To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha, Ha, He’: The Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Abstract

The Songs of Innocence and of Experience are in many ways Blake’s most accessible work, and therein lies a problem. As a result, they are often a reader’s first experience of Blake and, because of the satisfying nature of their paired structure, it can seem that they are an end in themselves: a discrete unit that contains a complete (if not fully articulated) guide to Blake’s concept of Vision. It can become almost habitual to think that the key to Vision somehow lies in the synthesis of Innocence and Experience. Encouraged by the famous phrase in The Marriage, ‘Without Contraries is no progression’ (E34), readers come to believe that Blake wants us to follow him on a spiral route of discovery that ends in a state of experienced innocence, streetwise but hopeful in the face of adversity. The Songs have, of course, been the subject of a wealth of impressive criticism and modern readers owe a great deal to the work of Frye, Erdman, Thompson, Glen, Larrissy and Essick (to name but a very few) for illuminating the incredible breadth of perspectives — social, historical, political, religious and psychological — contained within them. (Indeed, the interdependence of these perspectives should help confirm the accuracy of Blake’s assumptions about the relation of language, society and consciousness in shaping each other.) However, although it may appear a vast oversimplification, it is not, I think, a very unfair one, to say that even the most sophisticated criticism of the Songs has such a spiral, ‘synthesized’ reading at its heart.