Abstract
The child as an icon of human self-understanding is Janus-faced. Theologically, children may be limbs of Satan, the vessels of Adam’s sin, or they may be the ‘little children’, theirs the Kingdom of Heaven. In the revolutionary year of 1789, William Blake published his Songs of Innocence, which included the poem ‘Infant Joy’: ‘I have no name: I am but two days old.’ What shall I call thee? ‘I happy am, Joy is my name.’ Sweet joy befall thee!1 The child in ‘Infant Joy’ embodies natural innocence in a new age of hope, but in ‘Infant Sorrow’, one of the Songs of Experience published in 1794, the year of the Terror, a different child is born: My mother groan’d, my father wept, Into the dangerous world I leapt; Helpless, naked, piping loud Like a fiend hid in a cloud.2 ‘Infant Joy’ and ‘Infant Sorrow’ presage enduring tensions in figurations of human nature and the meaning of innocence in a secular world. The Romantic child is a multifaceted symbol of utopian aspiration and social protest.
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