Songs of Innocence and of Experience

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience asks to be read with the eyes as well as the ear. A short poem may sit beneath branches, beside a climbing stem or above a group of grieving bodies. Its lettering belongs to the design. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s copy Y, the combined title rises through bands of orange, red and blue above two reclining figures. Before any poem begins, the page makes the book’s two states something to encounter through colour, bodies and movement. ^[1][2]

The familiar title can suggest a settled collection divided neatly in half. The surviving books offer a more active history. Blake’s Innocence title is dated 1789; Experience is dated 1794. Yet an individual impression might have been printed, coloured or assembled into a book much later. The Met’s copy Y was printed around 1825, bringing designs from decades earlier into a late book. A date on a design and the date of the book in someone’s hands may therefore describe different events. ^[2][3][4]

That material history belongs to the reading. Some poems changed their position between the two groups; hand colouring changes the balance of a page; printed words sometimes received further work in pen. There is a continuing exchange between what a poem says and how a particular book presents it. Following a few identified copies brings that exchange into view without losing the songs’ direct appeals to pleasure, fear, compassion and freedom. ^[1][5][6]

One title, several kinds of date

The first distinction is between the two collections and the combined book. On the Innocence title page, Blake identifies himself as author and printer and gives the date 1789. The title remains visible in the Met’s much later impression, surrounded by vigorous foliage and a scene of reading. An original date is thus carried into a new physical object. It tells us about the work’s beginning, while the museum’s dating of the impression tells us about this particular return to the plate. Both dates matter. ^[3]

Blake was already advertising Songs of Experience before its dated title appeared. His prospectus of 10 October 1793 lists Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience separately, each described as an octavo illuminated book with twenty-five designs, priced at five shillings. The printed offer is valuable evidence of how he presented the books to prospective buyers at that moment. It should not be mistaken for a definitive inventory of every later copy, or for proof that every advertised arrangement survives. The list catches a developing undertaking in the act of being offered for sale. ^[8]

The prospectus also places the songs among other works available from Blake’s address in Hercules Buildings, Lambeth. He advertises coloured printing on fine wove paper and declares that he will produce his works and offer them at a fair price. Poetry, material quality and commercial presentation appear together. The reader invited into this enterprise was being offered an object whose making was part of its claim to attention. Blake’s assertion that his method greatly reduced expense is his own promotional claim; the prospectus does not establish a full account of his costs or earnings. ^[8]

A surviving copy needs a more particular description. Copy Y at the Met consists of fifty-four plates, catalogued as designs of 1789–94 printed around 1825, in orange-brown ink with watercolour, ink and shell gold. Its small sheets are approximately 15.7 by 14.1 centimetres. The museum associates the commission with the artist Edward Calvert, who met Blake around 1825. These are facts about a late book, rather than a colour scheme that can be projected backwards onto every Songs issued since 1789. ^[2][4]

Even a carefully stated date leaves several operations to consider. Writing a poem, devising a page, etching copper, printing an impression, colouring it and arranging leaves are related acts, but they need not be simultaneous. The Met’s late impression of the Innocence title page makes their separation clear. The question to ask of any reproduction is therefore quite concrete: which copy is this, and what does its date identify? That question makes comparison more rewarding, because differences can be recognised as features of particular books. ^[2][3]

How words became part of a printed image

Blake’s technique helps explain why the poems look as they do. As Joseph Viscomi describes it, Blake wrote and drew on copper with an acid-resistant liquid, working the lettering in reverse. Acid removed unprotected metal, leaving the words and design raised for inking and printing. Pen and brush could therefore make marks that belonged to the same printable surface. The words were not set in movable type and then placed beside an independently engraved illustration. ^[7]

This process allowed handwriting, ornament and figures to share a page. A title could become a canopy, a stem could turn around a stanza, and a curl of lettering could answer the movement of a branch. In the Met’s Innocence title page, the large word Songs and the curving growth above it are so closely interwoven that reading the name and following the vegetation become related actions. The design does not offer a neutral space into which the text has been inserted. It gives the title a particular way of occupying the paper. ^[3]

Viscomi also cautions against an appealing origin story: that Blake first completed a set of illustrated songs and then invented the process simply to reproduce them. His account places the invention within experiments in preserving the direct marks of pen and brush in metal. The resulting method helped generate the form of illuminated poetry itself. This makes the book’s appearance an outcome of invention through making, rather than the mechanical delivery of an already finished illustrated manuscript. ^[7]

