1. William Blake

Innocence and Experience in "The Lamb" and "The Tyger"

1. Introduction

My first paper is on William Blake. I chose to work on "Songs of Innocence and Experience" because its duality appeals to me and is a great basis to explain two of Blake’s most important ideas, that of "Innocence" and that of "Experience", as opposed to the traditional views of Rationalists and Puritans.

2. About the Poet

William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, in London, England, to a middle-class merchant family. When he was ten, he was sent to a drawing school due to his interest in engraving. Admirer of Raphael, Michelangelo and Dürer, he became apprenticed to James Basire, an engraver for whom he worked seven years. He became interested in poetry during the years he spent as an apprentice in Westminster Abbey, where he read Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. He became a student at the Royal Academy at the age of twenty-two and started to work as a professional engraver. He married Catherine Boucher four years later and instructed her in engraving so she would become his assistant. Blake saw visions since he was a child, and when his little brother Robert died in 1787 he assured that he saw his spirit raising from the ceiling and that he guided him in his writings.

Blake’s first poetry book, "Poetical Sketches" was published in 1783 but it was largely an imitation of classical works. During the late 1780s Blake developed his own engraving technique, which he called "illuminated printing". He illustrated most of his works using this new technique: "All Religions are One" and "There is No Natural Religion" in 1788, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1790-93), the prophetic books "America a Prophecy" (1793), "Europe a Prophecy" (1794) and "The Song of Los" (1795). Two of his most famous works, "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience", published in 1789 and 1794, reinterpret Milton’s ideas of "Paradise" and "Fall".

Blake and his wife moved to Felpham, Sussex, in 1800, where he worked under the patronage of William Hayley, a minor poet. It was there that Blake began to write the epic "Milton: a Poem". Blake’s popularity began to fall because writers considered him to be too eccentric. From 1804 to 1820 he worked on his most ambitious piece, "Jerusalem", another prophetic book. Blake’s creativity also began to fall and during the last years of his life he illustrated "The Book of Job" and "Dante, The Divine Comedy", still unfinished when he died in 1827.

3. Innocence and Experience in Romanticism

The Romantic notions of innocence and experience were born in opposition to the two stances that predominated in the 18th century: that of the Rationalists and that of the Puritans.

The Rationalists thought that children ought to be educated so that they would be useful to society once they became adults. In other words, children were born without innate perceptions and needed to accumulate experience in order to grow up and mature. On the other hand, Puritans held that, because of the Original Sin, children were born in sin and needed to be educated and corrected so that they chose the right path. In summary, both stances thought education to be necessary to get rid of children’s ignorance and sin respectively.

Romantics held a completely opposite opinion: experience was harmful, as it corrupted children. Innocence was a virtue that needed to be preserved, a source of imagination and creation that gave us joy. Through experience, children were obliged to drop their innocence and to adapt themselves to the adult world, oppressed by human rules that turned people into unsatisfied pessimists.

Blake’s "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" was subtitled "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul" and was divided into two books, "Songs of Innocence" (1789) and "Songs of Experience" (1794), each of them containing juxtaposing poems such as "The Lamb" and "The Tyger", which represent the contrast between the world of children, filled with kindness, and the world of adults, dark and wild.

However, Blake does not believe that innocence is a superior state. Though a source of imagination, "The Tyger" uses more elaborated structures and metaphors than "The Lamb", in this sense it is more creative. Blake argued that childhood could also mean ignorance and blind obedience, and that experience could be used to think for ourselves; the child that speaks to the lamb is ignorant of the wilder and more obscure side of life, which is necessary beautiful on its own and. Rather than choosing between the two states, Blake writes about the advantages and drawbacks of each of them, leaving the judgment to us.

4. Style

"The Lamb" was originally written to be sung, so it classifies as a hymn. The poem consists of two stanzas of ten lines each. The first stanza contains repeated questions, while the second one contains the answers. Each stanza contains five rhymed couplets (aabbcc…).

Blake uses repetition in the first and last couplets of each strophe, making it sound like the chorus of a song. The first and last couplets of each stanza also differ from the rest in that they have only six syllables per line, whereas the rest has seven.

"The Tyger" is divided into six quatrains, using rhymed couplets (aabb). However, there are two couplets that do not rhyme, both ending with "eye" and "symmetry" (3-4, 23-24). Moreover, lines 4 and 24, along with line 20, have eight syllables, unlike the rest, which have seven.

This poem is also a hymn but has a more marked rhythm than "The Lamb". Blake wrote "The Tyger" using trochaic rhythm, in which one syllable is stressed and the next unstressed.

