Songs of Innocence (Title Page)

An open book rests across a woman’s lap while two children lean towards its pages. Above this small gathering, William Blake’s title grows into an extraordinary canopy. Letters sprout long strokes, birds cross the intervening air, and minute figures occupy the great word Songs. The readers at the foot have a book within their reach; we have a whole page whose writing keeps turning into a picture. Blake makes the invitation to read visible before a single poem has begun. ^[1]

The design carries the date 1789 and the maker’s declaration, “The Author & Printer W Blake”. Yet the richly coloured impression in the Metropolitan Museum of Art belongs to copy Y of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, printed around 1825. Tate holds grey impressions printed after Blake’s lifetime. Following this title page means attending both to the composition he devised and to the particular objects through which it survives. ^[1][2]

A book inside the title

Begin with the lower left corner. The woman sits in a high-backed chair, her long skirt falling towards the ground. The children gather closely at her knees, their heads inclined towards the open book. Its pale leaves make a small, light area within a dense knot of bodies, arms and clothing. Their concentration contrasts with the movement overhead: down here, the design settles around a thing being shared. ^[1]

The group can escape attention in a small reproduction, yet it establishes the page’s scale. The letters overhead are immense beside these people. The book in the woman’s lap is smaller still. We look into an image of readers looking into another book, moving between the large title before us and the small book that holds their attention. The picture offers an activity to recognise without telling us what those inner pages say. ^[1]

Calling the woman a mother can make the gathering feel familiar, but the picture supplies no name or family relationship. She can be described more securely as an adult sharing a book with two children. Nor is the open volume identified as a Bible or any other particular text. These questions remain useful because they keep us looking at the relation Blake actually presents: three people close enough to follow the same pages, in an outdoor setting beneath a tree. ^[1]

On the right, the tree provides the group with an answering vertical. Its thick trunk rises from near the lower border, while a thinner growth winds around it. Branches stretch left above the readers and continue through the title’s middle. The human gathering occupies one side of the design and the tree the other, but their spaces are joined by the canopy. A quiet horizontal landscape behind them keeps the foreground figures and trunk clearly legible. ^[1]

Letters with inhabitants

Read the title slowly and its different kinds of lettering become apparent. Songs occupies the upper part in broad capitals with hollow interiors. The small of sits among branches and fruit. Innocence extends across the page in a flowing, slanted hand. This is a title with several speeds: the eye pauses inside the capitals, picks out the little connecting word, then follows the longer sweep below. ^[1]

The growths above Songs are especially difficult to divide neatly into letter and plant. The outer strokes flare upwards and bend across the top. Curves that help us recognise an S also carry the eye into something like a leaf or branch. Blake gives the word a recognisable outline while allowing its strokes to exceed the work of spelling. The reader has to follow the mark through both functions. ^[1]

Look within and around the capitals and another change of scale appears. Tiny human figures stand, recline or reach among the letters. One occupies the interior of the O; others appear around the central N and the later letters. The strokes become supports and perches for these bodies, making the title seem habitable. ^[1]

A little piper leans against the large opening stroke of Innocence, to the left of the word. This figure is easy to lose among the surrounding curls. Once found, it links the title’s promise of songs with an act of playing. Birds introduce another kind of movement, passing between letters and foliage. They draw attention upwards, away from the book on the lap. ^[1]

In the Met impression, colour sharpens these distinctions. The woman’s blue dress and the pink clothing of the child at the right anchor the reading group. Blue, rose and pale yellow areas pass behind the letters and branches. Orange-brown contours keep the title visible against them. Beyond the inner rectangle, fine green loops extend into the surrounding paper. The design has a strong boundary, yet its outer ornament keeps that boundary from feeling wholly closed. ^[1]

The monochrome reproduction offers a different emphasis. With fewer colour distinctions to guide the eye, the close relation between written strokes, twigs, bodies and birds becomes particularly insistent. Its darker lower passage makes the open book a conspicuous patch of light. These are effects visible in the reproduction; they do not identify the surviving sheet from which it was made or establish who printed it.

From listening to reading

This title page belongs beside another opening image. Tate’s catalogue explains that it normally follows the frontispiece: second in separate copies of Songs of Innocence, and third in the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The frontispiece and the title with its seated readers are distinct designs. The title is also separate from the combined book’s general title and from the title of Songs of Experience. ^[2]

The opening poem supplies an especially helpful connection. In the Introduction to Innocence, a child on a cloud asks a piper first to play, then to sing, and finally to write. The instruction to make a book comes from the child. The piper responds by taking a hollow reed and making a pen. The poem moves through successive forms of expression, allowing something heard in one encounter to reach people who were absent from it. ^[5]

The title page’s reading group gives that movement a further setting. Here the book exists and has gathered an audience. Yet the comparison also reveals a difference. In the poem, the child directs the adult maker; in the picture, an adult and children gather around a book. The two arrangements allow instruction to travel in more than one direction. Neither requires us to imagine that an adult possesses everything worth knowing before a child begins to listen. ^[1][5]

Blake’s last line returns to hearing: the written songs are intended to bring joy to children who hear them. Writing does not end the life of the voice. The woman might be reading aloud, or the children might be reading to her; the still image cannot settle that. What it does show is reading as a shared encounter. The volume on her lap is angled into the little group, and all three bodies converge upon it. ^[1][5]

The title’s inhabitants offer a playful version of what entering a book might mean. Reading this page involves finding things, shifting attention and connecting marks that initially seem separate. The discoveries begin within the name of the book itself. ^[1]

