William Blake: Songs Of Innocence and Experience

William Blake grew up with little to no formal education. His family was known as “dissenters”, opposing the corruption of the Church of England. However, Blake’s education primarily came through studying the Bible. As a young man, he found he was able to support himself through illustrations and engravings, but in actuality he enjoyed combining written poetry and illustrations. Blake’s sense of irony was frequently found in the way he brought word and images together. Sometimes the illustrations would add another perspective to the text, sometimes they would support the written word, and other times it would add a contradiction to the words and thus create a sense of irony.
In 1789, Blake published Songs of Innocence, but five years later he added more poems and changed the title to Songs of Innocence and Experience. This work expressed two states of the human soul. At a first glance, one may think that the poems found in Songs of Innocence pertain to childhood and a time of protection and security from the harshness of the world. Where as the poems found in Songs of Experience acknowledge the fact that adults have a complete awareness of the social and political injustices of the world. However, upon a deeper investigation of both sets of poems, one can see that the poems do not completely separate the two states, but intertwine the two.
For instance, Blake wrote The Chimney Sweeper, which can be found in the Innocence and Experience poems and are both accompanied by engravings:
Innocence:
In this poem, we see a young child whose father sold him into chimney sweeping, which was essentially child labor. The young boy has a dream one night while sleeping

“that thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black,
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open’d the coffins & set them all free.
Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run (p. 81)”.
This image of young boys set free by an angel and now able to happily dance in a meadow is seen in Blake’s engravings. When reading verses 11- 18, Blake leaves the readers with such optimism and hope for these young boys, but then the boy awakes and we remember that all of the happiness was only a dream. The last line of the poem, “So if all do their duty they need not fear harm (p. 81)”, leaves the reader disgusted with the fact that these little children have had their childhoods ripped from them and they are promised hope and happiness only through death. It is a pretty disturbing poem and definitely forces the reader to question the injustice of child labor in England.
Experience:
In this poem, the young boy’s parents have sold him into being a chimney sweeper. This poem is full of irony in the sense that his parents think that he is a typical child ignorant of the situation. However, not only does he know exactly what is going on, but he also puts on a happy face and is able to trick his parents into thinking that he is happy and ignorant of the situation when in fact they are the ignorant ones. The reader is left with a sense of sadness for the injustice occurring in the child's life, but there is a slight sense of pride in his ability to understand the situation.
When read together, the poems provide different images, but both leave the reader with a disgusted outlook on the social injustices of England towards children during this time. These children have had their childhood innocence taken from them and are no longer immune to their corrupt and oppressed world.