Songs Of Experience Research Articles

Keeping the Pursuit of Innocence in Experience: The Analysis of the Image of Children in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

The works of William Blake, an iconic figure in English Romanticism, are epitomized by "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience," wherein 'children' hold significant symbolic value. Blake delves into the essence of childhood, adopting their perspective and employing their voices to convey nuanced narratives. This approach serves as a vehicle for his profound exploration of humanity, social critique, and quest for innocence. Through an analysis of select poems featuring children in these two collections, this study juxtaposes the contrasting portrayals of children in these distinct realms while unearthing their shared characteristics. It investigates the dichotomy and harmony between innocence and experience in Blake's poetry. Remarkably, Blake's writing evolves from an emphasis on "innocence" to a recognition of "experience." However, even amidst this transformation, he steadfastly clings to the aspiration for innocence, albeit within the context of a more sober and rational world of experience. This evolution underscores Blake's intricate exploration of the human condition, wherein the pursuit of innocence endures as a central theme throughout his work.

Mickle Maher, <i>There Is a Happiness That Morning Is</i> (Theater Oobleck, Chicago, 2011)

In There Is a Happiness That Morning Is, Mickle Maher has imagined a witty, amusing, and moving love story about two college professors, inspired by two of William Blake’s poems. The first poem, “Infant Joy” from Songs of Innocence, is taught by the exuberant Bernard (Colm O’Reilly). The second, “The Sick Rose” from Songs of Experience, is taught by the precise, severe Ellen (Diana Slickman). The college dean, James (Kirk Anderson), serves as the worm in this Garden of Eden. The audience serves as the students in the classroom. William Blake, eighteenth-century poet, is front, center stage. His poems, chalked with artistic flourish on a large blackboard which dominates the stage, are always in front of the student-audience. They are referred to again and again by the characters, speaking in verse. So skilled are the actors that this seems natural, while it adds texture and increases the emotions of the plot.

СТРУКТУРА ИНОГО МИРА В ПОВЕСТИ ЧАРЛЬЗА КИНГСЛИ "ВОДЯНЫЕ МАЛЫШИ"

The fairy tale “The Water-Babies” by the British novelist Charles Kingsley depicts the other world as water kingdom. The boy chimney sweeper Tom gets there having drowned in the river. The paper analyses how the other world is organized to provide the Victorian up-bringing and support the ideas of Darwinian evolution. Tom’s life in water is interpreted as the period of moral transformation and the study of nature. The topography of the other world is structured around the magic Isle of St. Brendan. The boundary between this world and the other world is crossed through mirrors, water surfaces and by looking in the eyes of fairies. “The Water-Babies” are interpreted as part of a specific literary tradition. The article compares different versions of the archetypal plot about a chimney sweeper in English literature. The analysis is focused around the poems about the chimney sweeper by William Blake in “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”, narrating the tale of children getting into the other world and the following Redemption. “The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire” by Walter de la Mare is the final text in this tradition. In conclusion we examine beliefs about chimney sweeper in folklore sources and in particular the connection between chimney sweeper and good luck.

오에 겐자부로, 블레이크에게서 길을 찾다: 『새로운 사람이여, 눈을 떠라』를 중심으로

Kenzaburo Oe is a Japanese novelist who was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. The novel, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age is a series of linked, meditative stories that describe Oe’s changing relationship with his adolescent brain-damaged son through the poems and paintings of William Blake. This study examines how Blake’s poems and symbols work in the novel, focusing the first story, “The Songs of Innocence, the Songs of Experience,” and the last one “Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age.” In the stories, Oe seeks the possibility of healing and salvation through much difficulties and symbiosis with his son. It includes the process of his son’s becoming an artist as a priest. The stories also include Oe’s own spiritual journey guided by Blake. Oe’s allusion to Blake serves as a device which establishes an entirely new form of novel. By doing so, the personal experiences of father and son rises to the height of universality.

