Themes and Styles in Songs of Experience

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Themes and Styles in Songs of Experience

With reference to at least four poems, show how they are

representative of themes and styles in Songs of Experience.

In the Songs of Experience “Innocence” has progressed towards

“Experience”, but it is important to remember that Blake's vision is

essentially dialectical: “Innocence” and “Experience” are co-related

as the road to “experience” begins from “innocence”. The poems in

Songs of Experience are darker in tone and outlook, affirming a

bleaker (or more realistic) view of creation than their “Innocent”

counterparts. Blake manifests the themes of cynicism, corruption,

oppression, disillusionment and cruelty through the use of stylistic

devices such as mirroring, juxtapositions, archetypes and imagery.

In “The clod and the pebble”, the poem provides two contrasting

attitudes, one of selfless love for others, and the second, of Love as

self-absorption and possessiveness. The first stanza seems to belong

to the Songs of Innocence sequence, and the final stanza to Songs of

Experience, and perhaps it is left to the reader to adjudicate between

the two attitudes. However, as a poem in the Songs of Experience

sequence, it is important that the final words are given to the

selfish Pebble rather than to the down-trodden Clod, perhaps

suggesting that it is the former's attitude which is seen to be the

most insightful. Blake uses imagery such as the clod of clay to

represent something insignificant, like mud, downtrodden. Blake also

uses alliteration on the phrase “clod of clay” to emphasize its

worthlessness. This imagery also creates an impression that the clay

is malleable and unformed, implying youth, ignorance, naiveté and

innocence. However, this spineless cl...

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...n on the private lives of Englanders; an almost comically

melodramatic scene of tombstones and Death-figure priests. It is thus

perhaps too easy to dismiss this poem at once as nothing more than

that. However, this simplicity allows the poem to become a didactic

poem, with new levels of resonance rising from it with each reading.

The level that first presents itself is explained above; the Church

taking on itself the legislation and administration of morality. This

Songs of Experience lyric deals with the repression of joys, desires

and instincts by the church and by prohibitive morality. Given that

the poem deals with a vision of a journey into the "garden", we could

perhaps also view the poem as a commentary on the ways that conscience

and guilt are imposed on the imagination and on what is natural and

instinctual, the 'mind-forged manacles' of London.

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