The Work
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul was first published together in 1794, though Songs of Innocence had been published separately in 1789. The combined volume consists of fifty-four illustrated lyric poems engraved, printed, and hand-colored by Blake himself on copper plates, using his patented 'relief etching' method. Each copy is therefore slightly different, since Blake painted each one individually. The Princeton Copy C (1794) and the Rosenwald Collection copies are among the finest surviving examples.
The collection is organized in two counterpointing sequences. The Songs of Innocence present a world of pastoral faith and protective love, voiced largely from the perspectives of children, shepherds, and nurturing figures. The Songs of Experience present the same themes - children, parents, God, nature - in their corrupted, institutionalized, or repressive forms. The two sequences are meant to be read together, as 'contrary states': neither is complete without the other, and the collision between them generates the collection's spiritual energy.
Blake is now recognized as one of the four major Romantic poets (alongside Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Shelley), but he was almost entirely unrecognized in his lifetime. The scholarly rehabilitation of Blake began with Alexander Gilchrist's posthumous biography (1863) and accelerated through the twentieth century, reaching its definitive form in David Erdman's monumental Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954) and Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1947).
Biblical Engagement
Blake's biblical engagement is systematic, pervasive, and often ironic. He absorbed the entire Bible through the King James Version, Isaac Watts's hymns, and Nonconformist preaching, and he returned it transformed - using biblical imagery to interrogate the institutions and theologies that claimed biblical authority.
John 1:29 ('Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world') provides the foundation for 'The Lamb,' the collection's central icon of innocent faith. The poem presents a child asking a lamb who made it, then answering its own question: 'He is called by thy name, / For he calls himself a 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.' The Lamb of God, the lamb of the flock, and the child are all gathered into a single image of Incarnation: God becomes small, vulnerable, and gentle.
Isaiah 53:7 ('He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth') provides the prophetic depth of the Lamb image. Blake's innocent lamb is always already the Suffering Servant - the lamb that will be slain. This is not stated in 'The Lamb' but is the unstated knowledge that gives the poem its poignancy: innocence in Blake's world is always destined for experience.
Revelation 5:6 ('And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth') provides the eschatological dimension: the Lamb that was slain is also the Lamb on the throne. Blake's prophetic vision - in which innocence is not simply lost to experience but will ultimately be restored in a visionary synthesis - draws on the Revelation motif of the Lamb's triumph.
'The Tyger' (Experience) is the poem that most directly poses the theological problem. Its central question - 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' - draws on Isaiah 45:7 ('I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things') and Job 38-41 (God's response from the whirlwind, where Behemoth and Leviathan - creatures of ferocious power - are presented as part of divine creation). Blake's Tyger poses the theodicy question in its sharpest form: how can the God of the Gospel of John - the God of gentleness, incarnation, and self-giving love - also be the God who made the tiger's predatory violence?
Blake does not answer the question, but his non-answer is itself a theological statement. The Tyger is 'fearful symmetry' - its creation required courage from the divine Creator, a 'dread hand' and 'dread feet.' The God of the Tiger is not simply the God of the Sermon on the Mount; He is also the God of the whirlwind, and Blake's theology refuses to domesticate either aspect.
'The Chimney Sweeper' poems (one in each collection) engage Matthew 19:14 ('Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of heaven') as a critique of the institutions that exploit and destroy children while claiming Christian sanction. The Innocence version's vision of 'Tom Dacre' - the child dreaming of being freed by an angel - is presented ambiguously: it is simultaneously a genuine consolation and an ideology that keeps children compliant with their exploitation. The Experience version makes the critique explicit: 'And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery.'
'The Garden of Love' (Experience) is Blake's most direct critique of institutional Christianity. Its speaker finds the garden of childhood play transformed into a chapel with 'Thou shalt not' written over the door - a clear allusion to the Decalogue (Exodus 20) as a system of repressive prohibition - and priests binding 'with briars my joys and desires.' Blake's critique is not of the biblical God but of the institutional church's distortion of biblical love into legalistic repression.
Author and Context
William Blake (1757-1827) was born in London and trained as an engraver. He received virtually no formal education beyond his craft training and was almost entirely self-taught in theology, philosophy, and literature. His reading was extraordinary in range: the Bible (intensively), Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, Swedenborg, and the Neoplatonists. He was a committed dissenter from established religion and politics - sympathetic to the American and French Revolutions, hostile to the established Church of England, skeptical of the rationalist Enlightenment.
