Songs Of Innocence Poem Analysis
When reading and studying William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience it is easy to find the obvious juxtaposition of innocence in a pastoral world against the realisation of a more cynical, adult world often full of corruption.
Many of Blake’s contrasting poetry cement the different mind sets he was enduring while writing his poetry, which leave a major distinction between the states of innocence from the state of experience.
Themes, imagery and language may be the defining features in Blake’s poetry that contrast the two states but, when looked at more closely, it is in fact the themes imagery and language that compare the two states closer together, allowing us, the reader, to see the two states as in fact, one whole. Before any poems are studied, main contrasting features are found in the books themselves. Blake was one of the great revolutionary artists, and had high hopes for the French Revolution, which is evident in the themes of joy and hopefulness in Songs of Innocence, but the disastrous end of the French Revolution caused Blake to lose faith in the goodness of mankind,
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The use of question marks, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" (1) allows Blake to create a tone of conversation, in order to portray the infinite goodness of God as seen through the worshipful eyes of a child, eager to learn. Just like most of the poems in Songs of Innocence, often lacking contraries, lack also energy, progression and complexity. This is used perfectly to mime the state of infancy in the child’s simplicity and vulnerability. In “The Lamb” there is an element of desperation in the joy, because we cannot avoid supplying the knowledge that the joys depicted are exclusive to infancy and very short-lived. This theme of desperation is evident in the use of question marks in stanza one, and the use of repetition, twice, in the second stanza, at the beginning and at the
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