (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

For Blake, reality is constituted by the tension between opposites. Good and evil, joy and suffering, innocence and experience, body and soul, heaven and hell are not dualities in which one side must be eliminated but polarities that generate the energy of existence. To suppress either pole is to diminish life; to hold both in creative tension is to perceive reality in its fullness.

Innocence, in Blake's usage, is not mere ignorance or naivety. It is a state of consciousness characterized by trust, wonder, compassion, and the perception of the divine in ordinary experience. The child who sees angels in a tree is not hallucinating; they are perceiving a dimension of reality that adult consciousness, narrowed by convention and self-interest, has learned to filter out.

Experience, similarly, is not mere cynicism or disillusionment. It is a state of consciousness characterized by awareness of suffering, injustice, hypocrisy, and the mechanisms of power that create and maintain social evil. The adult who sees the exploitation behind the charity, the oppression behind the piety, the suffering behind the prosperity, is perceiving dimensions of reality that innocent consciousness, in its trust, overlooks.

Blake's point is that neither state alone gives access to the whole truth. The innocent child does not see the exploitation; the experienced adult does not see the angels. The fully human soul requires both: the child's capacity for wonder and the adult's capacity for critical perception. Blake called this higher integration "Organized Innocence," a state that has passed through Experience and emerged on the other side with both its critical awareness and its capacity for joy intact.

Songs of Innocence

The Songs of Innocence present a world of pastoral simplicity, divine care, and the untroubled harmony between the human, the natural, and the divine. The dominant imagery is of green meadows, gentle streams, lambs, children playing, and protective angels. The God of Innocence is gentle, caring, and immediately accessible: a shepherd tending his flock, a father comforting his children, a creator who "became a little child" (The Lamb).

Key poems include:

"Introduction": A piper encounters a child on a cloud who asks him to pipe, then sing, then write down his songs. The progression from music to song to written text enacts the process by which inspiration becomes art. The child (the spirit of Innocence) is the source; the piper (the poet) is the vehicle.

"The Lamb": A child asks a lamb who made it: "Little Lamb who made thee? / Dost thou know who made thee?" The answer is Christ, "He is called by thy name, / For he calls himself a Lamb." Creator, creature, and perceiver are united in a circle of innocent identity: God became a child, the child addresses the lamb, and all three share the same gentle nature.

"The Chimney Sweeper" (Innocence): A child chimney sweep, sold by his father and forced into dangerous, filthy labour, dreams of angel-liberation: thousands of sweepers released from coffins of soot, washing in a river, and playing in the sun. The poem operates on two levels simultaneously: on the surface, it consoles the child with faith in divine care; beneath the surface, it exposes the cruelty of a society that requires children to be consoled for their own exploitation.

"Holy Thursday" (Innocence): Charity children, dressed in their best, file into St. Paul's Cathedral for a service. The speaker sees them as "flowers of London town" and their singing as "a mighty wind" ascending to heaven. The scene is genuinely beautiful, and the speaker's perception is genuinely innocent. But the reader who has also read the Experience version knows that this beauty is purchased by the children's poverty.

The Lamb

The Lamb is the poem of perfect Innocence: a child's simple question about creation, answered with a child's simple faith. The creator who made the lamb is the same God who "calls himself a Lamb" (Christ) and "became a little child" (the Incarnation). In this poem, there is no distance between creator and creature, no mystery, no fear. The creator is known, loved, and identical with the creation: gentleness made the gentle, innocence made the innocent.

The poem's simplicity is its profundity. By using the simplest vocabulary and the most direct syntax available in English, Blake creates a verbal equivalent of the state of consciousness he is describing. You cannot read "The Lamb" ironically; its form resists irony as completely as a child's smile resists cynicism. This is not because Blake is naive but because he has chosen to inhabit Innocence fully, without the protective distance that adult sophistication provides.

Songs of Experience

The Songs of Experience present the same world as the Songs of Innocence, but seen through different eyes. The pastoral green has darkened. The protective God has become an absent or punitive authority. The children who played on the green are now chimney sweepers, prostitutes, and soldiers. The institutions that seemed benevolent in Innocence, the Church, the State, the family, are revealed in Experience as instruments of oppression.

"Introduction" (Experience): The Bard (the prophetic voice) calls the "lapsed Soul" of Earth to awaken from its sleep. Where the Introduction to Innocence was joyful, this is urgent and dark: "Hear the voice of the Bard! / Who Present, Past, & Future sees."

"The Chimney Sweeper" (Experience): The same subject as the Innocence version, but the tone is entirely different. Instead of angelic consolation, the child sweep says: "And because I am happy, & dance & sing, / They think they have done me no injury." The child's apparent happiness is not genuine comfort but the exploitation of innocence by a society that uses the child's faith to mask its own cruelty.

"Holy Thursday" (Experience): The same scene as the Innocence version, but now the speaker sees what innocence overlooked: "Is this a holy thing to see, / In a rich and fruitful land, / Babes reduced to misery, / Fed with cold and usurious hand?" The beauty of the ceremony cannot mask the ugliness of a society that produces child poverty.

The Tyger

The Tyger is the most famous poem in the collection and one of the most famous in the English language. It is the contrary of The Lamb, asking the same question ("Who made you?") but in a tone of awe, terror, and bewilderment rather than gentle trust.

The Lamb's creator was gentle, known, and intimate. The Tyger's creator is terrifying, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The creator of the Tyger works with "hammer," "chain," "furnace," and "anvil," the tools of a cosmic blacksmith forging a creature of devastating beauty and power. The poem's central question, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?", receives no answer. In Innocence, the question is answered easily. In Experience, the question remains open, because Experience has discovered that creation includes violence, predation, and terror as well as gentleness and care.

