Optimism in Blake's Songs of Experience
To be "optimistic" is to "believe that good things will happen in the future". Most readers would balk at the poems within Songs of Experience being described thus. Afterall the collection is meant as a contradiction to Songs of Innocence - the latter showing life through the eyes of innocent children, while Songs of Experience illustrate an "experienced" view of the world. However, to simply polarise the two would be a gross injustice to the complexities of Blake's work. Upon close inspection, it is actually possible to detect a slim thread of hope within the negative future Blake describes within Songs of Experience. As long as one is able to appreciate the deep subtleties inherent within the poems instead of simply taking them as face value, one would be able to understand why the collection is not "entirely pessimistic". Though the future presented is bleak, Blake still presents a solution out of our problems, giving us hope, however slim, for our future. This may be hard to swallow for most, unless one bears in mind that there are a myriad of possible interpretations of Blake's poetry. There is no one definite interpretation as each poem contains a wealth of meanings - even a single word could hold a different significanc
Though they are bleak and gloomy, Songs of Experience are essentially warnings of the possible consequences if Mankind continues in his current path. Afterall, if his life is as meaningless as that of a fly, it would not matter that throughout his life, he merely ". One can take hope in the fact that the future predicted within Songs of Experience is not the inevitable destiny of Mankind - rather it is the product of our very own mind. It is the synthesis of the Clod and the Pebble - in the soft "age of gold", the young couple are able to "delight" in the "sunny beams" of "the holy light". In this solution, optimism can be found. Thus the current evils of the world can be eradicated and the bleak future portrayed can be avoided as long as humans change their mindsets. There is still hope for the speaker due to the immense potential he possesses - if he could just get more involved with his life, this world would be a much happier place for him. This is clearly a vision of hell on earth - in this bleak and harsh reality, where could fragile hope exist? Yet hope shines through when one considers a simple phrase: "mind-forged manacles", which the speaker hears "In every cry of every man,In every infant's cry of fear,In every voice, in every ban". Yet one must bear in mind that other than his expression of fear, the father has not punished or even reprimanded his child! He has not condemned Ona for her actions, and thus hope is still present - hope that the parent and child can eventually come to terms with Ona's sexual maturity and move on to a higher innocence. Instead of using the definitive article "the", like "The Divine Image", seen in Songs of Innocence, most of the titles in Songs of Experience begin with "a". Rather, one gains the impression that the rationalistic speaker is merely indulging in self-comfort - an escape route from his current dreary lifestyle, which saves him from having to "suffer" any intense emotions or to take responsibility of his life. Unfortunately, he has wasted this gift of thought by using it to rationalise away the emptiness of his life. Afterall, all this suffering and repression is actually inflicted upon us by our minds.
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