A Level

English literature H071 H471

Introduction and guided reading
SONGS OF INNOCENCE &
EXPERIENCE WILLIAM BLAKE

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William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Experience

From September 2012, OCR will be introducing new set texts for unit F663. To support you and your
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 WILLIAM BLAKE
SONGS OF INNOCENCE & EXPERIENCE

Biography unscrupulous.

Blake was the son of a modestly prosperous retail

hosier (Napoleon was soon to call England ‘a nation Up to the age of about 50, Blake and his wife lived
of shopkeepers’), brought up in the Soho district of fairly comfortably, with a servant and in several
London, a home for artists, spiritual non-conformists rooms, though in later years their lifestyle contracted
and political activists (Blake was all three). Showing and poverty showed through. Blake was never a
an aptitude for drawing, the boy was sent first to solitary genius; on the contrary he recruited
drawing school, and then apprenticed to an adherents and admirers throughout his life,
engraver, James Basire. He enrolled in the Royal including, right at the end, a group of young painters
Academy, but, as usual with him in later life, found clustering about Samuel Palmer. Coleridge and
large institutions uncongenial and was soon Charles Lamb got to know Blake’s poems before the
executing freelance commissions for book poet’s death, and Ruskin became a devotee of his
illustrations. He is also likely to have quarrelled with paintings, especially their rendering of light. The real
the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua emergence of Blake’s reputation, however, came
Reynolds, whose general statements about art did with Alexander Gilchrist’s Life in 1863 and with the
not please him: ‘To Generalise is to be an idiot’ was Victorian cult of all things ‘Romantic’ soon
a typical comment. While Blake’s work as illustrator afterwards. The most attractive of the many
and engraver paid the bills, the self-published biographies for A2 students is Peter Ackroyd’s Blake
designs, and more ambitious personal projects, had (1995), an object lesson in how to return a major
to be subsidised. As a freelance, Blake was totally artist to the contexts that produced him.
dependent on the whim and character of his patrons.
Fortunately most of these seem to have been well-
disposed towards him, and tolerant of his
eccentricities, though the artist’s unworldliness did
leave him open to exploitation by the more AO4 Biographical
contexts

2
Writer, Illustrator, Self-Publisher obtruding, for ‘Truth can never be told so as to be
understood.’ No one censored Blake’s designs, no
Blake’s illuminated books were modelled on editor toned them down, and no printing-house
manuscripts from the Middle Ages, where the misrepresented or misunderstood them.
pictures informed the words and the words the
pictures, and the links between them were supplied He worked on copper-plates, drawing out his design
by the reader, not managed by the artist. If Blake did in stopping-out liquid. To get a positive etching, he
everything himself, there was no chance of needed first to create a negative, so he worked in
‘interpretation’ (‘priestcraft’, Blake often called it) mirror image, leaving as bare metal the most
important sections of the design and stopping out the A2 essays will benefit greatly if you respond to the
rest of the plate, so that when the acid was applied to visual aspect of Blake’s self-publication. However,
the copper it ate away at the unstopped material to they need to refer to the effect of particular designs,
release the desired form. and not to refer to too many. The prescribed material
remains Blake’s poetry, not his designs.
This method, known as relief etching, is opposite to
the conventional way of etching a copper plate at the Go to www.blakearchive.org for a comprehensive
time, where the surface of most of the copper plate collection of Blake’s designs. This includes a facility
is preserved and the design itself is attacked with for comparing variant inkings of the same plate held
acid. There is something satisfyingly paradoxical in different libraries.
about Blake’s inversion of the process, well-suited to
his delight in the creative power of opposites. As he
put it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which
includes the proverb ‘opposition is true friendship’,
this was ‘printing by the infernal method, by
corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal,
melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the
infinite which was hid.’

Once Blake had completed his etched plate (and he

could work much more quickly in the relief method
than the conventional system) he could ink it and
print it again and again. The design would
necessarily be the same each time it was printed,
but he could vary the effect by changing the inking
process. He could print in monochrome, or ink the
plate with a different solid colour on every page.

He could load the design on the plate itself with

different pigments, producing an effect of strong
shadow and autumnal tints. Or he could wait for
the lightly inked design to dry, and watercolour it
by hand, producing glowing effects of springtime
energy.

No two impressions need, or indeed could, be

identical. The ordering of the designs changes from
copy to copy, and the artist further varied his effects
by choosing to ink Innocence in vibrant watercolour
washes, preferring more sombre opaque effects for
Experience. Blake’s art had become truly democratic.

