Songs of Innocence and Experience - Essay Example

Thereby, it would not be wrong to say that the poems The Lamb and The Tyger enshrined in Songs of Innocence and Experience unravel the primordial friction imminent in the contrary traits within and without the human existence, a coalescence and blending of which imbues the creation with a sense of higher purpose that is all pervasive and all enveloping. To understand and grasp this poetic attempt at reconciliation of the opposites and the contraries, one needs to have some insight into the essential world view and philosophy of William Blake.

The quintessential gist of William Blake’s world view recognized the basic fact that without a coexistence of the contraries, there could not be any intellectual and spiritual progression (Fischer 11). That is why the poems in the collection Songs of Innocence and Experience affiliate to the two diverse states of the human soul. ‘Innocence’ and ‘Experience’ allude to the two fundamental states of human consciousness that largely affiliate to the Miltonic notions of Paradise and The Fall (Lawson 36).

Thereby, if the lamb affiliates to a nascent stage marked by childhood innocence that is not immune to human baseness and flaws, the tiger tends towards a stage of maturity and experience that though marked by loss of vitality, inhibition and fear, carries the reverberations of the divine and the exalted at its core. There is no denying the fact that both the poem The Lamb and The Tyger happen to deal with the larger question of creation. However, in the poem The Lamb, the poet takes a subdued and understated approach towards this primordial human dilemma by posing a sweet and delicate question to a soft and meek creature like lamb.

Instead of being blunt and direct with the gentle and humble creature that constitutes the subject of the poem The Lamb, the poet simply asks the lamb that, “Little Lamb who made the?/Dost though know who made the?” It goes without saying that the gentle and lilting tone of the poet in The Lamb is indicative of the sublime notions of innocence, meekness, gentleness and divinity. When the poet refers to the lamb’s attributes like, “Softest clothing wooly bright;/Gave the such a tender voice”, the lamb comes out as an essential symbol of pastoral innocence that acts as foil to the urban world of human shrewdness, which carries on with its murky business in the backdrop of the larger world of God’s creation.

The gentle tone and phrasing resorted to by Blake in The Lamb imbues the poem with a delicate sense of gentleness and spirituality, as the poet proceeds ahead to unravel the link between the softness, gentleness and the meekness of the lamb and the God’s lamb that is Jesus as he says, “Little Lamb I’ll tell the!/He is called by thy name,/For He calls himself a Lamb”. The thing that needs to be noted is that the sweetness and gentleness enveloping the mood of the poem The Lamb does also give way to a sense of blandness, which needs to be balanced with something sharp and fiery like the tiger.

Thereby, the poem The Tyger in Songs of Experience though being a separate and complete poem, do comes out as a just and necessary antithesis to the ideas and sentiments inherent in the poem The Lamb. Even while attempting a cursory perusal of The Tyger, one simply could not help noticing the fact that