William Blake (1757-1827)
Songs of Innocence, 1789
Blake's Life
Blake emerged from a lower middle-class background
in London, a haberdasher's son who studied art and was apprenticed to the
engraving trade with the expectation that he would find a place for himself
in the developing industry of late-18th-century England. He first
published Poetical Sketches (1783), which showed his dissatisfaction
with Augustan poetry experimented with other poetic forms. As a poet,
his chief influences include Renaissance poets (Elizabethans and early
17th century), Chatterton, Collins, and Ossian.
As both an artist and a producer, Blake was able
to exert far more influence over the finished creative product than most
engravers and illustrators of the time. Blake's great work began
with his experiments with illuminated plates, created by etching both picture
and text in reverse onto copper plates, which were then used to print sheets.
He then hand colored these plates so that each version was a bit different
- also the order of poems in the volume was different.
His first major effort to create an illuminated
book was Songs of Innocence (1789); with Songs of Experience
(added 1794), this collection of poems was to show two states (not stages)
of the human soul. Nevertheless, a common way of reading the poems
is to see a progression from innocence (before the Fall) to experience
(a lower state after the fall) and thereafter to a higher state of organized
innocence that has been tested by experience.
He later wrote in more epic, heavily symbolic forms,
and his later work can make for difficult reading for the uninitiated.
Blake died in obscurity but was rescued from oblivion
primarily by the Pre-Raphaelites, who admired his work, and by readers
in the 20th century.
Producing Songs of Innocence
Blake engraved
the plates for the Songs of Innocence separately and shifted them
around into different orders each time he printed -- after he created the
Songs of Experience, he sometimes even shifted poems between the
two books. Therefore we don't have to read them in the order given
to us, nor -- although Blake clearly intended the poems to comment on each
other -- can we always make too much about the juxtaposition of poems.
Two poems might be printed next to each other in one edition and widely
separated in another.
Interpreting Blake
Blake's imagery is heavily grounded in the Bible,
particularly in the evangelical Dissenting tradition (related to early
Methodism and other enthusiastic sects of the 18th century and earlier).
Blake tended to reinterpret the Bible in his own sense (Frye says that
the central myth of all of Blake's writing is the Bible, read in its "infernal
or diabolic sense"), rather than literally, as did preachers of some of
these radical religious groups, with which he was affiliated. While
profoundly religious himself, he did tend to be suspicious of organized,
"Establishment" church and churchmen.
Poems and plates like "The Shepherd" and the "Lamb"
draw on conventional religious iconography -- Christ as lamb and as child,
etc. In fact, looking at the poems in Songs of Innocence and
Blake's engravings all together, one can see recurrent image clusters around
the child and lamb/sheep/shepherd theme; Gleckner suggests that the dominant
symbolic pattern of the work revolves around the child/father/Christ pole.
There is also visual imagery relating to vines and
vegetation, which again may have significance in light of Jesus's parables.
Boime points to the tight integration of words and image in the "Frontispiece"
to Innocence, which echoes contemporary textile patterns.
E.g., see how the tree branches form the word “Songs” and the shape of
the “o” in “of” mirrors the neighboring apples (429). Boime says
that the vegetative images found in Blake's illustrations are "visual metaphors
related to ideas of renewal" (440).
There are also radical social and political elements
in his work. Several poems in Innocence suggest the social
world of experience that lies outside -- the "shadow of experience" as
some have called it. "Holy Thursday" shows the innocence of the children
but the experienced reader can see regimentation and repression, the marks
of the social world (e.g., the presence of the beadle, who represents religious
authority, restraint, duty, all of which clash with Blake's idea of freedom).
Children retain their innocence in the face of a horror, but we MUST recognize
the horror. "A Dream" gives a voice of command, not comfort.
In the 1790s, Blake like other first-generation
Romantics, supported the French Revolution (one of his works is on this
subject, and another, America: A Prophecy, addresses the other great
revolution of the period). The French Revolution began with high
expectations in 1789, the year Blake published the Songs of Innocence;
by the time five years had elapsed, the Revolution had begun to turn savage,
and it is not impossible to see the darker vision of Songs of Experience
(and the color choices made in later printings of Innocence) as
in some way reflecting discouragement at the outcome of the promising revolution.
Nevertheless, he saw the violence of the Revolution, which frightened many
of his contemporaries, as a cleansing force that would sweep away the corrupt
- a kind of millenarian vision which he expressed in his longer poems.
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