T. S. Eliot once said of Blake’s writings, “The Songs of Innocence and the
Songs of Experience”… are the poems of man with a profound interest in human
emotions, and a profound knowledge of them.” (Grant 507) In these books of
poetry and art, written and drawn by William Blake himself, are depictions of
the poor, the colored, the underdog and the child’s innocence and the man’s
experience. The focus of my paper will be on Blake’s use of simple language,
metaphors and drawings to show the two different states of the human spirit:
innocence and experience. I hope to show this through two poems: the
“Nurse’s Song” of innocents and the “NURSES Song” of experience. In
the first poem, the poem representing innocence, the nurse is in the background
image as a pretty, young woman, sitting and reading by a tree. Her mood is
peaceful and at rest “When the voices of children are heard on the green / And
laughing is heard on the hill.” (Blake 23) The drawing and the poem also
convey a sense of peace and trust. The children are naïve and vulnerable to the
pain, the sorrow, and the evils of the perverted world; yet their faith in the
fact that they are protected by the nurse, like a lamb by his shepherd, is clear
from their play. The nurse herself trusts that the children are safe from
perversions because of their voices and laughter. The picture shows this trust
of the children through their carefree play, holding hands and dancing in a
ring. In the next stanza, the nurse seems to step into her knowledge of
experience: Then come home my children, the sun is gone down And the dews of
night arise Come Come Leave off play, and let us away Till the morning appears
in the skies. (ll. 5-8) She asks them to come in, so as to protect them from the
dangers, or maybe just from exposure, to the night and its dampness. Her concern
for what the darkness brings can only mean she has experienced the night before.
The very minute this stanza begins, a weeping willow tree appears on the right
side of the lines. It does not go away until the drama is over and the children
get to stay out and continue their play. Just as quickly as the nurse expresses
her concern, the children in their innocence express their desire to play more.
The children, with their wise innocence, proclaim it is still light out; and not
only do they know it, but the sheep still grazing and the birds still flying
know it too. With this, the nurse gives in to them, and the children are
victorious. By her giving in to them, she shows love and understanding for their
knowledge of what is around them. In so doing, she shows that innocence obtains
knowledge just as well as an experienced adult. Therefore, would it not be safe
to assume that without the corruption of certain experiences the soul can still
be knowledgeable and wise? As the poem ends, the echo of laughter and shouting
again rules the hills. By returning to the echoing laughter of children, Blake
returns the reader to the innocence felt in the beginning. In addition, by using
the word “echoed” to describe how the children’s play reverberates
throughout the hills, he gives the children’s innocence eternity. The
innocence and joy these children possess are mirrored in “Infant Joy.”
“Infant Joy” is about a baby who is just two days old. There is a short
dialogue between the baby and the baby’s mother: “I happy am/ Joy is my
name, /Sweet joy befall thee!” (ll. 3-5), which describes the simplest form of
innocence and joy Blake could ever portray. The poem continues with the
sweetness and innocence that a baby represents. The nurse of experience reacts
quite differently to the children in their play and the baby of joy. In this
poem, a healthy, middle aged nurse brushes a boy’s hair. A little girl sits
down behind the boy. The illustration shows no sign of carefree play and gives
off the impression that these children are repressed. Surrounding the picture is
a wreath of vines, which the book defines as the symbol of pleasures the boy
will find in his life, pleasures that the boy will find regardless of the
repression of experienced others. Sexuality is the victim of repression, and the
nurse in this case is the offender. Blake thinks of sexuality as an innocent
thing, as opposed to the people in the society, whom thinks of it as shameful. I
am sure Blake is partial to the nurse of innocence. In the poem of experience,
the reader is faced with the immediate change of the title. The first
“Nurse’s Song” has the voice of children as well the nurses and a
narrator. The title suggests a happy song with the interaction of the outside
world and the inside of her mind. The second “NURSES Song” has only the
voice of the nurse. It suggests that the nurse’s mind and her perceptions
would be the only topic of the poem. The first line is the same as the first
line in the Nurse’s Song of innocence. By using the same beginning line, Blake
brings the reader back to the mood of carefree innocence. With the recollection
of the first poem in the first line, the second line starts to corrupt the mood
with “whisperings in the dale.” The whisperings suggest the children are
older and more experienced, aware of sex, that is. With adolescence, there is a
sense of recklessness and innocence in life. It does not matter who hears them
because what they say is absent of corruption or experience. However, as they
mature and become young adults, “the youth,” they become more prudent and
reserved with their words, as if they have something to hide or be ashamed of,
as they become aware of their sexuality. This is exactly what the nurse
perceives from the whisperings. She juxtaposes these whisperings with her own
experiences as a youth. Due to her reflections, her face “turns green and
pale.” The book refers to the “green and pale” as a traditional color of
the “sex-starved spinster,” a great description of a person “sick with
longings for experience she will never have.” It seems clear to me she is
jealous of the innocence and pleasures these children possess. Her next step,
whether jealous or protective of the children’s youth and innocence, is to
call them home: Then come home my children, the sun is gone down And the dews of
night arise Your spring & your day, are wasted in play And your winter and
night in disguise. (ll. 5-8) In this stanza, the nurse does not mention the
morning appearing again to play in. This is a powerful statement in my opinion.