An impression could then receive further attention. In copy Y, washes of colour establish zones within the printed design, while fine green tendrils extend around the outer margins of several pages. The reader sees both a compact, bounded image and lines that reach beyond it. The distinction is especially clear on The Tyger: a strongly coloured inner rectangle contains the poem and animal, while lighter loops surround its edges. The page has a surface to inspect beyond the words needed to transcribe the poem. ^[9]

This is one reason a transcription and an image offer different kinds of access. A transcription makes the sequence of words easy to follow and compare; a whole-page image preserves the relative scale of title, verse, figure and empty paper. On A Little Boy Lost, the poem occupies most of the inner field, but the bodies and flames along its lower edge change what the eye meets after the last line. Reading the words alone and then returning to the page can make that encounter more forceful. Neither act exhausts the other. ^[1][10]

The book opens more than once

Copy Y begins with a combined title, an Innocence frontispiece and an Innocence title page. The separate designs slow the entrance into the poems. They offer different ways of imagining what a song is: an encounter between figures, a spoken or musical act, a written text, a reading shared between generations. The small red numbers above the designs establish their place within this particular copy. Its sequence has a visible physical record as well as a succession of subjects. ^{[2][11][3][4]}

On the combined title, large letters occupy most of the upper space. The smaller subtitle, “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”, stretches across a lower band. Beneath it, two bodies lie among flowing forms and tongues of colour. The bright bands do not separate into two tidy compartments labelled innocence and experience. They move through the page, carrying the title towards a bodily scene. The subtitle asks for a comparison of states, while the design resists turning that comparison into an abstract diagram. ^[2]

The Innocence frontispiece changes the pace. A piper stands beneath a child who floats above him on a cloud. Sheep occupy the lower setting; enclosing trees make the meeting feel like an opening within a wood. The standing figure looks upward, and the child extends its arms. Their relation directs the eye from the ground towards the air. In copy Y, the blue of the piper’s clothing and the pink of the cloud make the two figures distinct while keeping them inside a richly worked green enclosure. ^[11]

This image prepares for the Introduction, whose piper first entertains a child on a cloud. The child asks for piping, then song, then a book that others may read. The encounter moves from a performance heard by one listener towards words available in the listener’s absence. It is the child who requests the change of medium. The adult maker responds, takes a reed for a pen and writes songs intended for children to hear. The book imagines its origin as an exchange, with instruction travelling from the child towards the poet. ^[1][11]

The Innocence title page offers another relation between adults, children and words. Below its great curling letters, a seated woman holds an open book towards two children. A tree rises beside the little group and spreads across the title. Reading takes place within the vegetation rather than outside it. There is a useful difference from the frontispiece: the cloud child directs a solitary piper, while the title page presents an adult and children gathered around a book already made. The opening designs move between inspiration and the shared activity of reading. ^[3]

The title page also makes the maker’s name part of the composition. The line identifying Blake as author and printer sits beneath the reading group, within the lower boundary of the design. It connects the small scene of instruction to the physical work that enables it. The statement need not be read as a declaration that every task was performed without assistance; it visibly joins the roles of writing and printing in Blake’s presentation of the book. The page itself supplies that claim before the poems begin. ^[3]

At the entrance to Experience, the frontispiece returns to a standing figure and a child, but changes their relation. In copy Y, the winged child sits on the adult’s head, its hands held above the figure’s shoulders. The adult faces forward and looks out towards the viewer. A tree rises at the right, and the landscape opens behind. Compared with the piper’s upward gaze, this is a more frontal encounter. The figures remain connected, but the child is no longer suspended at a distance on a cloud. ^[4]

That change gives a reader something specific to compare without supplying a single compulsory explanation. The adult may appear to support the child; the child may seem to guide or crown the adult. The hands join them, while the adult’s direct gaze brings the viewer into their arrangement. The design can be read alongside the new collection’s more commanding Introduction, yet its bodily relation remains open enough to complicate a simple story of inspiration first possessed and then lost. The two frontispieces reward looking back as well as moving forward. ^[1][11][4]

Two introductions and an answer

The two Introductions establish different kinds of address. The piper begins by responding to an encounter. He changes his activity when the child asks him to, and the resulting songs are offered for others to hear. The Experience introduction begins with an imperative to hear the Bard. This speaker claims a view of past, present and future, and calls upon Earth to return from her fall. The relation between speaker and listener has become more overtly authoritative. ^[1]

