Innocence may be provisionally described as a state which the
human faculties are perfectly integrated in which no being can refuse full
sympathy to another and in which the harmony of Man,God and Nahve
is to complete to allow a non-human conception of divinity. The Songs of
Innocence contributes to Blake's celebration of this ideal and draws
added significance from it. Many critics have sought to interpret them by
analyzing the intricacies of their psychological h a .
Blake, when he began to write Songs of Innocence had a clear
perspective of Golden Age in his mind. When one goes through his works
transient glimpses of his past childhood unfold before his eyes and one is
brought to face a new spiritual light. Objects which are familiar to them
are treated in a different light. In their unfamiliar transfigured aspects,
simple expressions hide deep meanings organized as types and antitypes.
There are significant anticipations of Songs of Innocence in
Poetical Sketches, the collection of Blake's juvenilia. They include a
number of neo-Elizabethan songs, the best of which is the Mad song
inspired by the six Mad songs, collected in Percy's Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry (1765). No less significant is the verse-tale about children
at play entitled Blind-Man's Buff which echoes the winter song in 'Love 's
Labour Lost' and relates the children's mishaps to society's lapse from a
primeval harmony. Shakespeare's winter song is echoed again in one of
three pastoral lyrics which were transcribed into a copy of Poetical
Sketches.
Anticipations of Songs of Innocence in Blake's writiigs highlight
the book's dramatic and linguistic subtlety, but its imaginative scope
emerges more clearly from pastoralism. Implications of pastoralism are
idealistic and satirical and &spite its classical origin. It lends to Christian
reinterpretation. Medieval artists associated the Golden Age with the
Garden of Eden and used pastoral devices to honour Christ as the Good
shepherd. In the literature of Reformation the Shepherd and his flock are
often emblematic of the clergyman and his congregation Christian
humanist ideals found expression, in Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan
England, through important sub-genres like the pastoral h a , pastoral
romance and pastoral lyric. Two of Blake's juvenile poems echo the
attenuated pastoralism of the young Alexander Pope, but the pastoralism
of Songs of Innocence is Elizabethan rather than Augustan. Blake's songs
follow those of Shakespeare in celebrating not an idyllic landscape but an
integrated humanity and the pastoral technique of implied comparison
thus, makes the book an imaginative interpretation of the Fall of Man, In
transposing the arguments of Paradise Lost from classical epic to pastoral
lyric, Blake voices that celebration and critique of Milton which is a
recurrent feature of his literary and artistic work.
Robert F. Gleckner separated the Songs of Innocence into three
'
groups. In the first group, the one to be examined is the irresponsible
gaiety of child at play and his relationship to the Lamb and Christ,
maintains coherence. The second group, though more amorphous
delineates the difficulty midway point between the primal unity and the
approach of experience by means of a basic symbolic contrast of black
and white and the use of dreams or visions. The third group reveals most
clearly the encroachment of the night of experience as well as
omnipresence of a saviour who foreshadows the prospect of higher
Innocence.
These lyrics are attributed to a 'Shepherd' 'a young shepherd and
an old shepherd' and the fvst and third of them use the word 'Innocence'
in the context of a moral and subjective pastoralism like that of Arniens
songs in 'Asyou like it '. An altered text of the second poem was engraved
for Songs of Innocence with the title Laughing Song and critics have
compared the two versions in order to define the developing quality of
pastoralism. Blake himself suggests organization of Songs into series.
Keynes reminds the reader that the young Blake composed tunes for his
own poems and suggests that the 'sweet chorus' of Laughing Song
*
requires a simple merry tune. Hirsch notes that the engraved version is
'made more vigorous' by the reordering of the stanzas, but concludes that
the changes are not substantial' and that the poem belongs to the end of
Blake's literary apprenticeship.
Stanley Garner observes that the
replacement of Edessa and Lyca and Emily with Mary and Susan and
Emily moves the poem into a 'familiar country', but argues that the
unchanged epithet 'painted' is inappropriate to English song birds. More
perplexing anticipations of Songs of Innocence appear in the fragment of
prose fictions commonly known as 'An Island in the Moon' which Blake
composed in 1784.
According to Fye, the appearance of poems in Songs of Innocence
as Holy Thursday, Nurse's Song and The Little Boy Lost in the satirical
context shows that the idea of associating them with parallel Songs of
Experience was already in Blake's mind. After exploring their social
and literary background, Erdman agreed that they were at least ironic in
their original context, but argued that they were plainly not presented as
satire in Songs. Hirsch decisively rejected Fry's view, contending that
the characters' responses to Obtuse Angle's song showed it to be more
than an agent than an object of satire. So far Holy Thursday and Nurse's
Song are concerned, one can agree with Gardner that their arrival in a
satirical setting has caused much more trouble than it need have done.
Erdman says that when Quid's song was engraved as The Little Boy Lost,
however, its atmosphere was changed by the removal of the anapests and
the mockery and its meaning was transformed by the addition of a sequel
entitled The Little Boy Found, the Cynic's comprthmsive denials of all
ideas was thus transmuted into the first half of a two part parable about
Innocence endangered and re-established.
'
Donald Dike finds in Songs a convincing reminder that pastoral as
a way of relating the human realities can be toughly honest, Bentley, in
his discussions of The Shepherd stressed the radically immanent
Christianity of Songs arguing this poem defines a religious perspective in
which man and God are not simply analogous but essentially one. By
fusing the Old Testament symbol of the shepherd with the New
Testament symbol of the Lamb, Blake communicates the sense of trust
and mutual responsiveness which is promoted by the divine presence in
every feature of its pastoral world.
Hirsch in his discussions of The Echoing Green claims that this
text traces the entire cycle of human life within a poetic landscape which
fuses the natural with the prophetic.
lo
Comparing, The Echoing Green
with a song about village sports in Poetical Sketches, he concludes that
Blake managed to deepen his unpromising early use of the pastoral mode
only by bringing it to the service of a religious vision. Stanley Gardner
relates Blake's pastoralism to the foster homes provided around
Wimbledon common for pauper children from his district of London.
II
He insisted that The Lamb is central to the poet's pastoral thinking, and
points out that the lamb is a symbol of caring. He argues that both text
and illustrations of the Echoing Green relate material cherishing and
family care to participation in a community and that the 'chief motivation
in the poem is not instinctive joy, but rather human need.' He is less
interested in the religious dimension of Blake's pastoralism than in the
background of personal involvement which enabled the poet to transform
common place pastoral stuff into the strange and inimitable complex of
ideas that one encounters in spring.