Blake was never tempted to mass-produce his

designs, or to arrange their sale for profit, though
well-wishers, knowing Blake was touchy about
charity, sometimes gave ten times the original asking
price for his more sought-after special editions.
Twenty-four copies of Innocence survive, the same
number of the composite volume, and just four
copies of Experience alone. It is possible there were
never many more.

Gilchrist confirms that Blake’s early text, Songs of

Innocence, was, with the help of his devoted wife
Catherine, the work of a ‘total artist’:

The poet and his wife did everything in making the

book – writing, designing, printing, engraving –
everything except manufacturing the paper: the very
ink, or colour rather, they did make. Never before
surely was a man so literally the author of his own
book.
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William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Experience3
Continued

Correspondence between text and design in

‘The
Blossom’ is not very close. Critics usually see
‘The
Blossom’ as a study of sexual virility, though
the
sportive innocent figures in the design don’t
suggest
this. Nor is it clear how these relate to green
leaves,
sparrow, robin and blossom, all of which the
poem
describes.

A facsimile hardcopy of Songs of Innocence

and
Experience is available from Tate publications (2006),
and an illustrated Kindle edition from OrangeSky
Publications; a complete paper version of Blake’s
Illuminated Books is available from Thames and
Hudson.

AO4 Biographical contexts

AO3 Every self-published Blake
text different from every other
AO2 Appearance of designs
and texts
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William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Experience4

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William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Experience Sometimes, as in ‘Infant Joy’, where the child-speaker
is but two days old, its wisdom is so fresh from the
hand of God it seems creepily pre-human (trailing the
‘clouds of glory’, perhaps, that Wordsworth writes
about in his ‘Immortality Ode’). When Blake saw a
Songs of Innocence group of children at play, he didn’t think of competi
tiveness, envy or deceit, but was prepared to ad mire
Though long known as part of a composite volume without qualification. ‘That,’ he told someone,
(1794), where it stands as a companion of the later pointing to a children’s game, ‘is heaven.’ But worldly
Songs of Experience and enters into debate with it, readers are apt to find ‘heaven’ challenging, like the
Songs of Innocence made its appearance indepen ‘naked new-born babe’ in Macbeth’s visualisation of
dently in 1789, and must to some extent be consid Pity (1795), which, drawn by Blake, would strike the
ered a freestanding work. It is most confidently clas fear of God into any would-be murderer.
sified as a children’s book, with its title a reminder
that throughout his life Blake was fond of singing his Even the chimney-sweepers of Innocence seem
own lyrics, to tunes of his own devising. insulated from their appalling working conditions by a
shared religious vision, as iridescent as Charles
In the design for the Experience poem ‘London’, a Kingsley’s re-working of it in The Water Babies
shaft of light illuminates a child as he leads an old (1863):
man: ‘I see,’ Blake wrote in the long poem Jerusalem,
apparently a later re-working of this design, ‘London Then down a green plain leaping, laughing they run,
blind and age-bent begging through the streets / Of And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.
Babylon, led by a child. His tears run down his beard’
In Innocence, too, Blake is fond of showing how the They seem to run refreshed from this river, and back
child may educate, sometimes even shame, adult to their appalling labours, comforted by the eerie
possessors of worldly wisdom. half-rhymes of the final stanza.

The title page depicts an adult woman holding open a Thus the children of Innocence function as religious
book for two children to read, who examine the initiates, on intimate terms with the Lamb of God,
pages with mature, discerning faces. Authority in showing how far the adults of Experience often are
literature seems thus to belong to the child’s from understanding Christian integrity; or else they
response, not adult interpretation. This is in accord live among, and even lead wild beasts, like the Mes
with Rousseau’s views in his La Nouvelle Héloïse sianic child in Isaiah 11:6 (‘The Little Girl Lost’). Their
(1761) and Émile, ou l’Education (1762). These playground is an ‘echoing green’, whose cries ring on
books initiated a cult of the child as visionary that throughout life, increasingly distressing adult hearers
became widespread in first generation Romanticism. with thoughts of frustration and mortality, of Peter
Wordsworth’s insistence that all adults carry a Pan, of A.E. Housman’s ‘land of lost content’. They
formative child within them (‘The child is father of the are not productive or disciplined members of the
man’) is a famous instance. community. They will not, do not, cannot go to bed to
fit in with nurse’s or any other adult timetable.
The earliest poems in Songs of Innocence appear
among passages of gusty satire in an eccentric 1784 Like most children the children of Songs of Inno
manuscript not intended for publication called An cence satirise adult practice. Recent attempts to
Island in the Moon. All three Ur-poems focus on the prove that these beautiful but spooky poems are
patina of innocence that seems to insulate children about language acquisition or educational method
from danger or sorrow: from an unearthly light in fail to come to terms with the occult quality insepa
‘The Little Boy Lost’ (very bright in Blake’s design, rable from the Romantic cult of the child, or with
and just a yard from the child), from poverty in ‘Holy Blake’s contempt for all forms of education, even
Thursday’; even from their nurse’s demand they those that take a left hand path: ‘There is no use in
come into dinner from their playing in ‘Nurse’s Song’. education. I hold it wrong – It is the great Sin.’
These three poems set the tone for Blake’s thinking
about children in Songs of Innocence. His children
are both blessedly uncomplicated, and immune from,
or above, human wisdom.

