Book: Songs of Experience

Overview
William Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794) is the darker half of his paired collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a gathering of short lyrics that trace how the world’s institutions and internal fears erode the radiance of childhood vision. Where Innocence sings of trust, play, and unfallen perception, Experience answers with irony, social critique, and spiritual unrest. The poems are compact, musical, and deceptively simple, yet they stage a complex drama of the human soul confronting repression, exploitation, and doubt.

Framing Vision
The volume opens with an “Introduction” spoken by a bard who calls on a slumbering Earth to rise from bondage, and it is immediately followed by “Earth’s Answer,” in which Earth protests that she is bound by “selfish” powers. This exchange sets the key motif: a fallen world held in mental and political chains. Experience is not mere cynicism; it is a clarifying sight that perceives the structures, social, theological, and psychological, that confine human energy and desire.

Social and Institutional Critique
Blake’s urban panorama “London” maps systemic oppression: “chartered” streets and river, the “mind-forg’d manacles” of internalized control, the blackening Church, and palace walls stained with a soldier’s blood. In the Experience version of “Holy Thursday,” charity is exposed as spectacle; the children’s hunger and the country’s wealth indict a nation that starves the innocent while praising its benevolence. The companion “Chimney Sweeper” shows a child whose parents and church use the rhetoric of joy to justify his exploitation, turning religion into a mask for cruelty. Again and again, authority appears not as moral guide but as a mechanism that sanctifies inequality.

Inner Conflict and the Energies of Desire
Alongside social satire, the book explores the charged core of human passion and fear. “The Tyger” confronts awe and terror in creation, asking what kind of maker could frame such “fearful symmetry,” a question that unsettles simple theologies presented in Innocence’s “The Lamb.” “The Human Abstract” argues that pieties like pity and mercy thrive where poverty and distress persist; virtue itself can be parasitic on injustice. “A Poison Tree” studies suppressed anger that ripens into lethal allure. Love’s doubleness emerges in “The Clod and the Pebble,” where one voice says love seeks not itself, and the other asserts it binds another to its delight. Sexual repression haunts “The Garden of Love,” where a chapel replaces open play with a commandment of “Thou shalt not,” and priests bind joy with briars. Corruption and secrecy fester in “The Sick Rose,” a brief, emblematic lyric of hidden desire and decay.

Style, Form, and the Illuminated Page
Blake writes in ballad measures, lullaby cadences, and rhyme schemes that recall nursery songs, then twists them with irony and ambiguity. The apparent simplicity sharpens the shock when a moral turns grim. Each poem was engraved with images in Blake’s illuminated printing; vines, flames, figures, and borders converse with the text, visually enacting confinement or release. The visual darkness and cramped ornament of some plates mirror the thematic constriction of Experience, while occasional bursts of brightness hint at energies not fully subdued.

Paired States and Continuing Tension
Many lyrics echo partners in Innocence, “Nurse’s Song” turns playful freedom into suspicion, and “Infant Sorrow” counters “Infant Joy” with a newborn’s struggle, showing that neither state is definitive. Blake’s vision is dialectical: innocence without awareness is naive, experience without energy is despairing. Songs of Experience compels readers to recognize the chains, inward and outward, that bind perception and love, so that a more integrated, imaginative freedom might become possible.