William Blake's Mystic Vision of Contraries in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

William Blake's Mystic Vision of Contraries in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

Small Room for Judgment: Geometry and Prolepsis in Blake’s “Infant Sorrow”

ABSTRACTThe extensive typological allusions in Blake’s “Infant Sorrow” (Songs of Experience) associate swaddling with the establishment of traditional moral-materialist culture based on sacrifice. Blake links his culture’s materialism to three-dimensional perspective, which the accompanying design overthrows in accordance with Berkeley’s contention that distance exists only in the mind. By setting the poem’s aged speaker and the design’s infant at odds, Blake undermines the received relation between these two “sister arts” and enforces a cognitive dissonance that is of apocalyptic intensity. The supercharged political context of 1792–93 adds further immediacy. The design to the poem constitutes a direct reply to Burke’s Reflections and his theatrical Dagger Speech by way of Macbeth, a regicide play. Blake recognizes the fearful symmetry of escalatory violence, but he also sees how the very language and imagery of protest are already corrupt effects of the system. Thus it remains uncertain if his preferred instrument of reform is any more cutting than angry satire, itself liable to become just another theatrical spectacle.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Творчество и мифология Уильяма Блейка в контексте кинопроизведения Дж. Джармуша «Мертвец».

The presented article is devoted to the study of the image of creativity and mythology of William Blake in the film by J. Jarmusch "Dead Man". The author has carried out a detailed philosophical and art analysis of the film "Dead Man" and graphic works by William Blake, in particular, the series of engravings “Heads of Ghosts”, engravings “Ghost of the Flea” and “The Lost Boy”. The author also examined poetry and mythology in the work of William Blake based on the material of the works "The Marriage of Hell and Eden" (1973), "Songs of Innocence" (1789) and "Songs of Experience" (1973). Having conducted a comparative analysis of the works of W. Blake and the film by J. Jarmusch, the author revealed the similarities among the characters, mythology, plot and attitude in the movie "Dead" by J. Jarmusch and the works of W. Blake, interpreted the reason for citing the works of W. Blake in the movie "Dead Man" ... As a result, a conclusion was made about the commonality of the worldview attitudes of the work of J. Jarmusch "Dead Man" and the work of W. Blake. The article highlights the common features of the investigated works and the film: quotations from works of other authors, acquiring new meaning (citing the works of John Milton and Dante W. Blake correlates with the quotation of W. Blake in the film "Dead Man"); initiation motive; wandering motive; the idea of the wrongness of the world and the dualism of the universe. The author notes that the main artistic ideas of the works under consideration by William Blake are reflected in the film "Dead Man" by J. Jarmusch. In synthesis, they acquire a new meaning – the path of the soul to salvation through the overcoming of false ideas, vices, knowledge of the truth. This work uses the method of philosophical and art history analysis, developed by the Siberian art history school.

ДВЕ КОНЦЕПЦИИ ДЕТСТВА В ЕВРОПЕЙСКОЙ И РУССКОЙ ПОЭЗИИ XVIII–XIX ВВ.

G. R. Derzhavin with his famous Ode on the birth of a future Emperor 1779 became in the Russian poetry of a new epoch the pioneer of Childhood and children theme. The poet except the rossoist topic of Childhood as clear headsprings innovatively revealed a different concept of Childhood as a School (educational) in the episode of fairies gifts who give a child – a future tsar both exceptional abilities and knowledge. Derzhavin outstripped an English poet W. Blake who also touched upon the topic of Childhood and children in his poetic cycles of 1789–1794. The article also discusses the motif of Childhood and children on the material of English (W. Blake and W. Wordsworth) and Russian (N. A. Neckrasov) poetry of the XX c. W. Blake’s cycles («The songs of virginity» (1789) and «The songs of experience» (1794) as well as W. Wordsworth’s cycles «Preludes» and his «Ode.News on immortality coming from early childhood memories» (1803–1807) give the images of children and childhood in the context of nature as a leading principle of Romanticism: a child with his initial natural piety as a real headspring of a man – a pure angel but a sage already. In the Russian poetry of the XIX c. N. A. Neckrasov as well as W.Blake and W. Wordsworth in England turned to the images and motifs of children and Childhood through his whole literary biography («Childhood», «On the Volga. Valezhnikov’s childhood», «A schoolboy» and so on).