5
Continued The most significant ‘sources’ for Blake’s Songs are
the popular poems of the late eighteenth century,
particularly hymns and ballads. Ballads were to transform our world
collected by editors such as Joseph Ritson and AO4 Literary context:
Bishop Percy; hymns had become a regular part of Romantic cult of the child
Anglican worship. But the big difference between Revolutionary Times
Blake’s Songs and these analogues was that Blake’s
children are never interested in establishing a moral Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, the year
for his piece. ‘A Cradle Song’ in Innocence seems to of the Fall of the Bastille in France, opening event of
have been closely modelled on Isaac Watts’s well- the French Revolution, and symbol of the overthrow
known ‘Cradle Hymn’, but where Watts, rather of feudal tyranny. Songs of Experience was
absurdly, bids the cossetted infant remember how published in 1794, during the height of the French
much better off it is in its nursery than its heavenly Reign of Terror. Other first generation Romantics,
maker was in His Ox’s stall, Blake’s baby happily such as Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft,
shares Jesus’s ‘image’ and emotions, without once witnessed these events at first hand. Blake, as
reflecting on its supine privileges or expressing always, remained in London, but the political
puritanical guilt. Blake’s babe breathes ‘dovelike transformations unfolding in France inspired and
moans’ beguiling ‘earth to peace.’ That is enough. excited him. At the beginning of the Revolution Blake
There is no sermon. ‘The Little Vagabond’ in wore the red bonnet of liberty in the open street as a
Experience is based on the ballads rather than a mark of commitment; but as news of atrocities
hymn, but it too is inscrutable. The main point seems escalated, and it became clear the revolutionaries
to be to contrast the tight-fistedness of churchgoers meant to do away with the Catholic Church (which,
with more generous tavern-drinkers. But the poor somewhat oddly, Blake respected) he qualified his
child who speaks the poem, with his desire for beer- support. If the revolutionaries were to behave as
kegs at church, might just as easily be expressing heretics, argued the profoundly Christian Blake, it
the freedom of his lifestyle, or campaigning for self- was his duty to be a saint.
serving liberty hall. Like all the children in Songs, this
one is keen only to affirm, as simply as possible, his
joy in being.

AO4 Political and

AO3 Power of Innocence religious contexts

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William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Experience6
Blake the Radical which time, place, circumstance and human rules
impose on the imagination. This means that the
Literary criticism has trouble with the attitude of typical trajectory of Romantic writing and thinking is
Romantic artists to politics. Typically Romanticism to forsake political issues and historical context and
concerns itself with the individual and with the limits become preoccupied with the inner life. This can
lead progressive critics to maximise the political
residue in these writers, neglecting the true plot against him because he was of the ‘Paine party’,
complexity of the work in favour of something and enlisted the malicious soldier with angels of
polemical or reductive; it can encourage Satan in his epic Jerusalem.
conservative critics to argue that the art of the
Romantic has no business with the ‘real’ world at all, The political vision of Blake’s poems is thus
or, worse, to recruit the artist somewhat infuriatingly difficult to match up with deliverable
antiseptically for the heritage industry. political programmes. There is a tendency for real
people to get mixed up with visionary forces, as
Blake has been subject to both misappropriations. happens to Private Scofield, or to politicians like
The artist’s early commissions for the engraver Necker or George Washington. There is also a
Joseph Johnson brought him into radical circles. He tendency for the hard edges of Blake’s art, and its
did the illustrations for Mary Wollstonecraft’s first two complex vision, to highlight contradictions, even on
books, both didactic texts for children, and also basic issues, such as whether his poems advocate
illustrated a travel-book, John Gabriel Steedman’s interventionism or quiescence. For example, Blake
Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the concludes ‘Holy Thursday’ I (Innocence) with ‘cherish
Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), which deals pity, lest you drive an angel from your door’; yet at
quite graphically with the brutality of slavery. the beginning of ‘The Human Abstract’ (Experience)
Nevertheless, steeped as he was in the thinking of he argues that charity is bound to have a selfish
revolutionary writers, Blake was not a political animal. component, for this is a fallen world:
He found the anti-Christian outlook of many radicals
incompatible with his religious faith: ‘he rebuked the Pity would be no more
profanity of Paine [an Atheist], and was no disciple of If we did not make somebody poor
Priestley’ [a Unitarian], wrote Samuel Palmer. Blake And Mercy no more could be
was not very effective in political debate, being If all were as happy as we
aggressive and not always able to argue rationally,
and his ill-considered outbursts often dismayed his ‘London’, which George Orwell believed contained
‘minders’, who were aware of the dangers awaiting ‘more understanding of the nature of capitalist
conspicuous radicals, particularly after the notorious society’ than ‘three quarters of socialist literature’, is
‘Treason Trials’ of 1794. This was not, in Blake’s also ambiguous. The sigh of the ‘hapless Soldier’
case, an unfounded fear. In summer 1803, with the runs as ‘blood down Palace walls’. But is this the
South Coast kindled with fear of a Napoleonic soldier’s blood, shed during a revolutionary self-
invasion, Blake unwisely quarrelled with a soldier sacrifice? Or is he a soldier in the pay of
named Scofield doing some work in his garden. After establishment tyranny, whose ‘sigh’, projected as a
raised voices and some jostling, the soldier alleged musket-bullet, claims ‘innocent’ revolutionary lives?
that Blake had insulted the King and his troops, and The poem’s effects of synaesthesia also get in the
Blake was forced to take his trial for sedition at the way of its political arguments, introducing a note of
local Assizes. hallucinatory horror.

