Blake's Songs Of Innocence And Songs Of Experience

Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

This term has provided me with many valuable tools that help me understand people who are different from myself. Through many of the authors I learned about new cultures and was presented with new ideas. As a result of this new exposure, I feel that these authors contributed a positive experience in studying Western world literature.

One author that has influenced this positive experience was William Blake. William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience were great literary examples that describe the conflict between innocence and experience. In "The Lamb" of Songs of Innocence, Blake presents someone who receives an answer to his question and believes the answer without reservation. "Little Lamb who made thee...Little Lamb I'll tell thee/He is called by thy name/For he calls himself a Lamb" (870). "The Lamb" describes someone with a child-like faith that does not question many things, but simply believes what is presented to him by faith. In Songs of Experience's contrasting piece, "The Tyger," Blake describes someone who is much more confused than this child-like figure in "The Lamb." This character seems to question everything and anything. "What the hammer? what the chain/In what furnace was thy brain?" This character has had more exposure to life and through his experiences he is unable to accept things for the way that they are are, as a result, he questions their existence and the reasons for their existence.

These two pieces from Blake remind me of the phrase "ignorance is bliss." One idea is that the character in "The Lamb" was able to enjoy life because of his ignorance and, therefore, he was not bothered by their existence. On the other hand, however, the character with life experience in "The Tyger" was irritated with the curiosity of why things are as they are. Because of this character's knowledge, he was unsatisfied with life until he knew the answers to all of his questions, but even more questions were revealed with every answer that he received.

For me, the benefit of reading this work was that it made me consider ignorance versus knowledge. Today, in our society, the more you know the better off you will be, seems to be the view of the majority. Reading some of Blake's work, however, has made me wonder if life is more fulfilling with knowledge or with ignorance. Considering these works has made me see the value in knowledge because it allows us to understand more about our world, yet knowledge also seems to raise more questions than it answers. Ignorance offers the same dilemma between enjoyment through simple faith or stupidity from living by this simple faith. Although knowledge is a useful tool in today's world, I think that you can have too much of a good thing and it can cause you to have a negative view of the world. This exposure to Blake's writing is significant to me because it teaches me how to evaluate the information that is presented