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William Blake's 'Songs of Experience' and 'Songs of Innocence'

© A. Wilson

William Blake's collections "The Songs of Innocence" and the "The Songs of Experience" contain poems which grapple with the ideas and states associated with innocence and experience, respectively. Each collection contains poems which may be seen to be related to one another; this relationship may be explored and it may be revealed that most of the poems seem to form mirrored relationships with one another. "The Chimney Sweeper" from the "Songs of Innocence" may be seen to form the inverse of "The Chimney Sweeper"poem from "The Songs of Experience" and through a brief exploration of Blake's thematic and technical treatment of the subject, we may begin to see the pathos and irony which mark both poems.

In both poems, Blake attempts to place blame for the corruption of the young boys; first with the adult world, and in the "Experience" version, with those adults found within the institution of the Church. The "Innocence" version implicates the adults in the narrator's life; most specifically, his parents. The child's mother is dead and his father sold the child into the practice of chimney sweeping while still very young. Blake, interestingly enough, also attempts to blame the readers as he tells us quite pointedly that it is our chimneys that the boy sweeps and in our soot that he sleeps as if he were suggesting that by passively reading the poem we are as guilty as those directly involved.

The second stanza of the "Innocence" poem offers us a sense of innocence lost rather innocent maintained which is illustrated through Tom Dacre.The shaving of his hair which 'curl'd like a lamb's back' may well represent the shedding of his innocence by the hands of an exploitative and manipulative adult. The lamb imagery also serves to bring the reader's attention back to the theme of innocence and religious simplification brought about by "The Lamb"; it's mocking disentanglement of the rather harsh theology found in Christianity in an attempt to make it more palatable to children nicely complements the cynicism found in the "Innocence" sweeper poem. Lines 7&8 give a hint of forced innocence which juxtaposes well with the image of lost innocence in the previous lines; the narrator tells Tom to never mind the loss of his hair as it will no longer remind him of the soot in which spends his day. The image of white hair also serves to remind us that they boy is being acted upon by social institutions as the soot, representative of man's industry, is acting on the boy's innocently white hair; an innocence which is lost by an adult hand.

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