StudentShare
Contact Us
Sign In / Sign Up for FREE
Search
Go to advanced search...

Songs of Innocence and Experience - Essay Example

Cite this document
Summary
Name of the Student English Literature (Classic and Modern) Name of the Concerned Professor 11 October 2013 William Blake- Songs of Innocence and Experience The tow poems The Lamb and The Tyger from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience tend to validate a necessary existence of a sense of duality in the creation, one innocent and nascent while the other being shrewd and mature, both balancing an complementing each other to facilitate some larger harmony…
Download full paper File format: .doc, available for editing
GRAB THE BEST PAPER96.1% of users find it useful
Songs of Innocence and Experience
Read Text Preview

Extract of sample "Songs of Innocence and Experience"

Download file to see previous pages

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

...Download file to see next pages Read More
Cite this document
  • APA
  • MLA
  • CHICAGO
(“Songs of Innocence and Experience Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words”, n.d.)
Retrieved from https://studentshare.org/literature/1487538-songs-of-innocence-and-experience
(Songs of Innocence and Experience Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 Words)
https://studentshare.org/literature/1487538-songs-of-innocence-and-experience.
“Songs of Innocence and Experience Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 Words”, n.d. https://studentshare.org/literature/1487538-songs-of-innocence-and-experience.
  • Cited: 0 times

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF Songs of Innocence and Experience

Imitation of William Blakes The Tyger

Therefore, I greatly feel that my selection of Blake's poetic style in the poem 'The Tyger' has been effective in conveying my important theme and I have gathered appropriate experience and creativity through this assignment which will be useful in my future works.... This particular assignment has been different and useful in developing the creative writing in a specific and interesting way....
3 Pages (750 words) Book Report/Review

William Blakes Songs of Innocence and Experience

1In the paper “Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake” the author analyzes the set of poems, which juxtapose the pastoral world of childhood innocence against the adult world of corruption and repression.... Blake neither identifying himself with innocence and experience stands from a distance from where he attempts to recognize and correct the fallacies of both.... songs of innocence reveal the nave hopes and fears of the lives of children and study their transformation as the child grows to adulthood....
2 Pages (500 words) Book Report/Review

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience are rather clearly written on his thought that the soul has two different states, one of Innocence and the other of Experience.... Blake through his poems has given a perfect view of innocence and experience.... These were merged with the songs of innocence and were printed collectively in 1794.... Blake believes that children are the symbols of innocence and this innocence is much more...
5 Pages (1250 words) Book Report/Review

Downfall of Human Spirit in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience

The purpose of the present essay is to provide a literary analysis of a poetry collection book titled "Songs of Innocence and Experience" by William Blake.... hellip; William Blake, the author of the Songs of Innocence and Experience has been regarded by the critics for his exceptional expression of ideas and being creative for the themes that he developed.... Of his works, it notably considered that Songs of Innocence and Experience made a great distinction between the contrary states of the human soul....
6 Pages (1500 words) Essay

Social Ills in A Modest Proposal

In the essay “A Modest Proposal” the author summarizes the social ills detailed in "A Modest Proposal," "Songs of Innocence and Experience, "Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much with Us," and Shelly's poem, "England in 1819" by Shelley.... In “Songs of Innocence and Experience”, a collection of poems by Blake, Blake highlights a number of social ills such as the children as laborers as depicted in “The Chimney Sweeper”, discrimination of races as depicted in the poem “The Little Black Boy” and poor as sufferers of humanity....
1 Pages (250 words) Essay

William Blake's poem The Little Black Boy

The poem “The Little Black Boy” is from the compilation of the poems by William Blake, “Songs of Innocence and Experience.... His Essay, World Literature Topic: William Blakes poem "The Little Black Boy" The poem “The Little Black Boy” is from the compilation of the poems by William Blake, “Songs of Innocence and Experience.... Child: Though the word is not specially mentioned, the speaker is the child, the image of innocence and gentleness....
2 Pages (500 words) Essay

The Songs of Innocence and A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Compare one of William Blake's political poems in the Songs of Innocence and Experience and compare it to a text by Mary Wollstonecraft in a vindication of the rights of women.... In fact, the struggle of women that Wollstonecraft is espousing is not yet fully realized today and such made it more relevant than Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience.... Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience has its own literary merit only that its relevance is diminished when it is compared to Mary Wollstonecraft's A vindication of the rights of women....
4 Pages (1000 words) Essay

Comparison of Tintern Abbey and Songs of Innocence and Experience

From the paper "Comparison of Tintern Abbey and Songs of Innocence and Experience" it is clear that Blake writes about childhood quite extensively using different aspects of childhood life and the diverse experiences that are experienced during the course of growth.... Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey both exhibit similarities as they relate to the context of children and the idea of evolution with time with which occurs a transformation from innocence to maturity through experience....
6 Pages (1500 words) Coursework
sponsored ads
We use cookies to create the best experience for you. Keep on browsing if you are OK with that, or find out how to manage cookies.
Contact Us