We ‘hear’ the clank of ‘mind-forg’d manacles,

The artist was acquitted, but seems to have been churches become draped in something like funeral
much distressed by what he saw as a Government palls, and ‘sighs’ turn to blood-stains.

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William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Experience7

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William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Experience profound and touching; but to realise his dream his
soul must be ‘white’ and all kinds of arguably racist
implications occur to more ‘experienced’ readers of
the poem. When read alongside ‘The Chimney
Sweeper’ perspectives on the meaning of ‘whiteness’
Continued and ‘blackness’ shift again, making disinterested
‘experienced’ readings – as opposed to ‘innocent’
The apparently simple anti-slavery poem ‘The Little ones – well-nigh impossible. Blake may have got
Black Boy’ in Innocence proves a mine-field for wind of this himself: troublingly – or refreshingly – he
proponents of political correctness. Within the sometimes inks in the image of the ‘little black boy’
context of his innocent other-worldiness the little black or brown, sometimes white or pink.
black boy’s desire to ‘be like’ the Christian God is
Yet it would be a mistake to think that Blake’s art AO2 Blake’s complexity
always puts him above, or at least apart from, AO3 Ambiguity of Blake’s outlook
practical politics. Things are pretty clear and pretty and writings;
polemical in the poems critiquing organised religion. AO4 Political contexts
Blake was dismayed when a chapel was built on
Lambeth village green. In ‘The Garden of Love’ ‘Thou
shalt not…’ is written over the Chapel door and in the
garden where he used to play freely as a child:

Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

‘A Little Boy Lost’ - in which a child appeals to reason

and to nature for inspiration, is denounced by a priest
and is promptly incinerated by his parents -
expresses the extreme dissenter’s contempt for
those who seek to defend the ‘mystery’ of ‘priestcraft’
by repressive means, a contagion that spreads to the
heart of family life. The victims of Blake’s ‘Chimney
Sweeper’ poems, his most effective radical texts, do
not have family. Sweeps were usually parish boys,
ideal, because of stunted growth, for negotiating the
twisting flues and narrow apertures of chimney flues,
cleaning with brushes or metal scrapers as they
went.

The ‘apprenticing’ of children as young as seven was

often equated with official forms of slavery:

My father sold me sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry ‘weep’ ‘weep’ ‘weep’ ‘weep’!
So your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep.
(from ‘The Chimney-Sweeper’ - Innocence)

The boy is so young that his lisping attempt at

advertising his trade as ‘sweep’ comes out poignantly
as ‘’weep’, both advertising and bemoaning the
capitalist enterprise. In Innocence, as we have seen,
the chimney-climbing ‘lilly-whites’ are insulated from
‘harm’ by their faith; in Experience the ‘little black
thing among the snow’ is dressed as if for his own
funeral, disowned not only by his parents, but by the
God and King priest and parents praise in church.
Despite brutally bad publicity, not least from Blake’s
poems, climbing-boys continued to be maimed,
trapped and suffocated in the London flues until
sharp-toothed legislation in the 1860s.

Thus through exposure to riots, revolution, capitalism

and the Sunday-school, the little wunderkind of
Innocence, striding the blast and dreaming dreams of
heaven, becomes the sulky baby of ‘Infant Sorrow’ in
Experience, a cantankerous rebel, giving his sullen
parents (presumably the point-of-view of this poem)
rest by neither night nor day.