While Songs of Innocence is deeply indebted to the pastoral
tradition in its thematic structure, its outward form is that of a collection
of religious lyrics for children. Earlier books of that type included John
Bunyan's A Bookfor Boys and Girls (1686)' Isaac Watt's Divine Songs
attempted in easy language for the use of children (1715), Charles
Wesley's Hymnsfor children (1763) and Christopher Smart's Hymnsfor
the Amusement of children (1770). Such works sought to counter act the
pernicious influence of popular Chapbooks and Blake was familiar with
the genre because the publisher Joseph Johnson had employed him to
engrave illustrations for Anna Letita Barabauld's Hymns in Prose for
Children (1781). Blake's relationship to this convention was noted as
early as 1806, when a contributor to the Monthly Review declared him
certainly very inferior to Dr. Watts and it has been amply documented by
scholars of the last fifty years.
Vivian de Sola Pinto notes the importance of animal, bird, insect
and flower poems and shows how Blake in A Cradle Song transposed
Watts' A Cradle Hymn into a new poetic idiom." Kathleen Raine claims
that Watts, the chief contributor to the Songs represented all that to Blake
seemed most wrong with the religious morality of the time in its special
relation to childhood. l 3 Holloway argues that Blake was both imitating
and criticizing his predecessors in this mode and that such poem as The
Divine Image and On Another's Sorrow employ the versification of
eighteenth century hymn to undermine its typical values. l4 Shrimpton
compares Blake's poems with hymns by Wesley and others, arguing that
Songs presents the best possible defenses and interpretations of the act of
protection in its familiar religious and political contexts.'"
Glen Heather develops Holloway's suggestions that Blake was
engaged in a 'debate' with writers like Watts and Barbauld and suggests
that in this debate he was foregrounding and exploring the problematic
nature of that process whereby men seek to categorize and label
experience. l6 These studies while less speculative than most explorations
of Blake's pastoralism serve a similar purpose in clarifying his
imaginative critique of eighteenth century culture.
In Songs, Blake deals with the Innocence of children and the
heavenly secure and gleell pastoral world and merry making. The
children play until they are satisfied. They speak to animals like lambs
and shwp which are as innocent as themselves. It is a heaven that lies
about their infancy. Unstained world of Innocence also provides them a
guardian angel for ensuring their security. In this section Blake, is not
exclusively unconcerned with evil practices in the society against child.
His poems The Little Black Boy, The Chimney Sweeper lament their lots.
But what differentiates them from the world of Experience is that at the
end of all such poems that give expression to the hostility of the society.
Blake brings the children out of the fold from this vicious circle
and restores them to the heavenly abode of God. In this section, Blake
also brings the children out of in theory of God - God as child and lamb.
Thus God, Lamb and Child form a trinity. Here the images he draws are
simple, common place and pastoral. He fills the scenes of innocence with
angels who talk to children and mingle with them. In innocence, one
hears the wren like warbling echoing in the green fields and gardens. The
pastoral setting is sunny, full of flying and warbling birds and ringing
sonorous bells. The problem of these songs lies in their peculiar naivety.
This is not the simplicity of childhood, of incomplete; this simplicity has
its origin in no experience at all. Blake's condemnation of the perishing
'vegetable memory' as a substitute for inspiration and his preference of
the 'Eternal Image' to the actual object, are both relevant here. His
subject is the child like vision of existence. For him all human beings are
in some sense, and at some time, the children of a divine father. What he
describes are not actual events as ordinary men see and understand them
but spiritual events which have to be stated symbolically in order that
may be intelligible.
In the Songs of Innocence Blake's symbols are largely drawn fiom
the Bible and since he makes use of such familiar figures as the Good
Shepherd and the Lamb of God, there is not much difficulty in seeing
what he means. Indeed some poems are filly understandable only by
reference to symbols which Blake uses in his prophetic books; and since
meaning of most symbols tends to be in consistent, there is always a
danger that one may make his meaning more emphatic or more exact that
it is, especially since, as Blake grew older, he developed his symbols and
by placing them in precise contexts, gave them a greater definiteness.
Blake is not merely a revolutionary thinker on man's physical or
corporeal freedom; he is also one who broods over the spiritual freedom
or spiritual salvation of mankind. The former point, showing Blake as a
humanitarian can well be understood from poems such as The Chimney
Sweeper, Holy Thursday and A Little Girl Lost. In all these cases Blake's
fury makes him lash out at hypocrisy of man and society that enslaves
children to utter lifelessness. In Holy Thursday Blake sympathetic and
compassionate heart shares the agony of the children and his pent up
feelings are let out through an ironical comment:
Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardian of the poor.
Then cherishpity, lest you drive an angelfiom your door.
But the flood of fedings gains more fury in the poem of the same title in
Songs of Experience,
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich andjui@l land
Babes reduced to misery,
Feel with cold and usurious hand?
With vehemence, Blake argues for the freedom of human energy
too. He deplores any religion that denies sexual and emotional life of
man. Virility and vigour are divine and its free play should never be
hindered.
Blake was greatly affected by the sight of the miseries of the
chimney sweeper and the children of the Sunday school. Their physical
bondage enrages him and he comes up with the slogan of human liberty.
But ultimate liberty is that of the human soul and Blake, the mystic stands
for this point of view such as The Divine Image and To Tirzah the most
characteristic features of Blake's poems are based on his 'visions'. These
visions are peopled with angels, Gods and Goddesses. Ultimately this
implies that the poetic inspiration or poetry itself is divine and sacred.
Human instincts and impulses play a significant role in man's spiritual
progress and Blake always speaks against laying down codes of
prohibition against them. The best examples to quote in support of
Blake's mysticism lay in his poems The Garden of Love and The Divine
Image where the poet projects his philosophy of Godliness and divinity.
In Night the poet discloses the state of soul after its communion with God.
In the 'Golden tents' of God the soul of even the ferocious lion acquires a
new life of harmless simplicity and innocence.
In Blake's poems nature is associated with juvenating stimulants
such as the sound of the bell in the spiritual vision and the merry voices
of thrush and sparrow. The Echoing Green echoes the happiness of the
children,
The sun does arise and make happy
the skies the merry bells ring to welcome the spring.
Unlike in Wordsworth, in Blake nature is a part of the human
universe and sympathies with the human heart. The pastoral setting in
Blake gives an added spiritual colour and conforms to the innocence of
children. In portraying charming scenes of nature, Blake is as skilful as
Spenser. For example, his Laughing Song provides a vibrant scene.
Nature in Songs smells of Eden where sin is absent in man's conscience.
It is all enjoyment there. But this aspect of nature is not the only one with
which the poet deals in his poem, It has symbolical undertones in The
Garden of Love in the Songs. Its spiritual significance is asserted by the
fact that it is in a valley that the poet meets the child on cloud who
inspires his poetry at the beginning of Songs of Innocence. But particular
objects of nature may carry meanings and implications hitherto are not
thought of. For example, the Oak in The Echoing Green epitomizes old
age, green leaves stand for the flesh and birds that fly like arrows may
suggest sex. Flowers often symbolize beautiful women in Blake's poetry.
