Shine the Light on Winter Blues

DOES BLAKE’S ILLUSTRATED DESIGNS VISUALISE HIS POEMS IN THE SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE?

Leila Rouhi Shalmaei

Master of Art in English Literature

Sussex University of England

DOES BLAKE’S ILLUSTRATED DESIGNS VISUALISE HIS POEMS IN THE SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE?

Introduction:

William Blake was born in London in 1757. His Father soon recognized his son’s artistic talents and sent him to study at a drawing school when he was ten years old. At fourteen, William asked to be apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, under whose direction he further developed his innate skills. As a young man Blake worked as an engraver, illustrator and drawing teacher, and met such artists as Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose classicizing style he would later come to reject. Blake wrote poems during this time as well, and his first printed collection, an immature and rather derivative volume called Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783. Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, followed by Songs of Experience in 1793 and a combined edition the next year bearing the title of Songs of Innocence and Experience which shows the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

In 1809, Blake sank into depression and withdrew into obscurity; he remained alienated for the rest of his life. His contemporaries saw him as something of an eccentric- as indeed he was. Suspended between the neoclassicism of the 18th century and the early phases of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single poetic school or age. Only in the 20th century did wide audiences begin to acknowledge his profound originality and genius.

(1985, 492)

Blake’s political radicalism intensified during the years leading up to the French Revolution. He began a seven-book poem about the revolution, but it was either destroyed or never completed, and only the first book survives. He disapproved of Enlightened rationalism of institutionalized religion. In the 1790′s and after, he shifted his poetic voice from the lyric to the prophetic mode, and he wrote a series of long prophetic books, including Milton and Jerusalem.

Blake published almost all of his works himself, by an original process in which the poems were etched by hand, along with illustrations and decorative images, onto copper plates. These plates were inked to make prints, and the prints were then colored in with paint. This expensive and labor-intensive production method resulted in a quite limited circulation of Blake’s poetry during his life. It also posed a special set of challenges to scholars of Blake’s work, which has interested both literary critics and art historians. Studies on his work shows that we should consider his graphic art and his writing together; certainly he himself thought of them as inseparable.

(1985, 493)

William Blake was one of the most influential English romantic artists of the 19th-century. His poems, paintings, and engravings, revealed a remarkable talent. He was an artist who mixed his poetry with painting which was really interesting.

In his age he was influenced by various social, ideological, and political movement along with Romantic Movement which made him practice his own method and to develop a new style.

Why does he decorate his pages with lines and stain them with color? He engraved illustrations for printed books and he was familiar with emblems, devices, borders, and other decorations that beautify and interpret the printed page.

One critic admiring Blake’s poems writes:

The Short poems of Blake are like pebbles thrown into a pool, creating ripples which move outwards indefinitely, affecting everything they touch. At their gentlest they are like tendrils caressing the world, at their most violent like bombs smashing to smithereens the false structures of existing belief and opinions[1].1

In his critic of Innocence and Experience, C.M. Bowra claims that the address to Earth is an authentic appeal reflecting Blake’s desire of creating an aultimate synthesis in which innocence might be wedded to experience and goodness to knowledgea 2 2

The poems of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Song of Experience are portrayals of the continual conflict between innocence and experience. Each poem tells different links of interweaved stories.

Also, the “break of day “stands as a symbol of the new life in which innocence and experience will be transformed, and man’s soul will attain a fuller, more active life in the creative imagination. 3 3

Regarding the connections between Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience and some similarities Bowra adds that:

…The Bard in the “Introduction to Songs of Experience” appears again in “The Sick Rose[1]” and is again calling to an individual; perhaps this individual is the same character as the narrator at the end of “The Ecchoing Green “. By weaving through these stories and characters, Blake portrays views of innocence and experience as they appear in several characters. While these characters may not be the actual characters in previous poems, there is enough evidence to support the theory that the characters that are introduced are meant to represent the characters that have similar experiences to those that have been introduced earlier. Blake defines a few different “type” of characters, whose types are defined by the amount, of experience, wisdom and maturity. ”

Blake’s most well known work is that contained within his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience collections of poems. The former of these collections, printed 1789, depicts a naive world of nature with Christ-like overtones. It does, however, acknowledge an opposite or contrary world. The Songs of Experience, a later collection printed 1794, depicts a cold, sad despairing place.

In this essay, I attempt to compare Blake’s illustrated designs and poems in his Songs of Innocence and Experience and to examine to what extent his paintings visualize his poems.

As my first step, I would elaborate on some of the poems of Songs of Innocence and their corresponding images. This section will be followed by a similar study on his Song of Experience. Finally, I will round up the presented arguments voiced by a number of his famous critics and then provide a conclusion.

Songs of Innocence

Blake published his Songs of Innocence in 1789. The poems of Innocence are full of life and simplicity. The texts centers on the lively period of childhood and is full of energy. Both the design and the text are simple and contain subjects which are related to nature and children. Every item in the text and especially in the design may have emblems and should be considered meaningful.

In Picture Theory, Mitchell argues in a different way about the quality of the Songs of Innocence that the hollow reed and the stained water indicate that a kind of absence and lack of innocence accompanies the very attempt to express the message of innocence. What makes the poems songs of innocence is the narrator’s unawareness of these evil connotations.(1994,122)

Blake himself suggested some two years before that a man might be insulted with “the innocence of a child…, because it reproaches him with the errors of acquired folly.”

Jean H. Hagstrum says in this regard that Songs of Innocence deals with three integrally related elements – humble life, natural sexuality, and the Poet-Christ.
Humble life is the particular province of the border which is richer and more beautiful in it than on any other of Blake’s pages. In Blake’s borders, with trees, vines, creepers, leaves, birds, and insects, life was abundant- and allusive even the letters of the title page vegetate into organic forms

As the second major theme of Songs of Innocence, natural sexuality appears alike in word, border, and design. Some of the recurrent sexual symbols are lamb, ewe, leaves, stems, grapes, and the embrace of man and woman. For instance the boy on the second page of “The Ecchoing Green.” who gives a bunch of grapes from a vine to a girl is a symbol of sexual awareness.

The Poet-Christ of Innocence is represented predominantly in poetic and prophetic characters of divine, love, and human imagination. All those who salvage the lost are manifestations of Christ, or the divine shepherd who seeks and finds the straying sheep.

In this part I would like to explain about some of the famous poems of The Songs of Innocence such as: “The Ecchoing Green,” “The Lamb,” “The Little Black Boy” and “Infant Joy.”

I will also mention other critics’ points of view, regarding these poems.

The Ecchoing Green

Blake uses a curved line that stretches from side to side and top to side to connect different parts of form and vision. Like the designs, the poems are full of life and action; the sun, the singing birds, children playing, merry-bells, and laughter. However, the visual images lack some details that are included in the texts such as the sun and the birds. Also, the poem ends with a symbolic reference to mortality which gives the final lines a sad mood:

“Like birds in their nest,

Are ready for rest: And sport

No more seen,

On the darkening Green.”

As already stated, the second element of Innocence is uninhibited sexuality, which quite visibly is seen in “The Ecchoing Green,” in the first design of which we find a boy with a hoop and a boy with a bat which describe a summer day.

According to Hagstrum, the second page of the poem illustrates all the emblematic qualities that Blake manipulated such as: the direct appeal to children and to listening adults, the presence of proverbial wisdom as a substratum, and the conversion of people and natural details into a universal symbol. The poem is about a day of childish sport which symbolizes the beginning and end of life and is supported by its designs. On the second page, children from the right-hand side border hand grapes to members of a group who now returns home from play. It symbolizes the passage from innocence to experience through the gate of sex. (1964,56)