For a detailed study of Blake’s Radicalism see Jon

Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the
Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (1992).
 8
‘Without Contraries is No Progression’ poem is ‘The Poison Tree’.

On the title-page of Songs of Innocence and

Experience (1794) Blake suggests that the poems Here we are not confronting creative opposites, but
are meant to illustrate the ‘Two Contrary States of the the enormity of the differential between apparent and
Human Soul’. Images of Adam and Eve crouch amid actual motives in supposedly civilised society. The
the fiery wrath of God, their genitals crudely covered poem, simple as it is, comprises a multiple betrayal
with leaves. It is the moment of judgement after the by deceit that ultimately spreads to and poisons
Fall (Genesis 3:11; Milton, Paradise Lost Book 10, every aspect of a relationship. The participants in the
121), when the bliss of Innocence gives way to poem should have aired and shared their
knowledge of Good and Evil, and awareness of differences, and let them co-exist. Instead, the poem
Death. To go by the poems which follow Blake didn’t culminates in the gladness of one character when he
just mean to ‘illustrate’ these contrary states, but to finds his enemy stretched out beneath a tree that is
set up trenchant debates between them. certainly not the Tree of Life (the design of the fallen
foe is graphic). Blake, who liked all disputes out in
‘The Songs of Experience are satires,’ wrote Northrop the open, bitterly subtitles this poem ‘Christian
Frye, ‘but one of the things that they satirise is the Forbearance’.
state of innocence . . . conversely the Songs of
Innocence satirise the state of experience.’ This Thus the poems of Experience are typically more
effect is best explored using the counterpart poems in sombre and less magical than those of Innocence.
Innocence and Experience. Gilchrist calls them Rather than affording glimpses of half-forgotten
‘antitypes’. These are: the two ‘Chimney-Sweeper’ childhood, they show the damage when the dust of
poems, the two ‘Nurse’s Songs’, the two ‘Holy years clogs the retina and dams the imagination. As
Thursdays’, ‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tiger’, ‘The Little Gilchrist puts it:
Boy Lost’ and ‘The Little Boy Found’, ‘The Little Girl
Lost’ and ‘The Little Girl Found’, ‘Infant Joy’ and The Songs of Experience consist rather of earnest,
‘Infant Sorrow’. Blake is never systematic, however, impassioned arguments; in this differing from the
so it would be unreasonable to treat every poem in simple affirmations of the earlier Songs of Innocence
Songs as if it ought to have a companion, or to – arguments on the loftiest themes of existence.
expect Blake to set up balanced discussion in all
poetic pairings. The deliberate instability of Blake’s Any student of Songs is likely to be surprised and
text is also a factor. In certain copies as many as six possibly daunted by the wide range of readings these
verses are transferred from Innocence to Experience. poems have attracted. My own make no pretence to
be definitive. One of the most vital connections to
Indeed, the most striking effects of all are probably in note in reading Blake is that between his simplicity
the ‘singleton’ poems of Experience. In ‘The Clod and and his obscurity. The two most influential studies of
the Pebble’ the dialectic is not found in dialogue with Blake’s poetry are Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry:
another poem but at the heart of the poem itself: we A Study of William Blake (1947) and David V.
are all either exploiters and exploited, the poem Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954),
argues, simply, coolly, cruelly, and we need one though both will need to be filleted for A2 students.
another, as bully needs victim, sadist needs
masochist, master needs slave. Lucky and Pozzo in Good simple guides are the Penguin Critical Studies
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot might well have read this by David W. Lindsay, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and
poem. In the brief, possibly autobiographical poem, Experience (1989) and Poetry of William Blake
‘My Pretty Rose-Tree’ the speaker refuses to cheat on (1991). Morris Eaves, ed. The Cambridge
his lover, only to generate an impenetrable thorn Companion to William Blake (2003) is very useful.
thicket of jealousy and reproof. At its deepest this
fierce, riddling poem even seems to suggest (‘her AO2 Blake’s complexity
thorns were my only delight’) the speaker gets a kick AO3 Ambiguity of Blake’s outlook
out of his girl’s jealousy. Another cruelly dialectical and writings;