If there is no mention of a new morning, we are left to forget there ever will
be a new morning. By leaving this out, she refers to the loss of her innocence.
Innocence that will not return to her as a morning would return to the sky. She
projects onto the children her tainted thoughts and draws the children into
them. Not only does the nurse take away innocence by not mentioning morning, but
she also turns the spring, or the introduction to sexuality, into an
unnecessary, squandered episode of in time. This takes away from the innocent
discovery of sexuality and turns it into a shameful, wasted experience. In the
end, she closes her demand to “come home” with “And your winter and night
in disguise.” There are not enough words to express the sadness in this line.
The winter, which is a whole season, represents eternal sadness. The night,
which is the end of light, represents death and experience. The night also
symbolizes the narrowing of her mind, the dimming of her light. Finally,
disguise, which conceals ones identity, represents shame and distrust. The three
words together create a disheartening miserable end. How disconcerting a thought
that most of the people we meet in our lives we may never truly know because
they have had a similar experience to the nurses. Even more disconcerting is the
fact that we project these experiences onto the children; and consequently, the
joy and fun of innocence is cut short, as the nurse does to the children in the
poem. The second “NURSES Song” is similar to that of the second version of
“Infant Joy”. Right away, the reader can see a change in the title, noting
the similarity to that of the “NURSES Song.” The first of the infant poems
is “Infant Joy”; the second is “Infant Sorrow.” The change of the title
indicates the corruption of experience, as did the change of the title in
“Nurse Song”. It continues the notion that the child is older, therefore
capable of experiencing the dangers of the world: My mother groand! my father
wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping aloud: (ll. 1-3)
The differences between the experiences in both poems are the people who have
the experience and the times in which they experience it. In “Infant Sorrow”
the child is going through the experiences as opposed to the nurse, who has
already experienced the pains of sexuality. Although the times are different,
the nurse and the youth both have a negative experience. Blake focuses on the
view the sexual experience is negative. He did not believe that sexuality and
experience were negative things, in themselves. Rather he wrote the poems in
experience to mirror the negative perceptions we often apply to sexuality. The
poems of the Songs of Innocence celebrate trust and innocence. They also
celebrate the wisdom of the innocent through the children and their argument to
continue to play. But as we see from the child of experience in “Infant
Sorrow,” innocence is not immune to the suffering of the world. The poems in
the Songs of Innocence are truly that of innocence, leaving one to perceive only
goodness. The Songs of Experience, on the other hand, are full of negative
perceptions drawn from experience. These poems give a true sense of loss, not
only of innocence, but of also one’s sense of trust and honesty, leaving the
person to withdraw from society. The Songs of Experience left me with the
knowledge of despair. This knowledge given to all other readers, including me,
by Blake are the equivalent of the commandments, to compare to the Bible. They
are a set of stories that I can relate to and perhaps model after, or at least
learn from them. I truly enjoyed reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence
and of Experience. The poems were easy for me to follow and I can relate to
them. These poems, as I am sure was Blake’s intentions, have opened my eyes to
a few experiences I would not want to go through. Now that I have experienced
through the eyes of the characters in the poems, I will work on not doing or
going through the same things they did. With that, I think Blake would be
pleased at the affects of his work.