Pleasure and authority

There is room for unease within the scene’s apparent tranquillity. Dennis M. Welch reads the woman as a governess and treats the title page as a scene of literacy instruction. For him, the fruit tree and winding vine recall the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis; the branches surrounding Innocence make the state appear vulnerable. He sets this tension beside the piper and birds, which preserve the possibility of imaginative pleasure. This is an interpretation of the design’s relationships, rather than an identification of its unnamed figures beyond dispute. ^[13]

The visible arrangement gives that reading something concrete to work with. The children face into the book and away from the trunk. The woman faces towards them and the tree beyond. Above their heads, branches enclose the word they have not been shown reading. The same forms can suggest shelter or a limit to the space available. Blake makes those possibilities difficult to separate because protection and enclosure occupy the same lines. ^[1]

Michael Phillips offers a different emphasis in his British Library discussion of the title page. He regards the children as holding the book and reading to the adult. His interpretation gives their activity priority: they can bring understanding to an older listener. These contrasting readings make the direction of instruction a live question. Looking at the children’s extended arms and the book’s position, we can recognise shared involvement without deciding that authority must belong wholly to the seated figure. ^[14]

Phillips also identifies the small figure against the N as an angel writing in a book. This brings another act of bookmaking into the design: reading below, writing above, and music beside the opening stroke of Innocence. The title gathers several ways of making and receiving a song around its name. ^[14]

A brief comparison with Nurse’s Song in Innocence helps preserve this uncertainty. Its adult speaker calls the children home as evening approaches. They ask to continue playing, pointing to the birds and sheep still outdoors. She agrees to let them stay until the light fades. The poem gives care a boundary, but also gives children a voice in determining it. Their request changes what the adult permits. ^[5]

That exchange does not decode the woman with the book as the nurse. It offers a nearby example of the collection’s interest in listening between generations. Returning to the title after reading it, we might attend less to the transmission of a finished lesson and more to the conditions of the encounter. The children lean in, their arms reaching across the open volume. Their shared attention leaves room to ask what reading might release as well as what it might teach. ^[1][5]

The author and printer

At the foot, the maker’s line occupies a narrow band below the reading scene. Its lettering is much more compact than the title overhead. Blake names two roles together: he writes the work and prints it. That declaration is especially apt on a page where letters, figures and vegetation belong to one designed surface. The connection between making words and making an image can be seen before the statement is read. ^[1]

Eaves, Essick and Viscomi explain the practical basis of this integration. Blake worked his letters and images in an acid-resistant substance on copper; etching removed the exposed metal and left the protected marks raised for printing. The lettering had to be written in reverse. The process preserved the direct character of drawn and written marks while allowing repeated impressions to be taken from a plate. ^[15]

The title page makes those possibilities unusually easy to appreciate. The large capitals and the small maker’s line do not look like a uniform set of interchangeable pieces. Each has been shaped for its position. A thin stroke can enter a branch, a letter can offer a perch, and the title’s rhythm can answer the movements of bodies. For a fuller account of the process, Blake’s illuminated books place this page among his wider experiments in the designed book. ^[1][15]

The byline should not be expanded into a claim that Blake worked without assistance. The same scholars describe Catherine Blake’s participation in printing and colouring. A particular impression needs further evidence before individual marks can be assigned to either person. Here, the wording tells us how Blake presented the work’s authorship and manufacture; it does not supply a complete division of labour in the workshop. ^[15]

A design that outlived its first publication

The date beside the tree belongs to the title’s original identity as Songs of Innocence. Blake’s prospectus of 10 October 1793 still offers Innocence and Experience as separate books, each advertised with twenty-five designs. That sales description records an offer at a particular moment. It is not a fixed contents list for every surviving copy. Tate notes that the separate Experience title carries 1794, while the joint title is undated. The earlier book’s opening continued to operate within a developing collection. ^[16][2]

The Met’s title page shows one later return to the design. Its accession is 17.10.3, copy Y, plate 3: a relief etching in orange-brown ink, finished with watercolour and shell gold, printed around 1825. The earlier 1789 remains visible within it. Its small red 3 and ornamental green surround belong to the appearance of this particular late page. Those details help a reader recognise the impression being discussed instead of imagining that every copy has its colours and borders. ^[1]

Tate’s A00038 and A00039 require another distinction. Their current records date the design to 1789 and the reprinting to 1831 or later. Butlin’s catalogue links these grey impressions to a group containing Spring, A00037, on paper watermarked 1831. Similar paper and pale grey ink support the proposed posthumous printing, probably by Frederick Tatham. The watermark is on the related sheet, not identified as a date inscribed on either title-page impression. ^[2]

The catalogue leaves the precise printing circumstances open. Catherine Blake brought plates when she went to stay with Tatham in September 1828, but these impressions need not have been made before her death on 18 October 1831. An attribution of probable printing to Tatham should retain that qualification. Matching the title-page composition alone would not identify an unlabelled monochrome reproduction as either Tate sheet. The same design can survive through materially different objects. ^[2]

The wider Songs of Innocence and of Experience guide follows the poems and changing books that extend beyond this threshold. ^[1][2]

Return finally to the gap between the readers and the great word above them. Nothing in the lower scene is on the scale of those letters, and yet the tiny book draws all three people together. Blake gives reading an intimate centre within an expansive design. Looking from their open pages to the birds, branches and inhabited title, we experience the movement he has prepared: a held object becomes an invitation to enter a larger imaginative world. ^[1]