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William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Experience9
Blake and the Enlightenment beauty of his own naked form and of the coral-
encrusted rocks on which he sits. All that matters is
Throughout his life Blake questioned established measuring geometrical figures on a scroll that seems
orthodoxies and systems, required received opinions to project from his own head, a monstrous parody of
to justify themselves, and believed that man must find Blake’s God in the act of creation. For Blake ‘Bacon,
his own personal, individual pathway through the Locke, and Newton’ are not the fathers of modern
world. “May God us keep / From Single vision & science, but ‘the three great teachers of Atheism, or
Newtons sleep!’ was Blake’s prayer. In Blake’s Satan’s Doctrine’.
Newton design the great scientist is oblivious to the
If Blake and those who thought like him looked Blake believed the highly political and theologically
increasingly unlikely to realise paradise on earth unorthodox Milton was England’s unsung National
through revolutionary action, they could still keep up Poet, and he illustrated Milton’s great poem, Paradise
a ‘mental fight’ for ‘Jerusalem’, the term Blake Lost, on many occasions, taking care to bring out the
borrowed from the Old Testament for the City of vigour of its Satan and the frustrating timidity of its
God, and hoped to build with the help of words and God. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-3) he
prayers in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. goes even further, arguing that Paradise Lost is a
dualistic rather than monotheistic poem, showing God
and Satan locked in creative struggle, and arguing
Blake’s hymn, now fast becoming the unofficial that the author ‘was of the Devil’s Party without
National Anthem of England and the English, is taken knowing it.’ Indeed Milton is most straightforwardly
from his Epic poem Milton, where the great seen as Blake’s attempt to educate the cosmic genius
Republican patriot returns to earth early in the of Milton out of the errors of religion, politics and even
nineteenth century to share his ‘Inspired Man’ speech sexuality into which his giant strength had wandered,
with Blake’s struggling compatriots. self-involved.

AO4 Blake’s intellectual

and religious contexts

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William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Experience identifying himself with one or other of the myriad little
Protestant sects that even to Church Historians are
now largely indistinguishable one from another. In the
1780s, Blake was a frequent attender at the New
Church, the chapel in Great East Cheap where
Blake and Religion almost all extreme dissenters went at this time, but
from1790 Blake rarely if ever went to Church, and
Deeply religious, Blake came profoundly to distrust when he did he often gave offence, for he delighted
organised religion. By birth he was a dissenter, in speaking his mind, often without listening to the
refusing to subscribe to the Thirty Nine Articles that opinions of others. He did not believe, especially on
defined the Established Church of England. Blake religious matters, that humility was any more than ‘a
was baptised in St James’ Church, Piccadilly in 1757 form of hypocrisy’. And Blake’s London – the London
though it is not clear he was a Baptist. He was one of of prophets like Richard Brothers and Joanna
the many religious men who walked the streets of Southcott – was awash with religious vision and
late eighteenth century London, dreaming of the argument, with ‘mysticism and millenarian yearnings’
transformative power of religion, but not really (Ackroyd’s phrase).
Blake has become one of Britain’s great religious next poem, reproachful ‘Earth’. ‘The Human Abstract’
poets, constellated with Donne, Milton, Herbert, posits a tree of ‘mystery’, as pernicious to humankind
Vaughan, Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley as that which grew in Eden, only this one is rooted in
Hopkins. Though his thinking is rooted in the Bible the human brain. This distrust of all ‘mystery’, the
he appeals to readers of any faith or none, for his exegesis and then the doctrine that flows from it, is
concern is the only conduit of religious vision, the the basis of Blake’s appeal to modern anti-clericalists
human imagination, and the only image of religious like Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials
truth, the human form. As he expresses it in ‘The trilogy. Blake’s message, his modern disciples note,
Divine Image’ from Innocence: is essentially that of Monty Python’s Life of Brian:
‘You’ve got to think for your selves . . . . You don’t
For mercy has a human heart; NEED to follow ANYBODY!’ Except Blake himself, of
Pity, a human face; course . . .
And love, the human form divine;
And peace, the human dress. Blake seems to have created for himself the most
Protestant of Protestant sects. It consisted merely of
The phrase ‘human form divine’ slips in from Paradise the poet and his wife, revolved around concepts of
Lost (3, 44), claiming Milton, as Blake often does, as (often sexual) energy, the ‘source of eternal delight’.
a harbinger of Blake’s human-centred faith. His creed might be summarised in his famous cou
plet, combining experimental reading of the scrip
tures with complete disregard for what anyone else
had ever thought or written about them:

Both read the Bible day & night

But thou readst black where I read white.

Blake’s religious conclusions are unorthodox and var In the words of Los from Blake’s Jerusalem: The
ied, but consistent in insisting that ‘all deities reside Emanation of the Giant Albion: I must Create a Sys
in the human breast’ (Marriage of Heaven and Hell) tem, or be enslav’d by another Man’s.
and in their distaste for a hierarchical priesthood
(now often referred to as ‘clericalism’). And the ‘System’ Blake evolved was highly personal
and individualistic. In the 1820s a young journal ist
The introductory poem to Songs of Experience por asked for the artist’s opinions on the divinity of Christ,
trays the rhapsodic bard deliberately misconstruing and received a disconcerting answer: ‘Christ – he
the ‘Holy Word’, as priests do, until roundly reproved said – is the only God – But then he added - And so
for chaining ‘delight’ in ‘night’ by the speaker of the am I and so are you.’

