RETURN TO POESIA (FIRST PAPER)
ROMANTIC POETS:
Songs of Innocence and
Experience
INDEX:
ﻣ Author’s life and “illuminated printings”
ﻣ Poems
· The Divine Image (Songs of Innocence)
· A Divine Image (Songs of Experience)
· The human abstract (Songs of Experience)
ﻣ Introduction
ﻣ Main body
ﻣ Conclusion
ﻣ Bibliography
WILLIAM BLAKE (1757
– 1827):
William Blake was
born in
Blake was a
transitional figure in British literature. He was the one of the first writers
of the "Romantic Period." But, he was not only a writer. In 1788, at
the age of thirty-one, Blake began to experiment with relief etching, which was
the method used to produce most of his books of poems. He called this method
"illuminated printing." Blake used illuminated printing for four of
his works. These included "Songs of Innocence and Experience,"
"The Book of Thel," "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and
"
Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, followed by Songs of Experience in 1793 and a combined edition the next year bearing the title Songs
of Innocence and Experience showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
"Illuminated
printings”:
·
1788: All
Religions are One
o
There is No
Natural Religion
·
1789: Songs of
Innocence
o
The Book
of Thel
·
1790–1793: The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
·
1793: Visions
of the Daughters of
o
America: a
Prophecy
·
1794: Europe: a
Prophecy
o
The First Book of
Urizen
o
Songs of
Experience
·
1795: The Book
of Los
o
The Song of Los
o
The Book of Ahania
·
1804–1811: Milton:
a Poem
·
1804–1820:
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/blake/context.html
http://asms.k12.ar.us/classes/humanities/britlit/97-98/blake/POEMS.HTM#POEMS
POEMS:
The Divine Image (Songs of Innocence, 1789)
“To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity,
Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human
heart;
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine:
And Peace the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine:
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.”
A Divine Image (Songs of Experience, 1793)
”Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.
The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.”
The human abstract (Songs of Experience, 1793)
“Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor,
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.
And mutual fear brings
Peace,
Till the selfish loves increase;
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
He sits down with
holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears;
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.
Soon spreads the dismal
shade
Of Mystery over his head,
And the caterpillar and fly
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit
of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat,
And the raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
The gods of the earth
and sea
Sought through nature to find this tree,
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the human Brain.”
http://asms.k12.ar.us/classes/humanities/britlit/97-98/blake/POEMS.HTM#DIVINE
INTRODUCTION:
Songs of Innocence
and Experience:
The
Songs of Innocence and Experience was
first published in 1794, although both parts were written some years before the
publication. But, between 1789 and 1794, Blake was revising and rearranging
them.
The result is a
set of thematically related lyrics organised by a general principle of wishing
to show the contrast between the state of Innocence (childhood, idealism, love,
beauty, etc.) and that of Experience (disillusionment, social criticism, mature
people ,etc.). Blake's intentions, in general terms, are difficult to define
exactly: he wishes his readers to see what he is attempting to reading and
viewing the illustrated lyrics themselves, and drawing out the contrasts and
similarities between the two sets of Songs.
Blake's own
summary description of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, that they show
"Two Contrary States of the Human Soul" offers perhaps the best way
of approaching this thematically organised set of illustrated lyrics.
"Innocence" and "Experience" are, for Blake, two
complementary but also conflicting states of the human soul, and states within
all of Creation: neither is "better" than the other, and both are
necessary to the other.
The glory of
Blake's vision is that he is able to relate aspects of human psychological,
spiritual and physical experience, to the more abstract realms of the
conceptual, the archetypal and the spiritual.
It’s not clear that if he is a Victorian or a romantic
poet, because although he lived and write during the Victorian period, most
critics say that he was the first author of the English Romanticism. And so, he
is usually treated as the most important poet of that period.
http://www.newi.ac.uk/rdover/blake/songs_of.htm
MAIN BODY:
These three poems are the ones that I’m trying to
compare The
Divine Image in Songs of Innocence with The Human Abstract and The Divine Image in Songs of Experience. I think
that there is a more clear opposition between them (Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience).
The main theme of
the poems in The
Songs of Innocence and Experience
came from Blake's belief that children lost their "innocence" as they
grew older and were influenced by the ways of the world and by the beliefs and
opinions of adults. When they grew up, the perspective of the writer changes
drastically. Those are a series of poems on how we see the world at different
stages of our lives. The poems from "Songs of Innocence" were written
from an innocent child's perspective, but those from "Songs of
Experience" were written from the perspective of a more experienced person
who had seen all of the evil in the world.
