Songs of Innocence and of Experience

This article is about William Blake's poems. For the Adequate Seven album, see Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Adequate Seven album). For the Greg Brown album, see Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Greg Brown album). For the David Axelrod album, see Song of Innocence.

Blake's frontispiece for Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. "Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall." Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a time and a state of protected "innocence," but not immune to the fallen world and its institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes known through "experience," a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and inhibition, by social and political corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church, State, and the ruling classes. The volume's "Contrary States" are sometimes signaled by patently repeated or contrasted titles: in Innocence, Infant Joy, in Experience, Infant Sorrow; in Innocence, The Lamb, in Experience, The Fly and The Tyger.

Songs of Innocence

Songs of Innocence was originally a complete work first printed in 1789. It is a conceptual collection of 19 poems, engraved with artwork.

The poems are each listed below:

Introduction

The Shepherd

The Echoing Green

The Lamb

The Little Black Boy

The Blossom

The Chimney Sweeper

The Little Girl lost

The Little Girl found

The Little Boy lost

The Little Boy found

Laughing Song

A Cradle Song

The Divine Image

Holy Thursday

Night

Spring

Nurse's Song

Infant Joy

A Dream

On Another's Sorrow

Songs of Experience

Blake's title plate (No.29) for Songs of Experience

Songs of Experience is a poetry collection of 26 poems forming the second part of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The poems were published in 1794 (see 1794 in poetry) Some of the poems, such as The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found were moved by Blake to Songs of Innocence, and were frequently moved between the two books.^{[citation needed]}

In this collection of poems, Blake contrasts Songs of Innocence, in which he shows how the human spirit blossoms when allowed its own free movement with Songs of Experience, in which he shows how the human spirit withers after it has been suppressed and forced to conform to rules, and doctrines. In fact, Blake was an English Dissenter and actively opposed the doctrines of the Anglican Church, which tells its members to suppress their feelings. Blake showed how he believed this was wrong through his poems in Songs of Experience.^{[citation needed]}

Introduction (at wikisource)

Earth's Answer

The Clod and the Pebble

Holy Thursday

The Little Girl Lost

The Little Girl Found

The Chimney Sweeper

Nurse's Song

The Sick Rose

The Fly (at wikisource)

The Angel

The Tyger

My Pretty Rose Tree

Ah! Sun-Flower (at wikisource)

The Lily

The Garden of Love

The Little Vagabond

London

The Human Abstract (at wikisource)

Infant Sorrow

A Poison Tree

A Little Boy Lost (at wikisource)

A Little Girl Lost

To Tirzah

The Schoolboy (at wikisource)

The Voice of the Ancient Bard (at wikisource)

Musical settings

Poems from both books have been set to music by many composers, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Frandsen, Sven-David Sandström, and Benjamin Britten. Individual poems have also been set by, among others, John Tavener, Jah Wobble, Tangerine Dream. A modified version of the poem "The Little Black Boy" was set to music in the song "My Mother Bore Me" from Maury Yeston's musical Phantom. Folk musician Greg Brown recorded sixteen of the poems on his 1987 album Songs of Innocence and of Experience and by Finn Coren in his Blake Project.

Poet Allen Ginsberg believed the poems were originally intended to be sung, and that through study of the rhyme and meter of the works, a Blakean performance could be approximately replicated. In 1969, he conceived, arranged, directed, sang on, and played piano and harmonium for an album of songs entitled Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, tuned by Allen Ginsberg (1970).

The composer William Bolcom completed a setting of the entire collection of poems in 1984. In 2005, a recording of Bolcom's work by Leonard Slatkin, the Michigan State Children's Choir, and the University of Michigan on the Naxos label won 3 Grammy Awards: Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and Best Classical Album.

External links

Works related to Songs of Innocence at Wikisource Works related to Songs of Experience at Wikisource

• Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), from Rare Book Room
• Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1826), from Rare Book Room
• Songs of Innocence and of Experience
• Link to Ginsberg recordings