An Analysis of Intertextuality in William Blake’s Companion Poems: The Lamb and The Tyger

This study undertakes a thorough analysis of the aspects of intertextuality and their undertones in William Blake’s companion poems:The Lamb (1789) from the Songs of Innocence and The Tyger (1794) from the Songs of Experience. These poems are often read side by side since they are described as counterparts to one another reflecting Blake’s dualistic ideology on the conflicting states of the human soul (good vs. evil). The researchers adopted Charles Bazerman’s(2004) theory in analyzing intertextuality within texts. The analysis of the poems revealed that there are 22 instances of religious and literary intertextual allusions within both poems and their type of textual integration was mainly description. In addition, a great percentage of those allusions consist of religious undertones which help reflect the dualistic approach that Blake adopted in his volumes of poetry.

Postmodernism, Marxism and Versions of the Future: an Interview with Professor Martin Jay / Postmodernismo, marxismo y versiones del futuro: una entrevista con el profesor Martin Jay

A través de su interés en el postmodernismo y crítica de las metanarrativas, en esta entrevista el profesor Martín Jay aborda algunos de los principales temas que han centrado la atención de la teoría histórica recientemente. Temas como el giro hacia la experiencia histórica, la contribución de Hayden White a la comprensión de la narrativa y el lenguaje, o la importancia de Fredic Jameson, son traídos a colación en este texto. El profesor Jay también vuelve a algunos de sus temas iniciales y conocidos como la llamada French Theory, el filósofo alemán Theodor W. Adorno y la presencia del marxismo en los Estados Unidos.Palabras clavePostmodernismo, capitalismo tardío, marxismo, experiencia histórica. AbstractThrough his interest in postmodernism and in criticism to metanarratives, in this interview Professor Martin Jay tackles some of the main issues that have lately focused the attention of historical theory. Topics such as the turn towards historical experience, Hayden White’s contribution to understanding of narratives and language, or the importance of Fredric Jameson, are brought up in this text. Professor Jay also comes back to some of his former well-known themes such as the so-called French Theory, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno and the presence of Marxism in the United States.Key wordsPostmodernism, late capitalism, Marxism, historical experience.