Yet the book does not leave that summons unanswered. Earth’s Answer follows with a voice speaking from confinement, darkness and despair. Earth attributes her imprisonment to a jealous and fearful power and asks whether spring can hide its joy, whether sowing happens in darkness, and whether a ploughman works only by night. Images of seasonal growth test the conditions under which she is being addressed. Her answer changes the scene from a call to rise into an account of what holds her down. ^[1]

The dialogue matters because a reader might otherwise receive the Bard’s address as the book’s final diagnosis. Earth’s response requires another hearing. The language of return sounds different when answered by a speaker who understands herself to be chained. Her appeal is for the breaking of a bond, and her questions invoke activities that need light, openness and freedom to grow. The answering poem does not merely repeat the introduction’s account from another angle. It makes the summons answerable to the experience of the one being summoned. ^[1]

The sequence also shows why Blake’s speakers deserve individual attention. A voice may sound prophetic without every part of its speech becoming an instruction from Blake to the reader. The book makes room for a response that alters the first voice’s claim. Its thinking happens between poems as well as inside them. Following the opening pair in order lets the reader experience that alteration, rather than collecting their most memorable lines as independent declarations. ^[1]

This gives the subtitle’s contraries a practical form. Two perspectives do not have to be arranged as a correct answer followed by a mistaken one. A comparison may disclose what a position can see, what it assumes and what its language leaves unheard. The brief poems make that work possible through changes of voice and situation. Their simplicity of diction can carry a demanding structure of listening, especially when the next page gives a voice to the person or world previously spoken about. ^[1]

Care and danger within Innocence

Night is a useful test of any assumption that Innocence means a world without harm. The poem begins with evening, birds at rest and the appearance of a radiant star. Angels visit the places where creatures sleep and attend to distress. But the guardians do not simply prevent every injury: when predators attack, they receive the spirits of the victims. The poem’s consolation exists alongside an acknowledgement that suffering has occurred. Its gentleness depends on sustained attention to vulnerability. ^[1]

The lion’s speech carries the poem towards another possibility. Pity draws tears from its eyes, and it imagines lying beside the lamb and guarding the fold. Predation gives way to companionship within the vision voiced by a former predator. The transformation matters because the poem has already allowed violence into its night landscape. A peaceful ending does not make the preceding danger unreal. It imagines a change in the creature capable of doing harm, rather than simply removing that creature from the scene. ^[1]

The poem therefore asks more of a reader than belief in an automatically safe pastoral world. It makes care active: watching, visiting, weeping, receiving and finally guarding. Its movement depends on the possibility that one being may attend to another’s suffering and become different through that attention. The lion’s promise is a response within the poem, with all the force and particularity of a speaker’s vow. It should be heard in that setting rather than reduced to a universal description of how the book’s world already works. ^[1]

On Another’s Sorrow gives a related pressure to compassion. Its repeated questions ask whether one can witness another’s grief without sharing it. Human responses lead towards the image of a divine presence that sits beside suffering, grieves and seeks to remove it. The poem’s argument proceeds through intimacy and participation. Its religious vision takes shape in acts of accompanying another being, rather than in the detached explanation of why pain was necessary. ^[1]

Read together, these poems make innocence capable of recognising need. Their reassuring forms need not be dismissed as merely naïve, but neither should reassurance be allowed to conceal the injuries they mention. The difference between attending to suffering and explaining it away is central to their effect. The songs’ small scale helps make that difference audible: a tear, a bedside visit or the sound of crying carries the weight of a much larger claim about how beings ought to live with one another. ^[1]

A child’s speech and the page of A Little Boy Lost

A Little Boy Lost presents a much harsher encounter between a child’s voice and adult authority. Its opening gives the child a difficult thought about the limits of loving and knowing another person. He then asks his father how he can love him or his brothers more, comparing his love to that of a small bird taking crumbs near a door. The movement is tentative and intimate. An abstract question becomes a domestic image of dependence and nearness. ^[1]

A listening priest turns the speech into an offence. He seizes the child and displays him before the community, treating questioning as an attempt to judge religious mystery. The narrative then moves through the failure to hear the weeping child, the parents’ ineffective grief, binding and execution. The contrast is between a small voice trying to understand a relation and an institution that claims the power to decide what that voice means. The child’s words are preserved for the reader even as the story shows their suppression. ^[1]

