Counterparts

Abstract

The earlier stages of the process which transmuted Songs of Innocence into Songs of Innocence and Experience can be followed in the ‘transitional’ poems and other works contemporary with them. Evidence for the later stages can be found in the notebook, where drafts of eighteen songs of Experience jostle with related verses which Blake never engraved. These eighteen poems, whose composition-sequence is discussed by Wicksteed (1928, 209–87) and Erdman (1973, 53–5), offer an expression and definition of Experience as Blake understood that state around 1792–5. Experience as a state of conflict and disintegration breeds a variety of moods and voices, from the self-centred to the prophetic; but the songs of Experience collectively map the postlapsarian realm which the songs of Innocence obliquely criticised. Lacking the harmony and integrity of Innocence, they stigmatise its idealism as gullibility; and the postlapsarian hypocrisies which they expose include the encouragement of Innocence as an exploitable condition. As the pastoralism of Songs of Innocence implied knowledge of a state other than Innocence, so the satiric method of Songs of Experience assumes familiarity with Songs of Innocence as statement of an ideal; and in Songs of Innocence and Experience the poems and designs of each part draw extra meaning from juxtaposition with those of the other.