Poems of Donne & Blake

This study will examine a number of poems from John Donne's "Holy Sonnets" and William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience." Specifically, the study will discuss the relationship to religion and politics established by these two sets of poems, will analyze the ways in which they establish different worlds, struggles, and audiences, and will present reasons for these differences.

The major difference between these two sets of poems is rooted in the conflicting consciousnesses of the two poets. Donne is a man who has arrived at a religious certainty in his life. He has settled within himself the kinds of contradictions with which Blake in his poems still wrestles. Blake is trying, for himself and for the reader, to present his view of the process of spiritual maturation. Donne is presenting his view of the relationship with God which he has entered into at the end of his own spiritual journey. Donne in the Holy Sonnets has left far behind the kinds of contradictions which mark Blake's Songs.

Another important difference is the centrality of God in Donne's poems and the centrality of humanity in Blake's poems. Although both sets of poems deal with the relationship between humans and God, the relationship in Donne's poems put God in a superior position, while Blake keeps humanity at the core of the discussion.

The sources consulted for this study are split on the nature of Blake's intentions in his Songs. Northrop Frye, for example, writes that "The Songs of Exper

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tle Lamb God bless thee" (Blake 29-30). The Songs of Experience depict humanity after the fall from innocence. We read of conflicts of various sorts which are not resolved by the kind of religious answers which redeem Donne. Every poem in Songs of Experience leaves the reader in an image of distress: "Her thorns were my only delight," and "The youthful Harlot's curse . . . blights with plagues the Marriage hearse," and "Cruelty has a Human Heart" (Blake 38; 39; 41). Humanity has failed and fallen in Donne, but is redeemed in Christ. In Blake, humanity has failed and fallen, but seems to be unredeemed by God and on its own. The reasonable conclusion is that Blake intends the Innocence and Experience Songs to be taken together to forge wisdom, if not religious redemption: "Without the perspective of Innocence, we would not be aware of our powers and wound remain unable to benefit from what the analysis of the Songs of Experience offers us" (Paananen 77). Blake's answer, if he supplies one, seems to be the capacity of the individual to imaginatively create out of his or her innocence and experience some sort of portrait not of a personal redemptive God, but "the Divine Humanity in Eternity" (Paananen 74). With respect to politics

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