Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Based on Wikipedia: Songs of Innocence and of Experience

A Poet Who Refused to Choose Between Pictures and Words

In 1794, a London engraver named William Blake did something that still seems radical today. He created a book of poetry where every single page was a work of visual art—not illustrations added after the fact, but images and words born together, each one inseparable from the other. He etched them by hand onto copper plates, printed each copy himself, and then painted over them with watercolors. No two copies were alike.

The book was called Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

That subtitle tells you everything about Blake's ambition. He wasn't just writing pretty poems about lambs and roses. He was mapping the human condition itself—the tension between our capacity for wonder and our knowledge of suffering, between the child's fresh eyes and the adult's weary ones.

The Two Contrary States

Blake first published Songs of Innocence on its own in 1789, a collection of twenty-three poems that seem, at first glance, like nursery rhymes. There are shepherds and children laughing on village greens. There are angels and protective mothers. The verse is simple, the rhymes are gentle.

But look closer.

One poem is called "The Chimney Sweeper." It tells the story of a small boy sold into the brutal trade of climbing up chimneys to clean them—a common fate for poor children in Blake's England. Another poem, "The Little Black Boy," explores race and spirituality through the voice of a child trying to understand why his skin color might matter to God. These aren't simple poems at all. They're pastoral scenes with shadows gathering at the edges.

Songs of Experience came five years later, and the shadows had moved to the center. Here Blake assembled twenty-six poems that answered and contradicted the earlier collection. Where Innocence had given us a gentle lamb, Experience gives us the terrifying tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night. Where Innocence showed nurses watching over happy children, Experience shows those same nurses grown bitter, their faces green with envy.

Blake wasn't saying that innocence is good and experience is bad. He called them "contrary states"—both necessary, both true, both part of what it means to be human. You cannot have one without the other. The child who has never known darkness cannot truly know light.

The Revolution in Childhood

To understand why these poems mattered, you need to know what people thought about children before Blake came along.

The dominant view, rooted in certain strands of Christian theology, held that children were born stained by original sin. They weren't innocent creatures to be protected—they were little sinners who needed discipline and moral correction to save their souls. The phrase "spare the rod, spoil the child" wasn't a metaphor. Childhood was a problem to be solved.

Blake rejected this utterly. In his vision, childhood was a state of grace, not disgrace. Children saw the world clearly, before society and its institutions taught them to see it through the lens of fear and repression. The innocence Blake celebrated wasn't naïveté or ignorance—it was a kind of wisdom that adults had forgotten.

This idea would become one of the defining themes of Romanticism, the great literary and artistic movement that followed. When William Wordsworth wrote that "the child is father of the man," he was walking a path that Blake had blazed. When educators began to argue that children should be allowed to play and imagine rather than simply memorize and obey, they were inheriting Blake's vision.

But Blake was no sentimentalist. His innocent children still lived in a fallen world. They still encountered cruelty, exploitation, and loss. The sweep's boy in Songs of Innocence may dream of angels, but he still has to climb back into the cold chimney come morning.

Every Page a Painting

Blake called himself "the painter and the Poet," and he meant both words equally. He had trained as an engraver from the age of fourteen, learning to cut images into copper plates that could then be inked and pressed onto paper. This was how illustrations were mass-produced in the eighteenth century.

But Blake didn't want mass production. He wanted something unprecedented: a book where every page was a unique artistic creation.

His process was extraordinary. First, he would write his poem directly onto a copper plate using acid-resistant varnish, writing the text backward so it would read correctly when printed. Then he would draw his illustration around and through the words, the images intertwining with the letters. Next came the acid bath, which ate away the exposed copper, leaving the varnished design raised in relief. Finally, he would ink the plate, press it onto paper, and hand-color each print with watercolors.

Because he painted each copy individually, no two versions of Songs of Innocence and of Experience are identical. The tiger in one copy might be orange; in another, almost pink. The rose might bleed a different shade of red. Scholars have counted the surviving copies and found that each one represents a distinct artistic statement.

