“Without contraries, there is no progression”: An Analysis on Blake’s

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

Romanticism is a phenomenon characterized by reliance on the imagination, freedom of

thought and expression, and an idealization of nature. The main characteristic of the
romantic writers was their desire to break with the rules that the tradition had set.
William Blake was a unique poet and writer who manifested his dissatisfaction with the
poetic tradition and highlighted a writing based on spontaneity. With the Romanticism,
the role of the poet changed, and was seen as performing the function of a prophet.
Blake’s creative autonomy is understood in this way: the poet as a genius and visionary.
His declaration of artistic independence emphasising imagination over observation is
supported by his description of images as seen in a vision (childhood’s visions), through
the eye, not with it.

However, what makes Blake being an exceptional (and uncommon romantic) poet is the
uniqueness of his composite art and his conception of the sublime. All his poems were
published in a form he called ‘Illuminated Printing’ through which he achieved to bring
life in his poetry. For Blake, ‘poetry and painting were to be multiplied by one another
to give a product larger than the sum of the parts’ (Mitchell 1978: 31). The sublime in
Blake differs in some aspect from the sublime of many romantic poets. Blake is not
interested to find the sublime in the nature, the sublime is connected to his ideas of
imagination and eternity which have a powerful effect in the reader. Blakean sublime is
the product of a visual/verbal composite. As Baulch (1997) points out, ‘Blake’s notion
of the sublime is consistently associated with the principle of clearly defined mental
form and its physical presence in visual representation’ (342).

Thus, the aim of this essay is to examine Blake’s notion of contraries in Songs of
Innocence and Songs of Experience and how their relationship is necessary to all modes
of progression. Therefore, Blake’s belief in dialectics needs to be discussed as being the
driving force in his theory of contrary states. Although the integration of contraries is
the key to understand Blake’s works, an explanation of the term ‘dialectic’ has to be
provided. In Hegel’s philosophical system, a given concept (thesis) necessarily
generates its opposite (antithesis) and then, through their interaction, a reconciliation
(synthesis) is reached. However, Blake’s dialectical vision is not exactly Hegelian in
that sense. As Tung (1997) declares, Blake takes the interaction of contraries as a
momentum of progression (198). His contraries do not disappear in some sort of
synthesis, they never null or negate one another. Their co-existence is a must, and they
have to be distinguished from negations. In fact, ‘Blake comes to see negations not as
the interplay of opposites, but rather as a principle that stands outside of the contraries’
(Damrosch 1980: 180). So, contraries states simultaneously exist and are necessary, in
their duality, to human life.

Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience represent two contrary states of
the human soul. Innocence was composed to symbolise a state of the soul which totally
requires a representation of the contrary state, experience. Thus, each group of poems is
incomplete without the other and ‘both are necessary to an adequate conception of the
human soul’ (Hirsch 1964: 15). Innocence is a state of pure childlike joy in which
nature is shown to be protective and in harmony. In a state of experience however,
innocence has been spoiled leading to a disillusion of the former illusions.
Consequently, both states are argued to be an interior journey to recover innocence
which has been corrupted by the world of experience (Cama 2013: 43-9). This journey
also means to progress to a state of prophetic vision in which achieving imaginative
transcendence is the main goal. Reading him through contraries as dialectical
movements, let us understand his poetry in which ‘there is a profound sense of
oppositions between different faculties in the human psyche, between different
approaches to life, between different interpretations of history’ (Punter 1988: 14).

With this understanding, then, by contrasting two famous poems, ‘The Chimney
Sweeper’ in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a better knowledge of how his
contraries accomplish his dialectical vision of the world would be attained.
Furthermore, it is quintessential to focus both in the verses and in the drawings
surrounding the poems because ‘as innocence and experience cannot be taken
separately, text and design cannot well be separated’ (Leader 1981: 38).

In both Innocence and Experience, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ are depressing poems about
child labour in which Blake depicted how poverty changes society. The narrative
comes from innocent children (little chimney sweepers) surrounded by squalor and
sorrow. However, the boy in Songs of Innocence is very different from his Songs of
Experience counterpart. Taking both poems as a whole, they involve a transition from
absolute innocence in the first poem to a recognition of experience in the second one.
As ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (in Innocence) opens, an orphan boy, the speaker,
contextualizes the reader into the harsh conditions the Industrial Revolution brought
forth. To highlight the grim reality where chimney sweepers have been forced to live,
the readers are involved making then aware that ‘the responsibility for employing such
young and miserable children was the society’ (Gummesson 2011: 23).

‘So your chimney I sweep and in soot I sleep’

Having introduced the reader to the misery that evokes pity, Blake moves closer to a
dream or utopia which evokes delight. The dream of ‘little Tom Dacre’, personalises the
narrative giving voice and identity to this child. His wishful thinking is a dream of a
bright summer’s day, a green plain, and a pleasant swim. ‘It is the vision that warms
every man in this life’ (Hirsch 1964: 186). Tom’s dream represents the enslavement of
the children, ‘locked up in coffins of black’, and how the angel (who can be seen as the
protector, the Poet as Shepherd) has set them free from child labour and they are
children again.

‘And by came and Angel who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins and set them all free;

Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run,

And wash in a river and shine in the sun’.