But sun-flower of Ah, Sun-Flower may be suggesting the man who feels
impatient of restrictions and restraints. In his pastoral setting it is the lamb
that enjoys supreme divinity.
In Innocence one likes to linger, appreciate the strife-free bliss
where all is tender, loving, generous and soft. But this is not the end of all
life. It is necessary to go through the harrowing events and feelings of
experience if man is to attain maturity, Man is thrown out of Garden of
Eden as he defiles the word of God, On earth, he suffers much. He gives
birth to the God of Conventional Religion or "The Mystery of Tree" and
cherishes and nurtures evil desires. He is unaware of higher Innocence he
may achieve of. He follows the path of Christ. It is to convince him of the
possibility of this attainment that the Bard calls out his message,
0 Earth, 0Earth, return
Ariseporn out the dewy grass. Lines ( 1 1-1 2)
But man is quite unfortunately inconsiderate of the poet's call to rpusc
him, Man can hear the words of the Bard, but he cannot move because,
Prisoned on watery shore
Starryjealousy does keep myden
Cold and hoar,
Weeping 0'er
I hear the Father of the Ancient men.
Earth 's Answer Lines (6-10)
But the irony of this tragic state of man is that the chain that binds
him is made by himselt it is the 'mind-foged manacles' that the poet
finds 'in every cry of man, in every infant's cry offiar, in every voice and
every ban.'
The landscape of innocence is a fostering, humanized landscape. It
echoes human songs and laughter; it accepts and sympathizes with every
feeling. The Laughing Song is one of the simplest of the songs but
Wordsworth found it worth copying into his common place book in 1804.
Joy is everywhere, in the leaping and shouting of the little ones, in the
sun, in the bells, in the voices of the birds in the Laughing Song, all
Nature rejoices. It closes with the invitation to participate,
When the painted birds laugh in the shade
Where our table with cherries and nuts shades is spread.
Come live and be merry andjoin with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of 'Ha' Ha, He1.
(Lines 9- 12)
The language is somewhat archaic bainted birds) the form
reminiscent of Elizabethan lyrics and the poem closes tellingly with the
call to sing the sweet chorus. The harmony of shepherds and maids, of a
man and nature, is caught in the very meaningless exultation of the 'Ha
'He He'. If one calls it witless exultation, one has only underlined the
point; this is least self conscious of sounds the pure meny note. So it is
with 'spring'. Animal sounds, 'infant noise', and the sounding flute are
all part of songs; and child and lamb play together with no sense of
difference. Music is only one manifestation of the reciprocal warmth that
marks all relationships; the nurse is truthful'and indulgent old John on the
echoing green participates in the laughter of the children at play. There is
neither jealousy nor restriction; dar'kness brings safe repose and satiation.
The happy 'Blossom' welcomes both the meny sparrow and the sobbing
robin, rejoicing in its power to accept or comfort each like. In Lamb the
harmony grows out of a deeper union;
I, a child and thou a lamb
We are called by his name.
(Lines 17-18)
Each creature is a member of another because of their common
membership in God's love and the body of His creations. This
participation in one life is nicely stated in The Shepherd, where the
freedom of shepherd is constant with his watchfulness, for he is himself a
sheep watched over by his shepherd with generous love. In Night all these
themes come together. The moon sits in 'heaven's high bower' like the
happy blossom. The darkening fields are left by sleeping lambs to the feet
of angels bright, as in Paradise Lost. Blake's world of Innocence is not,
however, Paradise. The angels cannot always control wolves and tigers,
or deny them victims; but the victims are received, New World to inherit,
In The Little Black Boy, the pain of being born with different face
is genuine and acute. Blake enters imaginatively into the condition of the
boy and mother. She supplies a consoling vision that makes the suffering
temporary and even source of pride. By showing her boy that the body is
a ' c l o ~that absorbs the beams of God's love and vanishes after a short
term of trail, she turns upside down the standards of the world around
him. This can save his sense of worth. His body is better adopted than the
white boy's to bearing God's love. God is here conceived much as in
Milton, where he dwells in 'unapproached light' which the angels can
bear to behold only when they veil their eyes with their wings. And all
bodies are instruments by which one trained to live in the spirit. The
poem ends with a reversal like the one that sets the ominous beadles
below the angelic children of Hdv Thursday. The little black boy sees
himself with the English child in Heaven;
I'll shade himporn the heat, till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our father's knee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his adverse hair,
And be like hi, and he will then love me.
Lines (25-28)
One can see pathos, surely, in the hndarnental desire to be like
him, the lack of any image of oneself that can give repose or self-respect.
Yet, there is also a strain of mature understanding or even pity in the
recognition that the white boy can bear less love and can give less love,
that he needs to wait for the black boy to be like him before he can
recognize their oneness in a common father.
A Cradle Song and The Little Black Boy are dramatic lyrics for
clearly identified speakers. Even the poems whose speakers are less
sharply distinguished from the poet such as Night and The Divine Image
are marked as dramatic lyrics by appearance and gives definition and
expression to the state of Innocence.
The Chimney Sweeper can be a complex adventure merely to
participate in the speaker's changing awareness regarding the poem A
Dream Adlard points out that dor beetle is known as The Watchman
because it flies after sunset with a loud humming noise, and that a
folksong known to Blake asserts that the glow warm 'lights us home to
bed' when there is no moonlight comparing A Dream with lyrics about
insects by Bunyan and Watts, Pinto argues that the speakers, instead of
taking the ant as a subject for allegorical or generalized moralizing,
attempts to enter with imaginative sympathy into the child-world of
smallness, helpless and be wilderment.
Hirsch claims that there is a touch of humow in the poet's
sympathy with the insects, but sees the predominant tone as one of
'unqual@ed trust in God's beneficence' and describes the dreamers world
as one which everyone is both guarded and guardian. 17 After training,
impulse of mutual solicitude through the various characters of the insect
drama, Gillham argues, "We are meant to see the speaker as a child and
that the child's dream expresses the knowledge of mutual care as a force
active in the world.'' Some critics draw attention to the ready empathy,
which makes the world 'heart broke' as relevant to the dreamer as to the
art, and shows how such empathy creates a world of oneself regarding
''
impulses in which there is no separation of self from other. The reader
of A Dream is invited to share that creative intuition of up grudging
responsiveness through which the speaker's sense of angels' protection
has been confirmed.