The poem does not resolve the tension between the Lamb and the Tyger. It holds the question open, which is itself the point. A creation that contains both the lamb and the tiger is more mysterious, more terrifying, and more beautiful than a creation that contains only one. The "fearful symmetry" of the Tyger is the symmetry of a universe that includes both poles: creation and destruction, innocence and experience, the gentle and the ferocious.

London

"London" is the masterpiece of Songs of Experience and one of the most concentrated political poems in English. In sixteen lines, Blake indicts an entire civilization. The "charter'd streets" and "charter'd Thames" (streets and river bought, sold, and legally controlled) establish that even the natural world has been enclosed and commodified. The "mind-forg'd manacles" are the most powerful image: the chains that bind humanity are not imposed from outside but forged in the mind itself, by the habits of obedience, fear, and acceptance that make oppression possible.

The poem moves through four stanzas, each exposing a different dimension of social evil: the general scene (weakness and woe in every face), the blackening church (religion complicit in the exploitation of chimney sweepers), the hapless soldier's sigh (running in blood down palace walls), and the youthful harlot's curse (prostitution blighting marriage and blinding the newborn with venereal disease). The progression is from the general to the specific, each stanza more shocking than the last, culminating in the image of infection passing from prostitute to wife to infant, a chain of corruption that links every level of society.

The Two Chimney Sweepers

The paired Chimney Sweeper poems are perhaps the clearest illustration of how Innocence and Experience see the same reality differently.

In the Innocence version, a child sweep, sold by his father, comforts a younger sweep named Tom Dacre by telling him about a dream in which an angel releases thousands of sweeps from coffins, and they play in the sun, wash in a river, and fly on clouds. The poem ends: "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm." The child's faith is genuine and moving; but the reader senses the horror beneath the surface: children sold, locked in coffins of soot, consoling themselves with visions of liberation that will only come in death.

In the Experience version, a sweep tells a passerby that his parents have gone to pray at church, leaving him to work in the snow. "And because I am happy, & dance & sing, / They think they have done me no injury." The child's apparent happiness has become a tool of exploitation: the parents use the child's resilience to deny their own cruelty, and the Church and State "make up a heaven of our misery." The Experience version does not replace the Innocence version; it reveals what the Innocence version conceals.

Blake's Visionary Philosophy

Blake was not merely a poet who wrote about spiritual matters; he was a visionary who perceived spiritual realities as directly as most people perceive physical objects. His philosophy, developed more fully in the prophetic books, includes several key ideas that inform the Songs:

Imagination is the divine in humanity: For Blake, the imagination is not a faculty for inventing fictions but the highest faculty of perception: the capacity to see the divine in the ordinary. "The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself" (Milton). When Blake says he sees angels, he means that his imagination perceives dimensions of reality that the reasoning mind, limited to the evidence of the five senses, overlooks.

Energy is eternal delight: Blake rejected the Puritan-Enlightenment suppression of bodily energy, passion, and desire. "Energy is Eternal Delight" (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). The forces that institutional religion calls "sinful" (desire, anger, imagination, joy) are actually expressions of the divine energy that animates all life. Suppressing them does not produce holiness but deadness.

The senses are limited: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite" (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Ordinary perception is narrowed by habit, convention, and the dominance of reason over imagination. The Songs attempt to cleanse these doors by presenting the world through Innocence and Experience simultaneously, revealing depths that neither perspective alone can perceive.

Opposition is true friendship: The contraries (Innocence/Experience, Reason/Energy, Love/Hate) are not enemies but partners. "Opposition is true friendship." The tension between them generates the dynamism of existence. Blake's universe is not one of resolution (in which one pole triumphs over the other) but of creative tension (in which both poles coexist and energize each other).

Blake and Religion

Blake's relationship with religion is paradoxical: he was one of the most deeply religious thinkers in the English tradition and one of the fiercest critics of institutional Christianity. He believed in God, in Christ, in the reality of the spiritual world, and in the primacy of vision over reason. But he attacked the Church for betraying the very God it claimed to serve.

In the Songs, this critique appears in poems like "The Garden of Love" (where a chapel is built on the green where the speaker used to play, and priests "bind with briars my joys & desires"), "The Chimney Sweeper" (Experience) (where the Church profits from child exploitation), and "A Little Boy Lost" (where a priest denounces a child for thinking freely). Blake's God is not the distant, judgmental deity of institutional religion but the "Human Form Divine": the creative, compassionate presence that expresses itself through imagination, art, and love.

This position places Blake in the lineage of Christian mystics, from Meister Eckhart to Jacob Boehme, who distinguished between the living God of direct experience and the dead God of institutional doctrine. Blake's Christ is not the Christ of the creeds but the Christ of the Gospels: a radical who challenged authority, embraced outcasts, and was executed by the religious establishment.

Influence and Legacy

Blake's influence on subsequent literature, art, and culture is immense:

Romanticism: Blake is now recognized as a forerunner of Romanticism, anticipating the Romantic emphasis on imagination, emotion, nature, and the critique of industrial society by two decades.

Modernism: W. B. Yeats edited Blake's collected works in 1893, bringing him to the attention of the modernist generation. T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, and many other modern poets have acknowledged Blake's influence.

Counterculture: Aldous Huxley named The Doors of Perception (1954) after Blake's line about cleansing the doors of perception. Jim Morrison named his band The Doors after Huxley's book. Blake's advocacy of energy, imagination, and the liberation of desire made him a patron saint of the 1960s counterculture.

Music: Blake's poems have been set to music by composers from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Benjamin Britten to Tangerine Dream. "Jerusalem" (from the preface to Milton) is one of England's most beloved hymns.

Visual arts: Blake's illuminated printing influenced the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, and graphic novel art. His vision of the unified artwork (combining text, image, and physical production in a single creative act) anticipates contemporary multimedia art.

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