The closing question asks whether such things happen on Albion’s shore. That question prevents the punishment from remaining safely enclosed in a distant tale. The poem turns towards the reader’s world and asks for recognition. It does not identify a particular recorded trial or supply a historical case file. Its force comes from the sequence it has made us follow: inquiry heard as threat, power exercised as piety, and public violence carried out despite the suffering plainly before it. ^[1]

The Met’s copy Y places that account inside a page whose beauty requires attention of its own. Orange-brown lettering fills most of a pale field. A tall, curling plant runs down the right, its leaves opening around the verse; blue, green and pink washes give it a vigorous life. The title extends across the top with large, varied capitals. The poem’s words occupy a made and tended space, even while they describe the destruction of a child. ^[10]

At the lower left, red and yellow flames rise beside clustered, bent bodies. Blue and purple clothing forms a dark mass across the bottom; pale heads and bowed backs give the group a weight very different from the rising plant. The eye that has followed the final question meets this compact scene of grief. The design neither illustrates every event nor labels every figure. Its forms make sorrow and danger physically present without turning the poem into a sequence of explanatory pictures. ^[10]

There is a tension between upward growth and downward bending. The stem carries colour along the right edge towards the title, while the figures press towards the ground. The reader can follow both movements without deciding that one cancels the other. In this page, ornament does not guarantee comfort. It surrounds words and bodies that make a severe demand on the viewer’s attention. The survival of brightness beside suffering is part of the design’s difficulty. ^[10]

The image also changes the poem’s final silence. No adult speaker arrives to explain the punishment away or announce a rescue. The grieving forms remain beneath the closing question. A reading that stops at the verbal argument misses the way the page holds the aftermath in view. A reading that treats the page only as a decorative object misses the accusation carried by the words. The two forms of attention need to remain in contact. ^[1][10]

The Tyger as a designed page

The Tyger offers another revealing encounter between words and their setting. In copy Y, the poem rises above an animal standing at the bottom of the design. A large tree climbs the right side, with trunk and branches framing the verse; slender growth appears on the left. The animal is small in relation to the full page. Its striped body stands in profile, its face turned towards the viewer. The visual encounter is more compact and grounded than the immense acts of making imagined in the poem’s questions. ^[1][9]

That difference need not be solved by calling the picture a failure to illustrate the words. The poem repeatedly asks about a maker, the creature’s fearful form and the labour capable of bringing it into being. The image offers a visible animal whose body the reader can inspect, while leaving those questions intact. A printed creature cannot show every imagined furnace, weapon or act of daring named in the verse. Its presence gives those imaginings a particular scale and setting rather than a final explanation. ^[1][9]

Colour makes the whole page important. The warm lettering and striped animal share a range of orange and brown, while blue washes and the pale trunk give the right border a cooler character. The small areas of green ground tie the standing creature to the base of the page. Beyond the inner rectangle, fine loops turn along the margins. The eye moves from a readable poem to an animal, a tree and the worked edges of the paper. The title’s great creature is encountered within this carefully delimited space. ^[9]

Looking at an identified impression also guards against treating a familiar reproduction as the poem’s permanent appearance. Copy Y’s colouring belongs to its late making. The title, tree and tiger are parts of a repeatable design, yet this arrangement of washes, strengthened outlines and outer ornament is what this copy presents. A discussion of Blake’s animal gains precision when it identifies the visible page before judging the relation between the creature in the poem and the one below it. ^[2][9]

When poems change sides

The distinction between Innocence and Experience is further complicated by poems that appeared in different groupings. The National Gallery of Victoria holds Songs of Innocence copy X, a small group of fourteen impressions on seven sheets, coloured before 1794. Its records include The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found, The Voice of the Ancient Bard and The School Boy. These titles can be encountered under Experience in the combined collection. An early book thus preserves a different setting for words that a later arrangement encourages us to read through another state. ^[1][5][12]

The School Boy shows why the change matters. The speaker loves the sounds and movement of a summer morning, but schooling turns that pleasure into anxiety and confinement. A caged bird and an injured plant become ways to ask what happens when growth is checked. The poem closes by connecting damage in spring with the failure of later fruit. Its argument follows a living sequence: early joy makes future flourishing possible, and oppression can interrupt the process. ^[1]