The speaker of The Lamb is clearly identified as a child both in the
illustration and in the text and the identification is confirmed by the
poem's rhythms and thought processes. In each stanza three couplets of
four-stressed lines with feminine rhyme, and relates this to the sequence
of tones which communicates 'the victory of the child's mind as it
advances from the fvst playful question to the final blessing.' Gillham
sees the poem as 'a description of the world by a person who is protected'
and points out that the speaker is 'delighted' to share his understanding of
a God whom he knows as a constant companion.'g Martin Nurmi deduces
from the rhythms that Blake 'probably had music in mind' and locates the
centre of the poem's harmony in the fact that child and lamb are united in
the incarnation of God. 20
Gardner emphasizes the way in which the h l y grounded
illustration transfers the divinity of the text to a 'domestic rural location
framed in flowering branches there.
21
The miniature drama enacted in
Nurse 's.Song is concisely described by Hirsch. The opening lines define
that reciprocity which allows the nurse to benefit from the confidence
expressed in the children's laughter. Her adult 'anxieties' awakened by
the sunset, make her call out protectively, but in the ensuring
disagreement she acknowledges the force in t e n s not as a symbolism or
social history but in its intricate dramatic strategies.
Recollections of childhood (nostalgia) are a common subject of
Romanticism. In Songs of Innocence, Blake accepts Lamb and child
symbolizing Innocence. Moreover they stand for Jesus Christ. Arthur
Symons says Blake's work begins in the Garden of Eden or of the
childhood of the world. His utterance of the state of Innocence has in it
something of the grotesqueness of babies. He is the only poet who has
written the songs of childhood, of youth, of mature years and old age and
he died singing, 22 The Universe is seen through the eyes of a child, felt
through the eyes of a child, felt through its senses, judged through its
heart and this child is the symbol of the most delicate and courageous
intuitions in the human mind, just like the soul of a peasant in those
moments of sober exaltation which will be to Wordsworth the very source
and inner substance of poetry.
In his Introduction, Blake represents a laughing child as his
inspiration for the rest of the Songs of Innocence. The eighteenth century
regarded the child as a miniature adult, but Blake knows this is not true,
and he gives his vision of the world as it appears to the child, or as it
affects the child. This world is one of purity, joy and security. Pure we the
children themselves whether their skins are black or white and the lambs
whose "innocentcall" is heard and with whom the children are compared,
and lamb and child both serve as symbols for Christ.
The text of Introduction to Innocence tells the reader a good deal
about the poems that are to follow. The child issues a set of orders to the
Piper and he does so marvellously well which rendered child-like
peremptoriness; 'Pipe a song, Piper Pipe the song, Drop thy Pipe, Sing
thy song'. At each command the Piper obeys. His obedience is easy and
immediate. He is never irritated. He allows himself to play, to enter into
child's world. Introduction implies that adults have something to learn
fiorn children, instead of patronizing him. Once amused, tolerant adult of
the first four stanzas on child's way of seeing and speaking, the floating
wingless boy disappears. Like a child, he takes delight in repeating the
song a third time. The manner of speaking is noted once the child
vanishes,
So he vanishedfiom my sight
And Ipluck'd hollow reed
And I made a rural pen,
And I stain 'd the water clear
And I wrote my happy songs.
Every child may joy to hear.
(Lines 16-21)
On the simplest level, the poem properly concerns itself with state
of Innocence "Wild, pleasant, merry, happy, andfill of joy," suggesting a
progression of states through which the soul of the 'InfantJoy' must pass
to attain higher Innocence. Innocence is introduced and sung by the Piper,
experienced by the Bard. The Piper clearly exhibits imaginative vision
and the Bard 'present, past and future sees'. Yet for each, the past,
present and future are different.
For the Piper, the past can only be the primal unity, for the present
is innocence and the immediate fbture is experience. For the Bard the past
is innocence, the present experience, the future a higher innocence. It is
natural.then that the Piper's point of view is prevailingly happy, he is
conscious of the child's essential divinity and assured of his present
protection. But into that joyous context the elements of experience
constantly insinuate themselves, so that the note of sorrow is never
completely absent for the piper's pipe. One of the other specimens in
which one can see the hillside scenery of innocence is 7'he Echoing
Green. Here, the scene and the day light cycle and the images of animated
nature correspond with human activity parallel to Spenser's
Epithalamion. Both Introduction and The Echoing Green describe nature
as a part of the whole setting.
As one watches the piper enter into innocence, one too finds one
self, at almost without realizing how, in a new world. The poem gathers
momentum gradually and naturally and each stanza plays an important
role in this process with its individual contribution. The first stanza
describes how the poet comes across the spiritual infant; the second
stanza goes on to say that the child requests the poet to pipe a song about
Lamb. The poet who pipes the tune again requested to the music on his
pipe. In the third stanza the poet is implored to sing the Lamb's song
vocally and on both occasions - when the poet pipes and sings, the child
weeps with joy. And these two stages, the child bids him write it down so
as to enable all to read and enjoy it. The piper has had a vision of the
divinity of I~ocence.The child is placed on a cloud because he is divine,
but he is made to speak and act like a human child for the same reason
that Blake's depiction of him on the frontispiece emits the expected
angelic wings and halo. The divinity of the child is the divinity of
children or innocents in the world. "He who would see the divinity must
see him in his children" writes Blake in Jerusalem.
Joseph H. Wicksteed comments, "The symbolism and the very
form of the verse suggest a bodily and spiritual union complete and
secure,, of the passive and active elements of love, the maid and man
coming down to the depth of poem, the child symbolizes poetic
inspiration and biblically it refers to Jesus Christ. 23 The child appears in
heaven which is the very abode of God. The 'rural pen' of the 'hollow
reed' undoubtedly epitomizes the pastoral elements of the piece. The ink
is made by staining 'clear water' symbol of purity.
The child-like quality of the opening lines of Shepherd 'How sweet
is the shepherd's sweet lot' instantly identifies the speaker as the piper.
The repetition of the word 'sweet' reminds the concluding lines of
Introduction. The Shepherd enjoys an enviable position because he roams
from morning to evening all along the valleys. Besides he is employed in
singing songs in praise of God. He feels happy and peaceful of mind as he
is always among sheep, which lets out innocent calls. He guards them
while they are grazing peacefully. The flock of sheep senses the
proximity of the shepherd and feels safe and sound. This care is the theme
of the poem, Gillham offers an illuminating contrast between the Piper's
response in Introduction and the response Wordsworth's speaker makes
to another child. He says that Piper does not have to contend with a
clumsy, grasping self, has no impulse to pull the child from its cloud and
put it on earth where it should be and has so much enjoyment in the child
because he takes it exactly as it comes. Piper allows himself to play to
enter into child's world. 21
The essence of Blake's vision is normally pastorai with Christian
emphasis. The imagery of pastoralism includes animals but animals are
wild as well as mild and the idyllic scenes of Innocence suggest the latter,
In other words, the vision darkens from idyllic reverie to observation of
natural fact in course of development. The purity and felicity of his
pastoral narration is effectively brought in Introduction. The first few
lines of the poem disclose pastoral elements and bring out the
conventional methods of employing these elements to achieve the goal of
pastoral environment:
Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs ofpleasant glee
(Lines 1-2)
The poet enacts the part of a vagrant Piper and meets the divine
face of the child. S. Foster Damon rightly maintains, "The Songs of
Innocence was the fmt great h i t of Blake's first mystical insight. The
music way begins in the Garden of Eden."