11
Continued

It has always been a moot point whether Blake’s

largely self-willed exile from Christian tradition was
good or bad for his art. T.S. Eliot thought his ideas
too obviously put together ‘out of the odds and ends
about the house’:

What his genius required, and what it sadly lacked,

was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas
which would have prevented him from indulging in
a philosophy of his own.

Those who value Blake as religious writer delight in

this contempt for institutions and the sidestepping
of tradition, finding in his poems the stern naivety
of Christian thought when separated from clerical
pollution.

T.S. Eliot’s essay on ‘Blake’ is in his The Sacred Wood

(1920).
 AO4 Blake’s religious contexts

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William Blake - Songs of Innocence & Experience12
Old Nobodaddy limits to human perception:

In his water-colour etching of God entitled The

Ancient of Days (1794) Blake shows a muscular Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete.
but rather preoccupied deity focused on a pair of Urizen wept and gave it into the hands of Newton
compasses with which he plans the creation of the and Locke.
world:
Throughout his life Blake was appalled by the human
The Lord… set a compass on the face of the depths: propensity to create and submit to oppressive images
when He established the clouds above: when He of the deity. When Blake is particularly aggrieved with
strengthened the fountains of the deep. (Proverbs 8: his Urizen figure he calls him ‘Nobodaddy’ which may
27) mean ‘No worse or no more than your Daddy’. He is
usually circumvented by the heroic figures in Blake’s
Blake’s picture shows God much as he had painted prophetic poems, Los and Orc, for they are
Isaac Newton: with the delicate insistence of a representatives of human potential or wisdom, which
calculating machine, a draughtsman, not an artist. Urizen tries to stifle. In orthodox Christianity God
This design is apparently based on a vision Blake created everything, and evil is merely a degeneration
saw at the top of his stairs in Lambeth. ‘He enjoyed of good, which God permits by allowing Satan (or
greater pleasure when colouring the print,’ a friend whoever) to exercise free will. But in dualist systems
recalled, ‘than anything he ever produced.’ He was like Blake’s good and evil, God and Satan, are equal
inking it just before he died: it seems to have and opposed: perpetually warring factions. Thus for
represented for him the arbitrary, controlling figure him ‘Truth’ lies in the debate between the purism of
of the father ‘that haunted Blake all his life’ in Peter Innocence and the cynicism of Experience, and can
Ackroyd’s words. only be established by synthesising the wisdom of
one with the other.
Blake also called his architect God ‘Urizen’, often
construed by critics as the ‘God of Limits or
“Horizons”’, of laws and penalties. As the poet argues
in ‘The Song of Loss’ Urizen conspires with the great
minds of the Enlightenment to mark quite arbitrary AO4 Blake’s religious contexts
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William Blake; Songs of Innocence & Experience13

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William Blake; Songs of Innocence & Experience fashionable Gothic novels at any lending library.

‘I behold London; a Human awful wonder of God!’

Blake is surely London’s great poet. ‘He left the city

only once,’ Peter Ackroyd tells us, ‘and most of his life But among all the exotic nastiness, Blake’s Babylon
was spent in the same small area bounded by the afforded glimpses of the heavenly city of Jerusalem
Strand, and Holborn, and Oxford Street. He did not beyond, where the Thames shone beyond his
need to travel any further because he saw, literally lodgings ‘like a bar of gold.’ London enabled Blake to
saw, eternity there.’ London was, for Blake, both the see the world in microcosm, and far beyond it.
Jerusalem and the Babylon described in the Bible,
and the events described or promised in scripture Something that would have been very hard to find in
unfolded on its streets: images of fire and ruin were Blake’s London, at least in the time of Songs, was
collected aplenty during the anti-Catholic Gordon an industrial chimney, still less a ‘Satanic’ Lancashire
Riots of 1780 (when Blake was 23, and became cotton-mill, though there would have been plenty of
mixed up with a group of rioters); the stars that threw smoke from coal fires, and light industry in the form of
down their spears in ‘The Tyger’ might have owed brewing, glass and brick-making. The famously
something to the ‘Great Fiery Meteor’ of 1783; even misinterpreted phrase in the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ (‘dark
the Tyger, eighteenth century symbol of Satanic mills’) is actually (as so often with Blake)
bloodthirstiness (however badly Blake drew it), made drawn from his reading, not from life. The Satanic mill
frequent appearances at a London Menagerie. is that at Gaza in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, line 41.
Blind Samson is set to toil there, a prisoner among
The young Blake, if he had been morbidly minded, slaves.
might have seen heads rotting on Temple Bar,
corpses badly concealed in the over-stuffed City
AO4 Social and
churchyards. He might have gorged himself on
biographical contexts
 14
Blake and the Natural World So he:

Natural imagery and description is characteristic of plucked a hollow reed,

Songs, and this may reflect the rural character of And I made a rural pen,
Lambeth, with village green and poplar trees, And I stained the water clear,
immediately before the builders moved in in 1792. And I wrote my happy songs
After that Blake would have had only fleeting glimpses Every child may joy to hear.
of green-world in London, and he spent only three
years in the country proper, at Felpham in Sussex. This country is as idealised and aesthetic as any in
His preference, in any case, was for the heart of an eighteenth century bucolic: note how the pen
London: his two favourite lodgings were within spitting makes the whole vision the paper of its text. ‘For all
distance of the Strand; he thought the suburbs round the attention he paid to the outer world’ argues one
Hampstead unhealthy ‘Mountainous Places’; and his critic, ‘Blake could have been almost blind.’
notion of an ‘echoing green’ were boyhood walks and
‘trees filled with angels’ on Peckham Rye. It is no surprise that Blake, who came to admire
Wordsworth’s writings late in life, did so with one
In the Introduction to Songs of Innocence Blake strenuous reservation. ‘The eloquent descriptions of
provides a typical ‘urban visionary’s’ countryside. Nature in Wordsworth’s poems,’ he told Crabb
Blake’s ‘strict, sharp-lined manner’ of recording Robinson, ‘were conclusive proofs of Atheism, for
nature owes little to originals, which he disliked. whoever believes in nature . . . disbelieves in God –
Almost everything is seen through pastoral For Nature is the work of the Devil.’
spectacles. A shepherd persona is:

Piping down the valleys wild,

AO2 Literary genre (pastoral)
Piping songs of pleasant glee . . .
AO4 Social and
biographical contexts
Immediately a literary-minded child on a cloud asks
him to ‘write / In a book, that all may read’.

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William Blake; Songs of Innocence & Experience15

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William Blake; Songs of Innocence & Experience Blake’s contemporaries thought him at best a
harmless crank, at worst a madman. Throughout his
life he was given to curious or premature
experiments: with nudism, spiritualism, sexual magic.
To recite Adam and Eve’s parts in Paradise Lost
Was Blake Mad?
Blake and his wife stripped naked. Once he claimed
to have talked with an angel who had posed for But so, he argued, could every other man and woman
Michaelangelo. He stopped and bowed to the Apostle alive. What, after all, were the prophets of the Bible
Paul when out on walks. At Felpham he saw a ‘fairy’s but gifted poets? As Blake asks the Prophet Isaiah in
funeral’ underneath a flower in his garden. In 1819 he The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘Doth a firm
worked indefatigably to draw ‘Spiritual Heads’ for an persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?’ Isaiah
army of visitors from history who visited him in the answers: ‘All poets believe that it does, and in ages of
company of a young water colourist named John imagination the firm persuasion removed mountains.’
Varley. There were personal sittings from the devil,
several female murderers, the ‘man who build the So Blake saw the sun-rise simultaneously with his
pyramids’, and a personification of the constellation bodily and his spiritual eye. He took the evidence of
Cancer. The most famous picture in this series is of a the first for granted, concentrating on the intensity of
malign spirit confined to the body of a flea, who the second. He explains that in ideal conditions the
answered the painter’s questions courteously. two perceptions should harmonise:

Gilchrist, his first biographer, noted that some ‘What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you
thought Blake’s recollections of these remarkable not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O
encounters were inconsistent, and that he probably no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly
made them up. Almost everyone who knew him host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty. I
pointed out ‘he could throw aside his visionary mood question not my Corporeal or Vegetative eye any
and his paradoxes when he liked.’ The truth is more than I would question a window concerning a
probably that Blake believed the world ‘in his head’ sight. I look thro’ it & not with it’ (Vision of the Last
(he would point to his craggy skull) was infinite in Judgement).
power and extent and that, beholding it, he
possessed ‘immortal longings’ that could reach the One of the most attractive guides to Blake is the
edge of the universe and beyond. He could control it, Catalogue of the 2001 Tate Gallery Blake Exhibition,
too, and tap it for artistic purposes. eds. Robert Hamlyn, Michael Phillips, Peter Ackroyd
and Marilyn Butler.

AO4 Social, religious and

biographical contexts

16

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