To emphasize the innocence of the children, Tom’s hair is described as ‘curled like a
lamb’s back’ as well as ‘white’ alluding to his innocence and to his angelical nature, to
purity. However, this purity seems to be blackened by the soot of human cruelty. But,
although the misery of life is so concretely depicted, these interwoven experiences of
sorrow and pleasure make more triumphant the affirmation of visionary joy. The
colours of the poem emphasise this belief by contrasting the bright, warm and colourful
dream with the dark, cold and black reality. This shows Blake’s understanding of the
world, which is a composition of good and evil even though we are looking at our world
(like the sweepers) with an innocent eye. That is why the children in the poem are so
innocent that they cannot see their callous destiny and their innocence makes them to
have faith. They preserve their innocence through dreams and the use of poetic
imagination even when the dream has ended.
A much more gloomy poem is ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ in Experience. A state of false
innocence is being shown off to us in which, as in its former poem, large social
injustices are attacked at the expense of particular individuals. The poem begins with a
speaker telling the readers that the chimney sweeper is not a bright being but a sooty
object amidst socially caused misery (Hirsch 1964: 229).

‘A little black thing among the snow, 

Crying “weep! weep!” in notes of woe! 
Where are thy father & mother? say?

They are both gone up to the church to pray’ 

Blake’s purpose in making the sweeper an object in the first lines of the poem is the
purpose of pointing to a social criticism. Moreover, we realize that the child has both
parents and he is not an orphan as in the previous poem. However, the criticism is even
more highlighted because it leaves open to attack children’s vulnerability who all are
object of exploitation. The innocence is changing in the poem, he has a much clear
understanding of the adult world and its miseries (Ferber 1991: 29). We find reasoned
awareness not just of parents but of society as a whole, the same society that force him
into this awful occupation.

‘And because I am happy and dance and sing, 

They think they have done me no injury, 

And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, 

Who make up a heaven of our misery’

In these lines, Blake accuses the parents of conspiring with the Church and the State and
of being, all of them, the ones who ‘make up a heaven of our misery’. They are sources
of repression that ignore the suffering of the children building up a fiction of happiness.
In fact, this poem is more ironic than its innocence counterpart in the way that Blake has
described the boy as happy (in some sense) but at the same time dressed ‘in the clothes
of death’. Although he says that he dances and sings, we do not enter into his innocence
in the same way we do in Tom’s dream. Here, unlike in the earlier poem, there is no
‘angel with a bright key’ to set him free into the world of imagination. It is the child’s
innocent happiness that have caused the parents’ attempt to destroy that world since
they no longer inhabit in it. Besides, the artificial morality that the parents bear is the
one that makes them blind in the suffering of the child. Through these final
considerations, the cruel fate of truth and innocence in the world of experience has been
shown; a world in which there is no happy ending as in the poem of Songs of Innocence
(Wilson 1971: 39).

The designs in both poems also play a crucial role in disclosing their unity. In
Innocence, Tom’s Heaven is depicted with many sweepers rejoicing at their liberation.
All children seem to have moved from the darkness of their occupation to the lightness
state of freedom. A paradisiacal landscape far from the cruel society is displayed.
Conversely, in Experience, a more realistic portray is made. The child is alone and
surrounding by a falling snow which contrasts with his nearly dead appearance. It is a
landscape in which nothing can growth, in which hope has been lost. These drawing are
part of Blake’s dramatization of ‘The Contrary States’ (innocence and experience) and
the embodiment of Blake’s world where individual freedom and social impositions
mutually exist.

The contrary states of human soul have been analysed through the ideas, images,
symbols, language and impression displayed in both poems. Songs of Innocence and of
Experience demonstrates Blake’s concern for individual human life, in particular its
course from innocence to experience. We move from illusion to truth, illusion being
entirely on the side of innocence and truth on the side of experience. In the first ‘The
Chimney Sweeper’, the state of innocence is harmonious not because the world is pure,
but because the mind has not been corrupted yet by the outside world. On the other
hand, its experienced counterpart shows how in the state of experience, the imagination
has been restrained by the repression of the State and the Church. All of these along
with the figure of the children, who possess the imaginative vision which allows to
transcend the corruption present in the state of experience, make us realize that both
Innocence and Experience are necessary for progression: ‘Without contraries, there is
no progression’.
Bibliography

Baulch, David. 1997. ‘To Rise from Generation: The Sublime Body in William
Blake’s Illuminated Books’. Word & Image, 13.4: 340-365.

Cama, Shernaz. 2013. ‘Introduction’. In Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Eds.

Sebanji Sengupta and Shernaz Cama. Delhi: Worldview Publications, pp. 43-49.

Damrosch, Leopold. 1980. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.

Ferber, Michael. 1991. The Poetry of William Blake. London: Penguin Critical
Studies.

Gummerson, Katja. 2011. William Blake’s Chimney Sweeper: A Stylistic and

Allegorical Study. Halmstad: Halmstad University, http://www.diva-
portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A557766&dswid=-4414 (accessed 18
November 2016).

Hirsch, Eric Donald. 1964. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake.

New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Leader, Zachary. 1981. Reading Blake’s Songs. Boston, Henley and London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Mitchell, William John Thomas. 1978. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the
Illuminated Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Punter, David. 1988. William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose. London and
New York: Routledge.

Tung, Chung-hsuan. 1997. ‘Blake’s Dialectical Vision’. Journal of the College

of Liberal Arts, 27: 193-211.

Wilson, Mona. 1971. ‘The Contrary States’. In The Life of William Blake.
London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 30-43.