2S
Blake identifies once the
ecstasy of the revelation with the state of mind of a child believing deeply
that 'Of such is the kingdom of Heaven'. The rural setting enjoys some
sort of prelapsarian (Before Man's fall from paradise) freedom of Eden
where man and God lived more closely than on the earth. By and large,
Blake has won the blessings of purative 'Muse' the so called "Child on
Cloud'.His introduction is unveiled displaying the countryside simplicity
where the music of his pipe reverberates in rich profession.
An instinct for the elemental simplicity of life is another
characteristic of Romanticism. This characterized both the poetry and
prose of the time. As Coleridge puts it, "Romanticism also suggested that
each th'hg has a life of its own and we are all one life." Thus, a new
attitude towards nature is developed. As an outcome of the revival, Blake
idealized childhood. He deals with the simplest places of life with the
instinctive life of a child, with the love of flowers, hills 'and streams, the
blue sky, the brooding clouds. To Blake, every spot is holy ground, angels
shelter the birds from harm, the good shepherd looks after his sheep, the
divine spark burns even in the breasts of savage animals. The Piper's
voice not only provides continuity from one poem to another but plays
crucial role to enhance the vision of the reader. Blake's Shepherd enjoys
an enviable position because he roams from morning to evening all along
the valleys.
One must look for Christ in men on earth, in guarded as well as
guardian. Man, the earthly shepherd protects Christ on earth by protecting
Lamb on earth. The innocent soul creates God by being in touch and
manifesting the virtues of delight. Religious ideas take new root in the
innocent soul~becauseit can afford them nourishment. This is true of most
of the poems in the Songs of Innocence. Zachary Leader feels, "Blake is
calling our assumptions into question though the Echoing Green helps us
to understand details in design to the shepherd, if it also deepens and
complicates the meaning of Innocence." 27
The poem Echoing Green is idyllic as it conveys to the reader the
extraordinarily brilliant picture of village greenery. A.C. Swlnburne puts
it, "Such a fiery outbreak of spring, such as insurrection of fierce floral
life - and radiant riot of childish power and pleasure, no poet or painter
ever gave before.
*'In this poem one finds oneself lost in the shouts of
playing children and ringing bells. To embellish the scene of spring the
poet paints the picture of warbling thrush and skylark along with the
blazing Sun makes it exquisitely beautiful. The first seven lines of the
poem touch upon the Sun, the sky, the bells, the spring, the sky-lark and
the thrush. The second stanza presents echoes of a different sort. The
memories of the old folk are 'echoes' of the echoing joy and jolly sports
of the young folk on the green. The reader can experience a pleasant
receding image of old folk when they too were young. Hirsch accounts
for the poem's complex tone - somehow both vaguely troubled and calm
and accepting by suggesting that 'the oldfolk who recollect their natural
past in the joy of children see both their source and their rebirth in
'eternity' and that 'in thefull cycle of life the setting of this sun is a new
and greater sunrise.' 29
The idyllic world of Innocence is limited neither to children nor to
childish pleasures. That adults can and should share ,thejoys of Innocence
is implicit in both the texts and designs of songs. Old John actively
participates in the joys of the girls and boys, although he is now too old to
run and leap across the green. He feels such pleasure as he watches the
children that he does laugh away care. Thus, one can find pastoral setting
which is part of Romanticism in the poem.
In his poem The Lamb, Blake depicts characteristics of
Romanticism. The Child and the Lamb are part of nature. The Lamb
symbolizes Jesus Christ. In the parables of Christ, we often come across
the imagery of sheep and shepherd and in the renderings of Jeremiah, the
prophet, we read "Thou, 0 Lord, art in the midrt of us, and we are called
by thy name, leave us not." It is from this source that the poet has drawn
the imagery of Lamb. The Chief land marks of innocence - the lamb, the
child and God-hse together in this poem and the completion of
innocence is almost attained. The child finds out the manifestation of God
in the Lamb and himself, In the Lamb, the poet again changes his person
to that of a child and renders forth the plain childish thoughts
spontaneously.
It is rendered in two different stanzas of which the first includes a
few queries put forth by the child and the rest of the poem answers those
questions. A child asks a lamb if it knows its merciful creator, its feeder
or the giver of its delightful and cozy thing of fleece. He also asks the
lamb whether it knows who gave it tender voice that fills the valleys with
pleasant joy and music. The speaker does not wait for any answer. He
tells the lamb that its creator is one who is called after the name of lamb
itself. He is meek and mild and came to earth as a child. In The Lamb, the
natural imagery is generalized; ('the stream', 'the Mead', 'the vales'); it is
a real enough habitat for the lamb, but it is 'lamb hood' that is significant,
the nature of the innocent creature of God,
Gave thee life, and bid thee food,
By the stream and 0'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight.
Sojest clothing woolly bright; (Lines 3-8)
Innocence has a divine source,
He is called by name,
For He calls Himseva Lamb
He is meek and He is mild,
He became a little child
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name. (Lines 14-17)
The innocent Lamb is Christ, the incarnation of love and
tenderness. There is no suggestion of the idea of the sacrificial lamb,
Christ is a lamb and the child has been baptized in his name. The child is
also identified with Christ because Christ became a child and particularly
praised the innocence of the children. Adams Hazard believes that the
speaker of the poem is so universalized as to be any one. The multiple
repetitions of word and phrase, the sing-song, jingle like quality of three
and four-beat trachea lines, diction and syntax of the utmost simplicity, all
point to the child's way of seeing and speaking. 30 A line like softest
'clothing wooly bright, for example, though perilously close to cloying
sentimentality, vividly capture the child's immediacy of response to and
total absorption in what delights him. The repeated line 'Little Lamb I'll
tell thee, i Little Lamb I'll tell thee' is an expression of the child's eager
delight and pride in being able to teach what he has been taught. There is
benevolent unity in the poem. The poem's structure is one of identity of
merging and interfbsing which is the ultimate condition of the
harmonious oneness. The Lamb symbolizes the tender, soft and less harsh
aspects of the soul. Both 'Lamb and child' are called by God's name, this
incarnation and passion so the poem ends,
Little lamb, God bbss thee
Little lamb God bless thee.