This matters because the images aren't decorations. They're interpretations. Take the poem "The Blossom," which seems on the page like a simple verse about a flower and some birds. But look at Blake's illustration, and you'll see something else entirely—figures that scholars have debated for two centuries, forms that shift the poem's meaning toward the erotic, the spiritual, or both at once.

The words and pictures argue with each other. They complicate each other. To read the poems without seeing the art is to experience only half of what Blake created.

The Tiger's Mysterious Creator

The most famous poem in the collection is "The Tyger," and it remains one of the most anthologized poems in the English language. Its opening lines have an incantatory power that has echoed through two centuries of literature:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night

The poem asks a devastating question: what kind of creator would make both the gentle lamb and the terrifying tiger? What kind of God fashions both innocence and violence, both the prey and the predator?

Blake doesn't answer. That's the point. The poem is all questions, one after another, building to a crescendo of theological doubt and wonder. Did the same hand that made the lamb make this fearsome, symmetrical beast? Did the creator smile at his work?

Interestingly, critics have sometimes complained that Blake's illustration of the tiger doesn't look particularly fearsome. The animal in his painting has been called "stuffed," "tame," even "grinning." Some have suggested this was a failing of Blake's anatomical knowledge—tigers were exotic creatures that most English artists had never seen in life.

But perhaps Blake knew exactly what he was doing. Perhaps the gap between the terrifying tiger of the poem and the almost comical tiger of the illustration is itself the point—another contrary state, another tension that the reader must hold without resolving.

Two Centuries of Music

Something about Blake's poems has made musicians want to sing them. The list of composers who have set Songs of Innocence and of Experience to music reads like a survey of twentieth and twenty-first century music.

The English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, best known for his lush orchestral works like "The Lark Ascending," set several of the poems. So did Benjamin Britten, perhaps the greatest English composer of the twentieth century. The American minimalist William Bolcom spent years creating an elaborate setting of the complete collection, which eventually won four Grammy Awards in 2005, including Best Classical Album.

But the musicians haven't only been classical. The electronic group Tangerine Dream, pioneers of synthesizer music, based an entire album called Tyger on Blake's words. The Irish rock band U2 titled two of their albums Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, released in 2014 and 2017 respectively—a deliberate invocation of Blake's contrary states.

The beat poet Allen Ginsberg believed that Blake had actually intended the poems to be sung, that their rhythms and rhymes contained implicit melodies waiting to be discovered. In 1969, Ginsberg recorded his own album of the Songs, accompanying himself on harmonium and piano, trying to channel what he imagined as Blake's original musical vision.

Even Bob Dylan, in 2020, dropped a reference to Songs of Experience in his song "I Contain Multitudes"—itself a title borrowed from Walt Whitman, continuing the chain of poets echoing poets across the centuries.

The Romantic Inheritance

Blake died in 1827, largely unknown. He had sold only a handful of copies of his illuminated books during his lifetime. The great poets of his era—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron—had read him, if at all, as a curious eccentric, a mystic who heard angels in his garden and saw visions of biblical prophets.

It took decades for the world to catch up.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, a small group of admirers began collecting and preserving his work. The Pre-Raphaelite painters, with their love of medieval imagery and spiritual intensity, claimed him as a predecessor. By the early twentieth century, he was recognized as one of the foundational figures of English Romanticism.

Today, the surviving copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience are scattered across the world's great museums and libraries. The Huntington Library in California has several. The British Museum and the Tate Britain hold others. Each copy is treated as the priceless artifact it is—a unique object made by human hands, carrying the fingerprints of a visionary who refused to let his words and images be separated.

Blake's influence runs deep. When you encounter a children's book where the illustrations are as important as the text, you're seeing his legacy. When artists refuse to be categorized as either writers or visual creators, they're following his example. When musicians return again and again to his words, finding new melodies in his rhythms, they're proving that he was right: the poems were always meant to be more than words on a page.

And when you feel the tension between hope and despair, between the world as it might be and the world as it is, you're experiencing what Blake called the two contrary states of the human soul—still contrary, still essential, still burning bright.