Introduction

Introduction Jim Hicks ON RARE OCCASIONS, academic conferences turn out as they should, and pilgrims making the journey find what they seek. The trek to the American Comparative Literature Association's annual meeting is one I've made more times than I can count, in part because its seminar format—where participants assemble around a theme and meet as a group for two or three days running—favors such an outcome. This year, I fled to Los Angeles for the ACLA, during a week of so-called spring in New England, and found there a panel on poetry and public feeling, convened by Tristam Wolff and Lily Gurton-Wachter—one site where the call was answered. On the second day of this seminar, the latter session leader began with a rumination on Blake's second chimney sweeper poem, that song of experience where "a poor black thing … taught to sing the notes of woe" comments: "And because I am happy and dance and sing, / They think they have done me no injury." Gurton-Wachter, in a problem-posing move worthy of Freire himself, focused our attention on a troubling existential claim: the sweep does say, "I am happy"—not "I was" (as in the previous stanza) or even "I seem." How, she wondered, can we make sense of this claim? The word "happiness," she reminded us, is related to luck and fortune, and likely borrowed into English from Scandinavian roots. We're happy when fortuitous things happen. That Blake's sense of "happy" might bear a trace of its original meaning suggests his use of "injury" may as well; early on, this Latinate term was largely legal, "wrongful action or treatment," "infringement of another's rights." As Nancy Armstrong and others have shown, English literature during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries called upon readers to sympathize with disenfranchised classes, to care about their rights and the wrongs done to them. A posttalk discussant emphasized the prescient presence of minstrel theater in Blake's lines: a "poor black thing" said to "dance and sing" would soon take center stage across the Atlantic. What [End Page 192] it takes for an object to become a subject, for "happiness" to become internal, or "injury" to be embodied are issues that Blake's prophetic poetry envisions, and the centuries following have yet to resolve. Just such a nightmare weighs on the brains in these pages, from Bob Hicok's opening "artist's statement," where he's "the lone yak forever surrounded by wolves," to James Haug's riverine thoughts, "a murky reflection of the heavens." In our summer issue, people make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. Whether it's Mhani Alaoui's young Aya, who stands up to her "expat," or Mirfet Piccolo's protagonist, who fails to save his children from the fascism he chose to follow, or the dutiful sons tormented by their aging fathers in stories by Charles Swift and Dave DeRicco—in each case, history weighs on and frames the struggle. Whether it's Sarah Rose Cadorette seeding hope in Haiti, Molly Quinn prompting a scene change in the psych ward, or Geneviève Piron recalibrating our compasses in Siberia, the lesson is clear: it doesn't matter what happens to you, all that matters is what you make of it. There have been better moments: Roger Mills recalls JFK's tribute to Robert Frost (first published in this magazine, back in 1964), where our nation's leader saluted the arts and pledged to support them: "If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him." Joel Westerdale also returns to Frost, demonstrating that the Good Green Poet's most famous poem is best read as an exemplar of Nietzschean amor fati. One wonders, nonetheless, what any of these éminences grises would have made of Panteha Abareshi's searing testimony to the contemporary experience of women of color, front and center in this issue. William Blake, perhaps, understood something of Abareshi's message over two centuries ago: "God and his Priest and King … make up a heaven of...

Interrelation/Coexistence between Human/Nonhuman in Nature: William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

This paper considers the interrelation and coexistence between human and nonhuman in nature in William Blake’s (1757-1827) Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (1789-1794). The paper looks at his poems in the light of ecocentrism, especially the theories of Lawrence Buell (1939- ) and Ashton Nichols (1953- ), who articulate ecocentrism as a word which expresses the interconnection between human and nonhuman in nature and environment. The word, ecocentrism, denotes nature and environment as the central and essential parts of the world to represent them as a web or system wherein all members and parts, including human and nonhuman, are related and connected to each other so closely that they cannot exist and live separately and lonely. By human, it refers to who is a creature in the web, who links to other creatures and entities so closely that he cannot be isolated from them. The linkage and coexistence are the matter which can be viewed in some of the poems of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Blake watches environment and nature carefully, and in some of the poems of two mentioned collections such as “The Echoing Green,” “Nurse’s Song,” “Holy Thursday,” “The School Boy,” to name just a few, he illustrates a situation of life in which human has close relation and connection to other creatures. According to Blake, human and nonhuman have such a vital relationship so that no one can live without the others. All creatures and beings in an organism have an effect on each other, and they are interrelated. The paper shows interconnection and coexistence between human and nonhuman in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience due to portrayal and representation of nonhuman creatures in the world. It defines some nonhuman terms such as nature and environment and then focuses on the interrelation and coexistence between human and nonhuman in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in accordance with ecocentrism.

Blake’s Songs, Their Introductions and the Bible

Although William Blake was highly eclectic and drawing from multifarious sources, religious system, philosophical thoughts and traditions, the Bible was Blake’s most predominant concern. Throughout his life of meticulous and tedious composite art Blake aimed at decoding the Bible as the Great Code of Art for helping people to be imaginative and visionary like Jesus Christ. Both in his complex and sophisticated prophetic works, meant for the illuminated people, and in his deceptively simple lyrics of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, meant for the rank and file of society, Blake did keep this up. The present study is an attempt to focus on this element, by delving deep into the texts and designs of the Introductions of Songs of Innocence as well as of Songs of Experience, inevitably considering the totality of Blake’s works and in the special context of their marked allegiance or affinity to the themes and symbols from the Bible. Blake visualized a blend of lamblike meekness and mildness with the ferocity of tigers of wrath for having the human form divine perfect.