(Lines 19-20)
One of the simplest poems Blake's Infant Joy may seem almost
without content. From an overall reading one assesses it to be an innocent
lisping of an infant. But on a close and deep study one comes to the roots
of its significant,
I h a p p am
Joy is my name
Sweet joy befall thee.
(Lines 4-6)
The above lines suggest something of the world as well as the
mother and child, The speakers are mother and baby. But there are critics
who hold that the poem is an imaginary conversation between a fairy and
an infant. According to JH. Wickrtead the child is unborn and so has no
name. It has been conceived two days within its mother's womb. In his
opinion Blake may be saying that the life of children after and before their
birth is happy. 3'
According to Glen Heathen, "In Infant Joy one overhears a
mother's imagery conversation with her two-day-old child." 32 The child
speaks the first two lines and mother responds in the third. Then the child
answers the third. The child then answers the mother's question, "What
shall I call thee? " in the third line by declaring, "I happy a&y
is my
name." The thoughts and speculation related in the poem are of vicarious
nature to those Virgin Mary. The contents of Infant Joy can also be
presumed as the reckonings of Virgin Mary when she was told by the
Angel of Annunciation that she will bear a child. The child is called joy.
Rather than a human being may be a reference to the bodiless all
pervading joy in general. The poem again hints at another aspect of
Innocence which is manifested in a child who transfigures everything into
joy. Joy he conceives as the core of life, joy which we do not learn or
receive or derive from something else, but which is our being and
essence.
A Cradle Song is a lullaby which has a touch of maternal affection
and tenderness addressing dreams sleep and smiles to hover over the
sleeping boy so as to guard him against disquieting perturbation. The first
three stanzas containing the mother's sincere and motherly feelings strike
a note of pathos. In the fourth stanza the mother is anxious over the
smiles and moans of her child in sleep. It is in the fifth stanza that the
reader can sense a turning point which almost frankly suggests the note of
pathos. It is all the more evident in the lines,
sleep Sleep, happy sleep
While 0'er thee thy mother weep.
(Lines 17-18)
At this precise moment her visionary powers began to fade. She
cries because she seems an inextricable comection between the child's
innocent beauty and its vulnerability. The mother sees in her child the
Holy Image of Christ. Once the thought of a historical Christ begins to
surface in the mother's mind, she loses touch with present moment of
unity and benevolence. "The effect of her tears," writes David
Wagenknech, "is to suggest that the mother is not part of the sleeping and
smiling creating but above it herself God like."
33
The mother's only
comforter is Jesus Christ.
Having been in touch with Blake's world of Innocence so long it is
not difficult for us to realize that Christ and child often hold a bilateral
linkage, Innocence. In Cradle Song, the child and his infantile smile and
weeping are aptly compared to smile and weeping of Christ. Christ wept
from the pain and pity that struck his heart on viewing his fellow beings
suffer and sin. Similarly Christ's smile, which in other words, implies his
blessing, redeemed many from the sloughs of sin and showered happiness
and peace everywhere. So the mother prays for the vision of Jesus Christ
from her child. Thus the poem is something more than a mother's
yearnings for her child's consolation; it is marvelously embroidered with
manifold aspects of Christ - Christ the saviour, Christ as an Infant Jesus
and Christ as the apostle of peace and salvation, As Northrop Frye says,
"For Blake there is no God but Jesus, who exists neither like historical
nor in the h
e like Jewish Messiah, but now in real present."
34
It is a popular and widely known fact that Blake forged his
creation in the years immediately preceding the Age of Romantic poets,
Like the Romantic Blake viewed the Augustan period as an interruption
or break in all the other eminent poets of the Romantic period,
Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron being the most popular among them.
Blake is a poet with revolutionary zest. In Blake's political outlook one
finds a radicalism of English type which includes a strong individual or
personal protest against institutional laws and rules. His poems point
directly at the English society of his time even his most complex
prophecies have a great deal in common with Charles ~ickens.Frye says
that every society is the embodiment of myth and as the artist is the
shaper of myth, there is a sense in which he holds in his hand and
thunderbolts that destroy one society and create another. 35 It is true in the
case of Blake. Being an artist, Blake always was fighting against social
vices through the media of art. His concept of society merely stresses on
hurnan'liberty and freedom. In his poem London one can get vivid and
pungent picturisation of 18' century London. Its children are pathetic and
its citizens are oppressed by state or Church.
Blake is one of the few writers who wrote and stored up against the
society's malevolence towards children. The English people employed the
Negro boys as servants in their houses and there remained a sturdy barrier
against the intermingling of English boys and the Sun burnt Negro boys.
As is apparent in the poem Little Black Boy the Negro boy is the
spokesman. He is well aware of his drawbacks and infirmities. He is
never guided by the false standards of unjust human perception but
guided by his mother. Their interaction is predominant in the poem. His
mother tells him that much of the ephemeral body is dust. She emphasizes
the life in the other world of God where humanity kindness and charity
matter more than the pigment of skin or hair. She tells him,
And there black bodies and this sun brunt face
Is bur cloud, and like a sha@ grove.
She comforts her son and guides him in right way So that he
canface the world positively.
(Lines 15- 18)
The doctrine presented by the mother is a strange mixer. She says,
Look on the rising sun, there God does live
And gives His light, and gives
It contains also echoes of the Song of Solomon, Pagan in its tone;
She again asks her son "come outfiom the grove
my love and care.
(Lines 9-10)
.The Little Black Boy offers a powerful and compassionate critique
of the mother's teaching. Though, it does not tell the reader how to regain
vision, it gently discredits those who would have them look for Eden
beyond and outside this world. In anticipation to her son's queries about
why his body is black when his soul is white, the mother tells him that
God lives in the Sun and that his love is transmitted to men through his
heat and light. "Man is given body because his soul cannot face a direct
exposure to the heat of God's love. Only gradually does he "learn to bear
the beams of love. That, the bodies of mother and son are black suggests
that they are much better able to receive God's love than is the pale
English child. But the implied superiority of black over white gives way
to a vision of eternity which men clouds 'Will vanish'. Then black boy
and white boy will come round God's golden tent and like lamb rejoice.
All will be equal in heaven, and there will be neither black nor white.
Wicbteed suggests that "the mother's teachings reflect Blake's
own point of view.
j6
Blake is implying that black people are black
because they have less vision than white people. Though inferior, black
people are nevertheless especially beloved by God because they protect
those with greater visionary powers. Blake attained his highest poetic and
imaginative splendour in The Little Black Boy. He proved ingenuous in
putting the real philosophy in the mouth of a neglected woman, mother to
the black boy. It is not an advice solely meant for her boy but to all those
who suffer, Her comfort is comfort for dl. In rwtic terms, she ascertains
the frostily of the body. She brings about in a quite convincing way, the
idea that body is a remembrance to absorb his beam of love and after a
white it sheds away leaving our soul alone. She proves that it is the soul
that it is to stand the test of God's love. The black boy keeps this idea in
his mind and never laments his misfortune. He knows that his body is
better adapted and habitually insulated to the tense of light of God's love.
