william blake
T.S. Eliot once said of Blake's writings, "The Songs ofInnocence and the Songs of Experience, and the poems fromthe Rossetti manuscripts, are the poems of a man with aprofound interest in human emotions, and a profoundknowledge of them." (Grant, Pg 507) These two famous booksof poetry written by William Blake, not only show men'semotions and feelings, but explain within themselves, thechild's innocence, and man's experience. A little over twocenturies ago, William Blake introduced to the Englishliterary world his two most famous books of poetry: theSongs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience. In his ownday, he was widely believed to be "quite mad," though thosewho knew him best thought otherwise. Today, few of us takeBlake's madness seriously, either because we don't believein it or because it no longer matters. Blake's fundamentalconcepts speak mainly about the human condition and emotion;and within the realms of this paper, I would like topersuade my readers that William Blake uses simple languageand metaphors to show the two contrary states of the human The world of innocence is a child's world, and it ispreserved in the minds of full-grown chi
The mire was deep, & the child did weepThe tears mentioned were hardly those of joy; they weretears of a child without his father - tears of sorrow. This entire poem, more or less, tells ofunaccountable tears: Sleep sleep happy child. Northrop Frye once said of the experience world;"The world of experience is the world that adults live inwhile they are awake. Blake did not believe that all human woes are self-induced. With the above example, one can assume that there is a greatdeal of sorrow within Blake's 'world of innocence'; for mostof the tears shed are not tears of joy. " (Ferber, Pg 7) Blake brings it to the readersattention in the last stanza of "The Shepherd": He is watchful while they [the sheep] are in peace, For they know when their Shepherd is nigh. the changes that occur in the world of experienceare, on the whole. A writer once said of this, "Experience isthe 'lapsed Soul' that is addressed in the 'Introduction' toExperience . The child, then, innocently, requested to hear the songagain, but this time he 'wept to hear. He widened theworld of innocence to embrace the ultimate in suffering; buthe also kept it 'innocent', and rather obviously so. The "Introduction" points the readers towards thepastoral world and the pastoral idea to follow in the nextcouple of songs.
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