Transforming Perspectives: The Angel's Key in William Blake's THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER

Although many scholars and critics have successfully annotated both the Songs of Innocence (SoI) and the Songs of Experience (SoE) versions of William Blake's “The Chimney Sweeper” and have noted t...

Trains

Trains Rebecca Schamore (bio) Up the steep wooded hill behind my house in northeastern Tennessee lies an open field that has always reminded me of Bambi's meadow. I often wonder, as I watch them pass through, if the deer that traverse our woods stop at its edge and counsel their fawns on the danger lurking in that wide sunny spot. They forage here regularly on their way down from the mountain that is [End Page 22] the focal point of my Appalachian town. On the far side of the meadow behind a rusting chain link fence, railroad tracks wend westward through the neighborhood on their way to Kentucky coalfields. The tracks are generally quiet, but sometimes at dusk as the chickadees and titmice softly chatter in their hushed evening tones, and the last light dances through the summer leaves, I catch the rolling rumble through the trees, and I remember the trains of my childhood. I was still a child, five or six, when my grandmother first played her train records for me. I was mesmerized by the soulful complaint of the instrumental "Train Blues," but I was too young to manipulate her high fidelity phonograph by myself. I had to ask Grandma to set the needle on the records and turn them over to hear the other side. Because I loved to dance and pretend and because I was shy and self-conscious, I would only ask her to play the records when my sister and cousins were outside playing. All alone, I would spin around the room, a whirling dervish, as the train thundered down the track, then collapse in a heap at the sadness in the fiddle's lonesome song. The trains of my childhood were mythic trains, trains of story and trains of song. The 1954 edition of Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could with its bright orange cover and its little blue engine spoke to me of kindness and optimism. I could not forgive the passenger and freight engines their haughty cruelty at leaving the toys and the broken-down train behind, nor could I understand the tired old engine's unwillingness to try. I adored the Little Blue Engine for pulling that broken train over the mountain and for helping deliver the toy animals and dolls, the picture puzzles, the big golden oranges, and the red-cheeked apples to the waiting boys and girls. That over the top moral lesson was not lost on five-year-old me. The Little Blue Engine was kind and helpful, she personified [End Page 23] my kindergartner's belief in who we should be. Best of all, she thought she could, and she did. If The Little Engine that Could was my song of innocence, my grandmother's records—those train ballads of Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, the Weavers, and so many others—were my songs of experience. I didn't need to understand the songs; it didn't matter. I knew enough, that there were trains, mines, and hardship. I knew that tarriers, whatever they were, had to "work all day for the sugar in [their] tay." And I knew, because Tennessee Ernie Ford told me, that you could "load sixteen tons" but all you'd get is "another day older and deeper in debt." The story that spoke most clearly to my younger self's sensitivity was "The Ballad of Casey Jones." All the other songs were simply a prelude. I acted out the story in my grandmother's living room. I wanted to warn Casey; I cried every time he said goodbye to his wife and climbed on that fateful train. I would stand in the great green chair by my grandmother's picture window and stare down imaginary tracks until I could see the train blocking Casey's path. I spent hours dancing and singing in that sunny room. If my grandmother or grandfather happened by and glanced my way, I would sit down so fast that sometimes I sent their oversized green footstool skidding across the floor. My play was private. I rode the Wabash Cannonball, took the night train to Memphis, and mourned the loss of that "brave engineer...