The first stanza of the poem asserts and highlights the white's superiority
over the black but later at the end of the poem, the black boy emerges as
greater than the other because,
I'll shade himfiom the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our father's knee
And then '1'11 stand and stroke his hair
,And be like him and he will then love me.
(Lines 25-28)
The note of pathos is struck in black boy's words. The black and
the white are of homogenous heritage since both descend from the same
family, family of God, but yet the black is segregated from the white. He
has to wait until he reaches heaven for transformation. But even in
heaven, he feels inferiority. It is quite paradoxical. For nobler depth of
religious beauty with accordant grandeur of sentiment and language, "I
neither know non-parallel nor, hint elsewhere of such poem as The Little
Black Boy" says Alexander Gilchrist. 37
This poem is however the most pointedly Christian of the Songs as
it centers on the idea of resurrection of the dead man and an after life in
heaven. Although, he appeared in the illustration, Christ is not named in
the poem. The little black boy accepts his life as a gift from God. He
knew his status, a slave regarded by his, oversees as a beast of burden
destined for an existence toil and harsh punishment. His circumstances
are painhl, but it does not occur to him to wonder why they are not
different. He never blamed his creator. This is innocence, as has been
remarked fructifies what is given to it, and he takes the lesson taught him
by his mother as a guide and obeys her in all respects just like a child. He
learnt the ways and love of God from his mother and filly prepared for
heaven. It is really wonderful that he knows that he has to bear heat of
God, if he wants to enjoy in heaven. He merely regards himself as being
blessed'in his adverse circumstances. The white boy is less blessed, so he
will have to be assisted when they come to the tent of God and the black
boy will help him there, how to love others. The cloud and shady grove of
the body are grateful shelters which filter the galore of God.
Gillham says that, "Many of the Songs are based on the intuition of
the efficacy of sympathy of care and charity of love as a principle actively
at work.
There is no attempt to account for the principle or to attribute
it to something else. Some of the poems are just child like because
children most readily respond to affection and give it spontaneously. But
all Blake's innocents are not children, They behave like adult and
sometimes they act upon their own intuition. Thus the poem beautifully
portrays Blake's philosophy and his views on religion and the society.
From The Little Black Boy onwards thin blasts of the wind of
experience have been frequently disturbing Blake's world of Innocence
forewarning the transition from Songs of Innocence to Songs of
Experience.
The title of the poem Holy Thursday suggests the annual church
services held of children from myriad charity schools in England on Holy
Thursday or Ascension Day that commemorates Christ's resurrection and
Ascension to heaven. On that day the children of charity schools
marching to St. Paul's Church where they sung songs in praise of God.
The glorious sight of the charity children's possession and service
survived in one form or another for over a hundred ye&. Chances of
Blake witnessing the procession are very bright since, he stayed in
London during the time. It was indeed a spectacle pleasing both God and
man, as Addision wrote in the Guardian No. 105.
Holy Thursday presents the Assertion Day 'anniversary' of the
charitY,school children. The grace-headed beadles' who lead the children
into St. Paul's are mentioned first and they may, seem like threatening
figures with their wands white as snow. But the children flow like a river,
they are like flowers, they have a 'radiance all their own and they raise
their choral voice like a mighty wind' or like harmonious thundering the
seats of Heaven's among. And as is usual in these poems, the closing
lines have gained meaning from the whole poem. Now the formidable
beadles take their place below the angelic children,
Beneath them sat aged men, wise guardians of the poor.
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angelfram your door.
(Lines 17-18)
The last line seems inadequate to those who are on the watch for
irony; yet it converts the aged men to the counter parts of Abraham and
Lot, who entertained angels at their door and were shown favour. Blake
purposely leaves proper nouns unmentioned when he says "their innocent
jbces clean." It is only mentioned in the second line the innocence of the
children is projected in the background of a sacred day such as Holy
Thursday and this method brings the two quoted phases "innocence" and
"Holy fiursday" to operate as the common factor before the whole of the
lines especially those lines have under current irony. The c h i l d . are
rather mechanically regular when they are pictured as walking pairs, Then
draperies in flying colours of red, blue and green are charming but it is
harm devoid of freedom.
The children flow like the waters of Tharnes towards the imposing
St. Paul's Church to offer their service. To Blake, they are maphysically
'the flowers of -London'. With their faces appropriate to children they sit
in batches for service. There arises a hum Erom this multitude of lambs as
they raise their innocent hands in prayer. Their humming rises up to
heaven like a wind and reverberates like 'harmonious thundering' among
the seats of heaven. Below the gallery sit aged men, wise guardians of
poor and the scene culminates at this point. Blake ends his poem with a
request. He bids us show pity to those young birds who are really angels
of charity schools. If one does not show pity, he says one will be
neglecting an angel at our doors.
The general ironic tone of Blake's account of charity children in
Holy Thursday has been frequently noted. Though the children are seen
happy they were often flogged, poorly fed and annually forced to march
through streets to St. Paul's to give thanks for the kindness, they had
received during the year and to celebrate to the anniversary of the
founding of the schools. Robert F. Gleckner firther says, Blake's irony
however is even more profound and he symbolized the professional
charity by the beadles who rule over the procession, by the regimentation
of the children. 39
The idea, language, tone and an occasional phase of Holy
Thursday is similar to Blake's poems. Blake attacks charity schools. They
are net based on kindness, altruism and Christian charity but upon the self
love and called them as the private vices in the society. He considers the
procession pure sham, sham pleasantness, sham cleanliness, sham relief
&om poverty and sham charity, In the last stanza, the children
demonstrate their essential innocence, despite the attempts to make them
conform to a hypocritical regiment by spontaneously, 'like a mighty wind
raising then voices to heaven in the song. Instantly, the wooden galleries
in which they sit seem transformed into the 'seats of Heaven'. Beneath
the children, unable to 'rise' in the same way
'sit'
the aged men, 'wise
guardians' of the poor, the poor who need to guarding but the love which
is absent fiom such professional pity.
The final irony of the poem lies in the relationship between this
anniversary celebration of professional charity mongers and Holy
Thursday itself. While the beadles and the wise guardians of the poor
raise children above the poverty of the streets by marching them into the
specially built galleries of St. Paul's the children on their ascend through
their song for above the physical confines of the 'high dome of St. Paul's
Momentarily at least, they like, Christ escape the grave of this world, of
Blake's London.