Blake's religious views were idiosyncratic and visionary. He claimed to have visions from childhood - including a vision of angels in a tree at Peckham Rye - and he developed an elaborate personal mythology (the Urizen/Orc/Los system of his 'prophetic books') that reinterprets the biblical narrative through a complex visionary symbolism. He was hostile to what he called 'Single Vision and Newton's Sleep' - the reductive materialism of Enlightenment rationalism - and to the Calvinist theology of the established church, which he identified with the tyrannical Father-God he called 'Urizen' (Your Reason).
Despite his heterodoxy, Blake was deeply biblical. He insisted that the Bible was the supreme work of human imagination and that Christianity, properly understood, was a religion of creative freedom rather than moral restriction. His critique of 'the Bible of Hell' (institutional Christianity's punitive version) was made in the name of the 'Bible of Heaven' (the liberating Gospel of imaginative love).
Structure and Key Poems
The collection is organized around 'contrary states' - matched pairs of poems that present the same theme from opposing perspectives. 'Introduction' (Innocence/Experience), 'The Shepherd'/'The Tyger,' 'The Lamb'/'The Tyger,' 'Infant Joy'/'Infant Sorrow,' 'The Divine Image'/'The Human Abstract' - each pairing creates a dialectical tension that neither resolves into simple affirmation nor simple negation.
'The Divine Image' (Innocence) presents Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love as divine qualities that are also human qualities: 'For Mercy has a human heart / Pity, a human face: / And Love, the human form divine, / And Peace, the human dress.' This is Blake's version of the Incarnation: God's attributes become human attributes, and human beings bear the image of God (Genesis 1:27) in their best capacities for compassion.
'The Human Abstract' (Experience) presents the same qualities in their perverted institutional forms: Mercy kept alive by Pity kept alive by Poverty, and so on - a system of exploitation dressed in the language of virtue. The poem concludes that the Tree of Mystery - the religious and philosophical systems that claim to explain reality - grows in the human brain, and that 'The Gods of the earth and sea / Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree, / But their search was all in vain: / There grows one in the Human Brain.'
Critical Reception
Blake's reputation was almost non-existent during his lifetime. He sold copies of his illuminated books to a small circle of admirers but was largely unknown. His rehabilitation began with Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake (1863). The twentieth century transformed his standing: Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1947) provided the first systematic account of his mythology; David Erdman's Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954) placed the prophetic books in their political context; Harold Bloom's Blake's Apocalypse (1963) analyzed the visionary theology.
Theological Significance
Blake's theological significance lies in his insistence that genuine Christianity is a religion of imaginative freedom, not moral restriction, and in his use of the Bible as a weapon against institutional religion's distortions. His 'contrary states' method is a form of dialectical theology: truth is found not in the simple affirmation of either innocence or experience but in the tension between them - a tension that mirrors the biblical dialectic between Law and Gospel, judgment and mercy, crucifixion and resurrection.
Legacy
Blake's influence on subsequent English literature has been enormous. His Romantic successors - especially Shelley and Keats - drew on his critique of institutional religion. In the twentieth century, he influenced D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats (who edited his collected works), Allen Ginsberg (who experienced a visionary encounter with Blake that he described as the defining event of his spiritual life), and the entire counterculture tradition. In theology, he has been taken up by liberation theologians (as a prophet of resistance to oppressive systems) and by scholars of religion and literature.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study John 1:29 and Revelation 5-6 (the Lamb of God), Isaiah 53 (the Suffering Servant), Job 38-41 (God's answer from the whirlwind, including Behemoth and Leviathan), Exodus 20 (the Decalogue, which Blake's 'Thou shalt not' critiques), Matthew 18-19 (Jesus and children), Isaiah 45:7 (God creates both peace and evil), and Genesis 1:27 (the image of God in humanity).
Further Reading
- Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947) - the foundational systematic study of Blake's mythology and its biblical roots. - David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954) - the indispensable study of Blake's political and social theology. - Alicia Ostriker, Vision and Verse in William Blake (1965) - a careful study of Blake's poetic method and its relationship to the prophetic biblical tradition.