William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience is a collection of poems which embodies not only the talents of a writer, but also those of an artist working in illuminated printing, applying words and pictures to copper plates with the surrounding surfaces etched away. There are twenty one copies of Songs of Innocence and twenty seven of the work as a whole, but no separate copies of Songs of Experience. The poems are presentations of a contradiction between innocence and experience, two areas of life through which we all must pass and are, in initial appearance at least, very similar to the genre of late eighteenth-century children's poetry, in terms of theme, title and simplicity. The subject matter of the poems would have been familiar at the time, with titles such as The Lamb and The Divine Image sounding like childrens' hymns.

A point to make about the apparent simplicity of Blake's poems is that they are deliberately so, in order to simplify the moral dilemmas of the time and present them in a form which could be understood. Ironically, the Songs of Experience are somewhat simpler in the way that the speaker of the poem is the voice of experience, warning the innocence about the futility of life. To summarize, Songs of Innocence show life through the eyes of innocent children, whilst Songs of Experience demonstrate an older person's realisation that there is pain and terror in the world.

Looking at the relating themes of the poems:-

Songs of Innocence and Experience are a series of poems on how we see the world at different stages of our lives. They are, as Blake says himself, "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul". Both collections sometimes share the same name for poems, such as The Chimney Sweep, but one glance at these two poems reveals the contrast between the unknowing small boy from Songs of Innocence and the more worldly wise soul in Songs of Experience. The word Songs invokes images of musicality, from the pastoral shepherd's pipe of the Introduction of the Songs of Innocence to the bardic harp of The Voice of the Ancient Bard, concluding Songs of Experience. Each collection shows comparative images of children, babies, religion and the general world in which we live, and how we see things differently when we are first in a state of innocence and when we reach maturity. It seems certain from looking at these poems that the 'two contrary states' are not necessarily exclusive and the pastoral ideals of Innocence often join the religious and social themes of Experience.

What words and themes interlink the poems? Here are some examples to think about:-

Click on the keywords to go straight to that part of the concordance.

• Children - The theme of the child crops up in both Innocence and Experience. Look at the concordance and think about how many times the words child and children occur and in what context. Look also at the words infant and infants. Compare their uses in the contrasting poems in which they occur.

• Church - Religion and the church play a big part in the poems, whether it relates to holy days or divine imagery. Looking at the concordance, see where religion plays a part in the poems and how important it is in relation to other themes. The word divine could be said to be a religious word, but how does its use compare from Innocence to Experience? How does the picture of divinity change when one moves from a state of innocence to one of experience? Why does the image of the lamb appear on numerous occasions in Songs of Innocence but only once in Songs of Experience?

• Song and Songs - The title of these poems is important and the words song and songs occur on a number of occasions.. It is worth thinking about the hymn tradition that Blake would have been thinking about himself when writing the poems. Also think about how moral and religious songs for children are related. See how many times these words occur by using the concordance and compare their occurrences in Innocence and Experience. Relate this to the use of religion in the poems.

• Joy and sorrow - The image of joy appears in both Innocence and Experience. Compare and contrast the uses of it and show how experience seems to suffocate innocent joy. Also look at the occurrences of sorrow in both collections. How can sorrow be seen so differently in these two contexts?

• Love - The contrasts of what we see and how we feel about love are clearly portrayed in both Innocence and Experience. What sort of emotions is Blake trying to raise within us when we read the poems in which this word occurs. Comment on its use as a means of portraying the human race in terms of good AND evil.