Holy Thursday is a lyric of transcending beauty. Though, one
misses the conventional landscape and soaring birds and flowers, this
poem has a higher degree of seriousness as a precursor of the coming
world of experience. Here the world of pure and unblemished innocence
gets enveloped in the smoke of experience. It signifies a further step in
the progress fiom Innocence to experience or rather from the sunny fresh
sunlight of the earlier songs into the warmer heat. If the world of
experience is brought upon us all of a sudden, it may look strange,
patched up and artificial. So the poet has to fulfill a double duty that of
gradually bringing the reader to the side of harder stuff as well as keeping
with in the limits of innocence so as not to corrupt the effect. Hence the
bitter experience of children in the hands of charity school patrons and the
poet's ardent desire to assert and pinpoint their innocence in the lines:
The hum of multitudes was there but multihules of lambs
Thousands of the little boys andgirls raised their innocent hands.
(Lines 7-8)
The century in which Blake lived witnessed the most painful after
effects of Britain's industrialization. The labourers were poor, often
without work due to ill-health. This poverty compelled many a father to
sell his children to master sweeps, who employed these children on poor
payment. In those days it was not an extraordinary sight to see the
children sweeping the soot of chimneys even when fire was burning
below in the fur place, It was these inhuman atrocities that Blake to write
the Chimney sweep. The Chimney Sweeper gives a vivid sense of Blake's
own childhood with its sharp contrast between the dirt and misery of
London and the freshness and face of the nearby countryside,
When my mother died I was very young
And myfather sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry, weep! weep! weep!
So your chimneys I sweep and in my soot I sleep.Lines (1-4)
The Little Slaves, black with soot, become clean, free and happy in a
green plain by a river in the sun,
There's little Tom Docre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lambs back, was shaved, so I said
"Hush, Tom never mind it,for when your head's bare
You how that the soot cannot spoil your white hair. "
The Chimney Sweeper Lines, (5- 10)
In spite of the obvious misery of their lives, the boys retain this
vision of eternal happiness and are sustained by it. The 'Z' in the first
stanza, who introduces, Tom Dacre is the second sounds like a William
Blake so closely identified with the sufferings of the boys that he presents
himself as one of them. It is interesting to compare Blake's picture of the
Chimney Sweeper's life with the sentimental treatment of them in Charles
Lamb's essay In Praise of Chimney-Sweeper and Kinsley's The Water
Babies. Martin Price says, "The Chimney Sweeper descends further into
suffering and the plight of the sweeps is as grim as can be conceived."
What the poem is saying, nevertheless, is that the nai've faith, one has
seen in Tom's dream is the means of survival. In a song by 'an old
shepherd' Blake had written:
Blow, boisterous wind, sterns winter @own Innocence is
winter 's gown; so clad we 'I1 abide life 3 pelting storm that
makes our limbs quake, ifour hearts be warm.
The Chimney Sweeper, Tom dreams that thousand of sweepers are raised
up in the coffin's black, when
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coflns and set them allfiee.
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in river, and shine in the sun.
(Lines 16-20)
The Songs cultivate a tone of naivety, what is spontaneously
discovered by a child, has, in fact, been earned by the poet's visionary
powers. The landscape of Innocence is a fastening humanized landscape.
It echoes human songs and laughter and accepted and symbolized with
every feeling. The language is somewhat archaic in the form of
Elizabethan lyrics.
REFERENCES
1.
Robert F. Gleckner, A Study of William Blake's the Piper and the
Bard, London: Wayne State University Press, 1959, p. 83.
2.
Geoffiey Keynes (ed.), The Songs of Innocence and Experience
showing the two contrary states of Human Soul. London: Oxford
University Press, 1970, pp.137.
3.
E.D. Hirsch, Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964, pp.188-90.
4.
Stanley Gardner, William Blake. London: Evans Brothers, 1968,
pp. 20-2 1.
5.
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947, pp. 192.
6. David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet against Empire: A Poet's
Interpretation of the History of his own times. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1954, pp.107-16.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Donald Dike, The Difficult Innocence, Blake's Songs and Pastoral.
English Literary History XXVIII, 1961, p. 375.
9.
G.E. Bentley, A Review of Stranger from Paradise: a Biography of
William Blake. London: Yale University Press, 2001. Reviewed in
Criticism, Summer, 2002 by Kathryn Freeman.
10. Hirsch, op.cit., 3,
11.
Stanley Gardner, op.cit., 4, p. 21.
12. Vivian de Sola Pinto, Isaac Watts and William Blake. Review of
English Studies, XX,1944, p. 214-23.
13, Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition. 2 vols. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1969, p. 30-33.
14. Holloway, John Blake: The Lyric Poetry. London: Edward Arnold,
1968, pp. 30-54.
15. Nick Shrimpton, Hell's Hymn Book; Blake's Songs of Innocence
and of Experience and their Models. Literature of the Romantic
period 1750-1850, ed. R.T. Davies and B.G. Beatty, New York;
Barnes and Noble, 1976, p.19-35.
16. Glen Heather, Vision and Dischantrnent; Blake's Songs and
Wordsworth's Lyric Ballads. Cambridge; Cambridge University
,Press, 1983, p.120.
17. Kirsch, op.cit., 3, pp. 199-200.
18. D.G. Gillham, Blake's Contrary State of Songs of Innocence and
Experience as Dramatic Poems. Cambridge; Cambridge University
Press, 1966, p. 243-5.
19. Ibid.
20. Martin K. Nurmi, William Blake. London; Hutchinson, 1975,
pp. 62-63.
21. Stanley Gardiner, Blake's Innocence and Experience Retrieved.
London: Athlone Press. Rpt. New York: St. Martin Press, 1986,
pp. 50-52.
22. Arthur Symons,
23. H. Wicksteed Joseph, Blake's Innocence and Experience. London:
J.M. Dent, 1978, p. 113.
24. Gillham, op. cit., 18, p. 75.
25. Foster Damon,
26. S.T. Coleridge, The Letter to Southey. September 10, 1802
London: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 864.
27. Zachary Leader, Reading Blake's Songs. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1981), p.75.
28. Swinebume, William Blake: A Critical Essay. London, 1906,
p.102.
30. Adams Hazard, William Blake, (University of Washington Press,
1963), p.88.
3 1. H. Wicksteed Joseph, op. cit., 23, p. 1 13.
32. Glen Heather, op.cit, 15, p. 75.
33. David Wagenknech, qtd by Bentley
34. Frye, op.cit. 4, pp. 60.
35. . Ibid. p.75.
36. H. Wicksteed Joseph, op.cit.,31,
37. Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake. London: Ruthven
Todd, J.M. Dent, p. 152.
38. Gillham, op.cit, 16, p. 95.
39. Robert F. Gleckner, Irony in Blake's Holy Thusday. Reading in
Literary Criticism: Critics on Blake, Ed., Judith 0' Neill. George
Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1970, p. 79.