5. Summary

In "The Lamb", a child speaks to a lamb and enquires about his origins: who made it, why is it covered in wool and why is its bleating so sweet. The child answers his own questions; it was God that created it, meek and mild, like him. In the end, the child blesses the little lamb.

In "The Tyger", an unknown speaker addresses a tiger and wonders why is it that the same "artist" who created the lamb decided to create this dark and deadly creature. If the lamb was meek and mild because God was so, does this mean that God has also a dark side?

6. Analysis

6.1. "The Lamb"

The first stanza begins with someone asking a little lamb "who made thee" (1-2). Rather than a scientific answer concerning the lamb’s parents, the speaker is interested in a religious reply, in "who" created it, as seen in the next line, when the speaker asks who "gave thee life", implying the participation of a higher being.

The fourth line sets the pastoral mood of the poem: "by the stream & o’er the mead". Not only did this higher being give the lamb a nice habitat, he also endowed it with the "clothing of delight" (5) —the "softest", "woolly" and "bright" (6). In the eighth line another rural element is brought up: "all the vales rejoice" with the lamb’s "tender voice" (7). The last couplet of the fist stanza, in which the speaker asks the lamb yet again if it knows its creator, constitutes the chorus of this hymn.

The second stanza begins with another repetition; the speaker, whose identity remains unknown to us, says that he is going to answer the questions that he himself asked in the previous strophe. We can also deduce that the previous questions were rhetorical. The next four lines (13-16) give us clues about the identity of the creator: "He calls Himself a Lamb", "He is meek" and "mild" and "He became a little child". It is now clear that the speaker is talking about Jesus Christ. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ is called "The Lamb of God", meaning that he sacrificed himself, as lambs are sacrificed, to atone for the sins of men. "Meek and Mild" are two adjectives often associated to Jesus Christ in Christian tradition. The poet Charles Wesley already used this line in a poem called "Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild". In that poem, Wesley refers to God as a little child, as does Blake in line 16 of "The Lamb". Christ was a child as meek and mild as a little lamb.

It is in the seventeenth line that the identity of the speaker is disclosed: he is a child. The next line, "We are called by His name" (18), refers to the condition of God’s creations as his children, as little lambs. Having answered all the questions, the child proceeds to bless the little lamb twice in yet another repetition that works as a chorus.

6.2. "The Tyger"

This poem is the dark companion of "The Lamb". Its subject is a tiger that represents everything the lamb is not; whereas the lamb was an innocent and harmless creature, the tiger is mysterious, dangerous and fearsome. Blake describes it as "burning bright / In the forests of the night" (1-2); this landscape is completely different from the bucolic setting from the first poem.

The question about the origins of the animal appears once again, but in a language that expresses worry. When Blake asks "What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" (3-4) he is talking about God sometimes represented as an eye. The phrase "fearful symmetry" expresses both fear and admiration toward its beauty.

Being so different from the lamb, the speaker wonders "In what distant deeps or skies" (5) it was created. This line contains the words "deeps" and "skies", which may represent Hell and Heaven. The speaker was sure that the lamb was created in Heaven, but the tiger, once again identified with fire in the next line, can’t possibly come from the same place. Another question about its creator: "On what wings dare he aspire? / What the hand dare seize the fire?" (7-8). "Wings" is a confusing word, for Blake might be hinting that it wasn’t God who created the tiger but Lucifer. In any case, the creation of the tiger was a daring act.

The third and fourth stanzas narrate the process of creation of the tiger. The third stanza focuses on the identity of the creator and uses words that evoke sinister images such as "twist", "sinews" and "dread". The fourth stanza centers on the creation of the tiger as an industrial process: "What the hammer? What the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?" (13-14). If the lamb was created with love and care, the speaker makes it seem as if the tiger was created by a blacksmith in a factory very far away from the rural landscapes of the first poem.

The fifth stanza evokes a couple of Biblical images: the fallen angels and God associated with the figure of a lamb. The first couplet, "When the stars threw down their spears,/ And watered heaven with their tears" (17-18) summarizes the story of the creation of the stars as seen by Christians. These lines may seem out of place but, taken with the next couplet as a whole, suggest that something good may come from something evil, as the stars that were born from the tears of the fallen angels, and the other way around, as the dangerous tiger that was created by the same person that created the innocent lamb.

The last stanza is a repetition of the first except for one word: Blake has changed "could" to "dare"; he has changed his enquiries about the skills of the creator to the moral implications of such creation.

7. Conclusion

Blake presents both stances in two poems that seem simple at first, but that are actually written with great care so as to evoke children’s naivety and adults’ appreciation for beauty and thought. What Blake is trying to say is that Rationalists and Puritans aren’t right in their rejection of childhood values, but that those values aren’t the best option on its own. Not everything is black and white, and a balanced mix of kindness and individuality is the right path.