Within an Innocence gathering, the poem can sound like a defence of the conditions that permit delight to continue. Under Experience, its cages, restraints and warnings can take a more immediately accusatory place among other accounts of injury. Neither position changes its words into their opposite. Placement changes what a reader has recently heard and what other voices seem to answer it. The early NGV leaf makes this a material question about books, rather than only an abstract debate about what innocence ought to mean. ^[1][12]

The two Lyca poems bring a still more unsettling movement through danger. In The Little Girl Lost, the seven-year-old child sleeps among wild animals; a lion approaches her with tears and tenderness. In The Little Girl Found, her searching parents initially fear the creature, but the encounter changes when the lion appears as a golden spirit and leads them towards their daughter. The family’s eventual life with the beasts transforms the meaning of the wilderness through the course of the narrative. ^[1]

The tenderness is inseparable from strangeness. The child’s exposure, the animals’ actions and the parents’ fear make this an uneasy rescue to describe as a straightforward return to ordinary safety. The story instead changes the relation between human beings and the creatures they dread. Read beside Night, it gives another version of a lion whose behaviour exceeds the expectations attached to predation. The shared animal does different work in the two sequences, but both ask the reader to imagine altered relations between vulnerable and powerful beings. ^[1]

The fact that the Lyca sequence belongs to the early NGV Innocence group and to Experience in the combined text discourages an overly rigid classification. It does not establish that the two states mean the same thing. It shows that the poems’ relations can be reconsidered through arrangement. Readers can ask how the sequence changes its neighbours, as well as how its neighbours change it. The book’s organisation becomes one of the means by which it thinks. ^[1][5]

A book assembled across years

The Huntington’s copy E brings printing and later finishing into especially close contact. In the Blake Archive editors’ account, the volume was assembled for Thomas Butts in 1806 from impressions printed at several earlier dates. Extensive recolouring accompanied the retracing of weakly printed words. Making a readable page could require renewed pen work years after the impression came off the press. ^[6]

One striking example is the Experience poem Nurses Song. The Archive’s account identifies a double impression, with one printing displaced below and to the left of the other. The editors trace the doubled forms in details of vines and leaves. This is a particular printing event, not a change in the poem’s verbal argument. It gives the decorated margin another kind of evidence to carry: its marks help reconstruct how a page was made. ^[6]

The account also distinguishes Blake’s assembly from a posthumous leaf inserted by a later owner. A surviving volume can therefore record actions by more than one maker. Reading its contents involves understanding how the physical book arrived at its present form. ^[6]

A title page printed after Blake

A further distinction appears in Tate’s impressions of the Songs of Innocence title page, A00038 and A00039. Martin Butlin’s catalogue associates these grey impressions with a group thought to have been printed after Blake’s death, probably by Frederick Tatham. The evidence includes an 1831 watermark on another sheet in the group and similarities of paper and ink. The cautious attribution belongs to the impressions, not to the invention of the title-page design, which remains dated 1789. ^[13][14]

This creates a useful comparison with the Met’s coloured copy Y title page. The same underlying design can belong to objects with different printing histories and finishes. A reproduction labelled only with Blake’s name and 1789 may conceal that distinction. Identifying the Tate object number or the Met’s copy letter makes it possible to ask a more precise question about what is being shown: the design, a lifetime impression, a later printing, or a particular coloured page. ^[3][13][14]

Reading across the whole book

A rewarding route through Songs begins with the openings, then follows the poems in one identified sequence before turning to comparisons. The frontispieces establish relations between adult and child; the introductions establish voices; the answering poems test how those voices are heard. A page such as A Little Boy Lost then makes the treatment of a child’s speech inseparable from the way grief occupies the lower design. The book’s concerns recur through changing forms of encounter. ^{[1][11][4][10]}

Comparison is most useful when it returns to something visible or audible. The lion of Night and the lion in the Lyca sequence offer related transformations without becoming interchangeable symbols. The moved position of The School Boy changes the field around a poem whose words remain recognisable. The Met’s late colouring shows that the collection also has a life beyond the first making of its plates. Each return gives another reason to attend closely to the particular page. ^{[1][2][5][12]}

The songs remain approachable because their scenes are so concrete: a child asking, a piper listening, a bird confined, a body grieving, a creature standing below a tree. Their difficulty emerges through the relations between those scenes. Reading the book whole allows an apparent reassurance to meet a later challenge, or a threatening figure to become a guardian. Looking at its pages keeps that process tied to the small, intensely made objects through which Blake brought words and images together. ^{[1][2][11][9][10]}