William Blake (Selected Poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience)

'The Lamb' is the purest statement of Blake's innocent vision: a world in which every question has a gentle answer and creation, child and God are bound together in love. Blake presents this vision through a child speaker, a hymn-like form and a theology of meekness — and the poem's serene confidence is exactly what its contrary, 'The Tyger', will later disturb.

The poem is built as a catechism — a question and its answer. The child asks 'Little Lamb who made thee', then answers his own question with complete assurance: the maker is one who 'calls himself a Lamb', who 'is meek & he is mild'. Blake gives the innocent speaker no doubt at all, and that certainty is the heart of the innocent state: in this world, to ask is already to know.

Blake's form reinforces the vision. The gentle, song-like rhythm and the soft repetitions ('Little Lamb… Little Lamb') make the poem sound like a child's hymn or lullaby, so that its theology feels not argued but cradled. The diction is simple and tender — 'meek', 'mild', 'tender voice' — building a God who is approachable rather than awesome.

The poem's central move is to dissolve the boundaries between creature, child and creator: 'He became a little child: / I a child & thou a lamb, / We are called by his name.' Christ is the Lamb of God, the child is a lamb, and all three share one name. Blake presents innocence as a state of perfect belonging, in which nothing is alien or fearful.

Yet a reader who knows the collection feels the limit of this vision even here. The serene answer to 'who made thee' becomes unbearable beside 'The Tyger', which asks 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' and can give no reply. 'The Lamb' is not naive in a foolish sense — it is genuinely beautiful — but it is partial: it sees a world of meekness because it cannot yet see the tyger. Blake presents the innocent vision with full sympathy, and lets experience supply the doubt the lamb cannot.

Blake presents childhood as the moral measure of his society: cherished and free in the Songs of Innocence, but in the Songs of Experience sold, caged and silenced. By moving the child from a world of protected play to one of exploitation, Blake makes the treatment of children a verdict on the adult world.

In the innocent poems, childhood is joyful freedom. In 'Nurse's Song' the children play on the green until 'the sun is gone down', and the kindly nurse lets them stay out longer; play is sacred and the adult world serves it. 'Spring' and 'The Lamb' surround the child with tenderness and song. Here childhood is a state of trust, and the adults exist to protect it.

Experience shatters this. 'The Chimney Sweeper' opens with a child 'sold' by his own father 'while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep' — the stammering 'weep' (for 'sweep') turns the child's first word into a cry of grief. Childhood here is not protected but trafficked, and the poem's gentle nursery rhythm makes the exploitation more disturbing, not less.

Blake also shows childhood imprisoned by the very institutions meant to nurture it. In 'The School Boy', the boy who 'loves to rise in a summer morn' finds that school 'drives all joy away', caging a creature meant to sing like a bird. The image of the caged bird presents education itself, when joyless, as a violation of the child's nature.

Blake's subtlest method is the child-voice itself. The innocent sweep sincerely believes that 'if all do their duty, they need not fear harm' — and his sincerity is precisely what indicts the adults, because Blake lets the victim voice the comforting ideology that keeps him enslaved. Across the collection, then, Blake presents childhood twice over: as the tender ideal of what life could be, and as the first casualty of what his society actually is. The gap between the two is his judgement.

'London' is the bleakest poem of the collection and its most complete vision of experience: a city in which every person, sound and institution is implicated in a single web of oppression. Blake presents the city not as a place but as a system, and his methods — the repetitions, the metaphor of the 'manacles', the final fusion of birth, sex and death — make that system feel total and inescapable.

The poem begins by exposing ownership itself. The streets are 'charter'd', and even 'the charter'd Thames' — a river, the freest of things — has been mapped, owned and licensed. Blake's repetition of 'charter'd' suggests a city in which nothing, not even nature, escapes possession. The speaker who 'wander[s]' through it 'mark[s] in every face… / Marks of weakness, marks of woe': the play on 'mark' (to notice; a stain) makes suffering visible on every body.

The poem's central move is the metaphor of the 'mind-forg'd manacles'. Blake hears chains 'In every cry of every Man, / In every Infants cry of fear' — and the hammering anaphora of 'every' makes oppression universal, the very atmosphere of the city. Crucially the manacles are 'mind-forg'd': the chains are mental, made and accepted by the mind, so that the Londoners are imprisoned as much by an ideology they have internalised as by any external power.

Blake then names the institutions. The 'Chimney-sweepers cry' appals the 'black'ning Church' — the Church both literally blackened by industrial soot and morally blackened by complicity in child labour; the 'hapless Soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls', making the monarchy responsible for the deaths it commands. The critique rises through the social order from child to soldier to king.

The final stanza fuses everything into one image: 'the youthful Harlots curse' that 'Blasts the new-born Infants tear, / And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse'. Birth, sex, disease and death collapse together; the oxymoron 'Marriage hearse' makes the wedding carriage a funeral one. Within the collection, 'London' is the point at which experience has wholly displaced innocence: there is no child's consoling dream here, no answering Lamb — only the clear, total sight of a society destroying itself. It is the dark culmination toward which the contrary states have been building.

There is real truth in the proposition: the Songs are saturated with social criticism, and Blake's attacks on the Church, the monarchy and the exploitation of children are among the most pointed in English poetry. But I will argue the proposition draws a false line. Blake's social criticism is not separate from innocence and experience; it works precisely through the contrary states. The injustice is the content; the contrary structure is the method.