The
Divine Image in Songs of Innocence treats humanity as a
little child, created in God's image; in both Experience’s poems it’s described
using personifications with terms related to the evil, words such as Terror,
Secrecy, Mercy, Mystery, Deceit, Cruelty, Jealousy and Fire.
The
Divine Image in Songs of Innocence attributes the virtues of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
to the human form. It also gives God all of the glory for the creation of the
human in his own form. This can be seen in the last two lines of the poem,
"Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too."
The
difference and the evolution of the author’s point of view, what he wanted to
show us, is very clear if we see examples such as these. In A Divine Image
(Songs of
Experience), he talks about irony and the cruelty that people
have; a very different vision from the poem The Divine Image (Songs of Innocence) in which
he talks about “Mercy, Pity,
Peace, and Love…” saying that these are “virtues of
delight”. In the same way, whereas in the fist poem he talked about an iron
heart, the cruelty of a human heart and the terror and
fright that human have because of God, in the second one he says:
“For Mercy has a human
heart;
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine:
And Peace the human dress.”
It is thought that the companion poem of The Divine Image in Songs of
Innocence is the one with the same name in Songs of Experience, but it
only appeared in one copy of that composed book. Because of that, the poem that
is usually matched with it is The Human Abstract in Songs of Experience.
We can see
this relation, firstly, because The Human Abstract also attributes Pity and
Mercy to the human form. However, it also implies that humans do not have these
characteristics when he/she is a child, but when grows up. It also says that
humans have traits of Cruelty, Mystery, and Deceit. The "experienced"
author of "The Human Abstract" has seen how people really are. The
innocent perspective has changed thanks to the experience of hard times.
There are
some words that appear a lot of times through these poems. Firstly, we can see
the word “human” in all the stanzas in A Divine Image in Songs of Experience. Blake did that because he wanted us to fix
our view in that pessimistic and disillusioned vision of the human and our
behaviour. But, in A Divine Image in Songs of
Innocence the most repeated
words are these “virtues of delight”: “Mercy, Pity, Peace
and Love...”
The
Human Abstract, that is a sextet, is very pessimistic as the A Divine Image
in Songs of
Experience. In The Human Abstract, the “tree” represents the
hope and optimism that people have, the peace and the humility that humans look
for. But here, he is saying they cannot obtain that peace, because it is only
an idea that humans have, it’s a hope. Here, Blake talks about cruelty, deceit,
tears, and at the end, he says:
“The gods of the earth
and sea
Sought through nature to find this tree,
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the human Brain.”
In my opinion, in the following abstract of A
Divine Image in Songs of Innocence, Blake talks about God as if he was a man, and the
man was a god, because of that he says that both people and God are related to
“For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love”. He changes the papers and talks about humans as gods,
and God as a human.
“For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and
Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, His child and care.”
In these three poems, Blake used his favourite
rhetorical techniques: personification and the reworking of Biblical symbolism
and language.
Religion and the church play a big part in Blake
poems, whether it relates to holy days or divine imagery. Religion plays an
important part in the poems, because they are organised thematically, and it is
one of the most important and used themes through the book. As we can see, it
is also related to other themes and words, such as “divine”. It could be said
to be a religious word, but in a different way from Innocence to Experience. Whereas in the first divine is explained with
virtues and love; in Experience, it is related to cruelty and terror. So, we can see
that the picture of divinity change when one moves from a state of innocence to
one of experience.
http://asms.k12.ar.us/classes/humanities/britlit/97-98/blake/POEMS.HTM#POEMS
http://asms.k12.ar.us/classes/humanities/britlit/97-98/blake/POEMS.HTM#DIVINE
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/blake/analysis.html
CONCLUSION:
In conclusion, Blake
wrote the Songs
of Innocence and Experience in order to show and explain to us
his view of the two contrary states of the human soul. When somebody grows and
changes, through the innocence of a child to the experience and bad remembers.
Because of that, he divided the poems, because it seems the best way of
treating and approaching the thematic organisation of the poems.
Although, Blake did not belong to an especial nor
clear period, I think that the critics that say he was the first romantic poet
are right. I also think he was the most important and the first because he
started talking about nature; he needed to come back to nature, going far of
the pollution, the crimes and the violence of the city.
He, as other authors that wrote after him in this period,
used to talk about nature and love, but also about God, the sublime and the
divine things. These poems I have chosen are related to that theme, the changes
from innocence to experience seen through the “human” feelings and pray, to the
cruelty, the deceit and the tears.
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© Jéssica Aguilar Viñoles