William Blake's Songs of Innocence & Experience

William Blake is considered a creator of "great" poetry, defined by Laurence Perrine (1982) as poetry that "engages the whole person senses, imagination, emotion, intellect; it does not touch him merely on one or two sides of his nature," (239). In Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience we are treated to a pair of companion poems that try to resolve the polar opposites of human nature, good and evil. In The Lamb and The Tyger, Blake symbolizes human "innocence" and "experience" in the respective forms of a lamb and a tiger. However, we do not see Blake attempt to posit human beings in an eternal struggle between good and evil. Instead, Blake's poems celebrate the good and evil within human experience and the tension produced by man's futile attempt to resolve such contraries of his nature. Yet in the appreciation of the innocence manifested by the creator as well as the experience, a creative force evolves in the individual that gains awareness that such contraries are the "stuff" of life.

In The Lamb, Blake pays homage to the innocence of human nature during youth. Like we shall see the speaker do in The Tyger, this speaker is inquisitive. In The Lamb, the speaker wonders "Dost thou know who made thee, / Gave thee life, and bid thee feed�" (Blake 1). This questioning of the creative power or force behind life directly compares to the questioning of the speaker in The Tyger. In this poem Blake pays homage to the "fearful symmetry" o

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and is "meek" and "mild," (Blake 1). The symbol of the lamb is also a powerful Christian symbol and reference to the son of God, Jesus Christ. It also symbolizes the flocks of faithful who are all "lambs" of God. In The Tyger, Christian imagery is also evoked because experience breeds a loss of innocence, a reference to man's fall from paradise but also a reference to temptation and Satan. As such the images and word choice connote a fiery environment ala Hell and are in stark contrast to those of The Lamb. In The Tyger, we have the Tyger who is "burning bright", of "fearful symmetry", has "fire" in its eyes and "dread hand" and "dread feet," (Blake 1). Such imagery calls into doubt the promise of joy and peace everlasting offered by our beliefs and innocence in childhood. Other poetic devices are used in both poems to show the contrary nature of innocence and experience, belief and doubt, and good and evil in human existence. In The Lamb Blake achieves a rhythm that is soft and melodically pleasing. The rhythm almost mirrors a religious hymn or chant, praise to God the creator. Blake achieves this by the use of site and sound rhyme in addition to the use of repetition. In the final stanza, he utilizes repetition at th

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