Innocence and Experience

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The definition of experience according to Google is “practical contact with and observation of facts or events.” This definition almost directly contradicts the definition of innocence, which is “lack of guile or corruption; purity.” Innocence seems to be the inverse of experience. That is to say one cannot find both, as one grows larger the other will shrink. In The two poems The Lamb and The Tyger, William Blake divides his poems into two volumes. One of which is called the Songs of innocence and the other is songs of experience. It’s easy to pick out which Book these two poems by Blake belong in because of the vocabulary, the punctuation, and the descriptions within the lines.
The first give-aways are the vocabulary of the poems. In the first of the two, Blake talks simply so that it is easy to understand, including some lines being just flat-out repeated. In the beginning of the poem, the narrator states “Little Lamb who made thee/ do you know who made you?” Through this, the narrator presents a simple question which is one of curiosity and kindnesss toward the lamb. Blake co...

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