Songs of Experience: Confessions, Penitence, and the Value of Error in Tasso and Spenser

As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation swept Europe in the sixteenth century, penance (or its rejection) became a cornerstone of individual and confessional identities. Extending a post-Tridentine view of sacramental penance as consolation, Torquato Tasso'sGerusalemme liberatasuggests that penance offers a means to recover and even to benefit from the experience of error—and to incorporate romance error into epic action and ethics. Through extensive intertextual dialogue, Edmund Spenser'sFaerie Queeneengages this view to explore the fears produced in some lay people by the English Reformers' rejection of penance. Book 2 interrogates the possibilities for epic heroism in a fictional environment lacking any visible means to recover from error and therefore profoundly skeptical of experience and the errors to which it might lead. Spenser's virtuoso act of cultural translation reforms Tasso's penance-based ethics, exposes the shortcomings of one approach to reformation, and affirms the educational value of human error.

A Review of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience" in Persian Translation

All who research and study about William Blake's works more or less know about the nature of his most salient work, Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence . The Songs of Innocence tries to reflect child's innocence and ignorance of worldliness. They focus on childhood happiness and improvisation. Those who work the field of literary translation are aware of those limitations and bounds which a translator may face with, (sociolinguistic matters, cultural bounds, discourse issues…) none of which will lead us toward rejecting the essence of translator and translation. As Robert Frost says: in a literary translation the only thing we miss is the poem itself and even the best translators can not be aware of the exact philosophy of the poem, because it's just the mind of poet and inaccessible to others. But all all we translate poems and we try to share experiences. This paper is the result of years of reading and introspecting to William Blake's Song of Experience and of Innocence. While translating the collection to Persian the researcher encounters with number of questions, which she tries to present answers for them. So a sort of comparative, contrastive analysis between original English version and its Persian translation appeared. In this paper the writer chose 3 sample poems and their translations order to discuss translation issues she encountered with reading and translating Blake. The results showed key factors translating Blake are: symbolism, original spelling and punctuation, knowing about author's biography.

Revolutionary Justice in Brecht, Conrad, and Blake

Historians have approached the scholarly genre of “law and literature” as a means to mine works of literature for images, descriptions, and representations of law and legal events in historical (or historical-analogical) contexts. The questions asked are framed by history and treat literature as source material. Suppose we instead make literature our frame and history our subject. What can literature as form tell historians about “history” as we currently practice it? How might an inspection of literature as a practice change the practice of legal historians? Here I consider the possibilities through an examination of time and justice, and particularly the time of justice, in three literary works: Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Novel, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and William Blake’s poem “London” from Songs of Experience. My principal interlocutor in this exercise is the Marxist literary theorist and historical materialist Walter Benjamin. The conjunction is informative, for Benjamin was deeply engaged in the exposition of concepts of justice. My purpose is to show that literature as practice lends itself to the strategy of explanation that Benjamin termed “constellation” in ways that are suggestive of how legal historians in turn might employ constellation in approaching questions of time and justice.

Blake: Findings in 'A Little Girl Lost'

THE virgin ‘Ona’, mentioned in line 30 in William Blake's ‘A Little Girl Lost’ in Songs of Experience, issued in 1794, is prevented from dalliance by her ‘father white’, a restrictive holy parent who shakes the ‘blossoms’ of his ‘hoary hair’ (E 29),1 blossoms nipped in the bud by the wintry frost of a Fallen Age (seasons precipitated by the tilt of the Zodiac).2 Thus, confronted with such demanding Morality, Ona's ‘tender limbs with terror shook’ in ‘trembling fear’.3 Accordingly, Blake's Ona as a Little Girl Lost has a tragic afterlife in Blakean perspective. In The Four Zoas (VII.79:20–37, E 355) this unfulfilled maiden becomes one of the chaste moon-daughters of satanic Urizen.4 In such an allegorical equation, Ona is instrumental in forming manna, described as dewy ‘hoar frost’ in Exodus (16:14–15)—the divine Bread rained from heaven, an ingredient that miraculously nourished the Israelites...