Blake's criticism is at its sharpest when he uses the contrast between the two states. The two 'Holy Thursday' poems are the clearest case. In Innocence, charity-school children process into St Paul's, 'their innocent faces clean', and the tone admires the spectacle. Its contrary asks the question the spectacle suppressed: 'Is this a holy thing to see, / In a rich and fruitful land, / Babes reduced to misery?' The criticism lands not in either poem alone but in the gap between them: the experienced poem strips the mask off the innocent one.

The same method drives the two 'Chimney Sweeper' poems. The innocent sweep's faith that 'if all do their duty, they need not fear harm' is heartbreaking because sincere; the experienced sweep names the guilty directly — 'God & his Priest & King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery'. Blake indicts a Church and state that manufacture an afterlife precisely to justify present suffering. The injustice is unmistakable, but it is delivered by the contrast of the naive and the knowing voice.

'London' might seem to support the proposition, since it criticises without an innocent counterpart. Yet even here the absence of innocence is the point: experience has so wholly conquered the city that no child's consoling dream survives, only 'mind-forg'd manacles'. The bleakness registers as bleakness only because we have read the Songs of Innocence and know what has been lost.

So the proposition is half-right. Yes, the Songs are 'about injustice' — Blake is a radical, and the poems attack real institutions. But to oppose 'injustice' to 'innocence and experience' misunderstands his art. Blake criticises his society by means of the contrary states: he lets innocence show us what should be, and experience show us what is, and makes the unbearable distance between them his indictment.

The proposition is seductive and, I will argue, wrong in a revealing way. It assumes a developmental ladder — innocence below, experience above, growth meaning the ascent from one to the other. But Blake's chosen word is 'contrary', not 'inferior', and his decision to bind the two states into a single book argues against any simple outgrowing. Innocence in Blake is not a lower rung to be climbed past; it is a permanent and necessary vision whose loss is a catastrophe, not a graduation.

There is a case for the proposition, and an honest answer must grant it. Blake does expose the limits of innocence. The innocent 'Chimney Sweeper' consoles himself with a dream of heaven and concludes that 'if all do their duty, they need not fear harm' — a faith that, left uncorrected, simply licenses his exploitation. The innocent 'Holy Thursday' admires 'innocent faces clean' and almost fails to notice the regimented misery before it. To this extent, innocence that refuses to grow into knowledge is dangerous: it can be complicit in its own oppression. The poems clearly want innocence to gain experience's clear sight.

But it does not follow that innocence should be 'outgrown', and the experienced poems make this plain by showing what experience without innocence becomes. 'London' is the terminus of pure experience: a city of 'mind-forg'd manacles' where every face bears 'marks of woe' and birth fuses with the 'Marriage hearse'. This is clarity, but it is also despair; experience sees truly and can do nothing but grieve. If innocence unchecked is blindness, experience unrelieved is hopelessness. Neither is a destination.

The decisive evidence is structural. Blake did not publish Experience as a sequel that supersedes Innocence; he bound them together as 'the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul', and printed contrary poems that demand to be read as pairs. 'The Lamb' is not cancelled by 'The Tyger'; the two coexist, and the volume holds them in tension. A reader who 'outgrew' the Lamb would lose the very capacity for wonder and love that makes the Tyger's cruelty register as loss. Blake's ideal, glimpsed in poems like 'The Divine Image', is not experience but a higher innocence that has passed through experience and kept its capacity to love.

My judgement, then, is that the proposition mistakes Blake's structure for a hierarchy. He does not ask us to outgrow innocence; he asks us to refuse the false choice between a love that is blind and a sight that is bitter. Growth, for Blake, is not leaving innocence behind but holding it together with experience — which is exactly what reading the two contrary states side by side requires us to do.

'The Tyger' is the great question of the collection, the poem in which experience confronts what innocence could not. Where 'The Lamb' answered its own question with serene confidence, 'The Tyger' asks and asks and never answers — and Blake makes that unanswerability the meaning of the poem. Through its imagery of forge and fire, its relentless interrogatives, and its single, devastating reference back to the Lamb, the poem stages the moment at which a comforting theology breaks against the fact of terror in creation.

The poem is almost entirely composed of questions, and Blake never grants a reply. 'What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?' begins an interrogation that runs through the whole poem and is never resolved. This is the formal opposite of 'The Lamb', whose child knew the answer before he asked. Experience, Blake suggests, is the state of questions without answers; the poem's power is its refusal to console.

The central imagery is industrial and Promethean: the tyger is forged. 'What the hammer? what the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain?' The maker is recast as a blacksmith labouring at a fearsome creature, and the violent monosyllables ('hammer', 'chain', 'furnace') make creation itself sound like an act of dangerous power rather than gentle love. The 'fearful symmetry' is an oxymoron at the poem's heart: the tyger is beautiful AND terrible, perfectly made AND deadly, and Blake will not let the reader separate the two.

The decisive moment is the turn to the cosmos and then to the Lamb. 'When the stars threw down their spears / And water'd heaven with their tears: / Did he smile his work to see?' The image of a weeping, possibly defeated heaven introduces the unthinkable: that creation might involve grief or rebellion. And then the line the whole collection has been moving toward: 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' This is the question 'The Lamb' could not imagine. If one God made both the meek lamb and the burning tyger, then the gentle theology of innocence is inadequate to the world — and Blake leaves the question open, because experience has no answer, only awe.

The poem's significance is therefore total. 'The Tyger' is not simply a poem about an animal; it is the point at which Blake's innocent vision meets its limit. The God of 'The Lamb' was 'meek & mild'; the God implied by the tyger is a terrifying maker of terror. Blake does not resolve the contradiction — he dramatises it, leaving the reader, like the speaker, suspended before a creation more frightening and more magnificent than innocence could conceive.