William Blakes Songs of Innocence and Experience - Book Report/Review Example

Songs of Innocence reveal the nave hopes and fears of the lives of children and study their transformation as the child grows to adulthood. While some poems are written from the child's perspective others are written from an adult perspective observing the child. Many of the poems praise the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to corruption and distortion of experience. He also takes a critical stand against innocent purity which he feels has the potential for cruelty and injustice.

4 "The Songs of Experience" lament harsh adult experience destroying the goodness of innocence, while also pointing out the flaws in the innocent perspective. For instance "The Tyger" attempts to account for real negative forces in the universe which innocence fails to confront. These poems treat sexual morality in terms of the repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and secrecy, which corrupt the ingenuousness of innocent love. The experience thus adds a perspective to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision, while also compensating for some of its blindness.

5Though the style is simply the ideas are complex. While some poems are narrative in style, other poems like 'The Sick Rose' and the 'Divine Image' use symbolism and abstract concepts. Blake's favorite rhetorical techniques are personification and the reworking of Biblical symbolism and language. Blake employs meters of ballads, nursery rhymes and hymns applying them to his own, often unorthodox conceptions. 6" His combination of the traditional with the unfamiliar is consonant with Blake's perpetual interest in reconsidering and reframing the assumptions of human thought and social behavior."