William Blake

Mapping the Soul
-------With the freedom of poetic language, William Blake expressed his abhorrence of the Church's deep-rooted stance on faith; such a stance on
Christianity was considered blasphemous, but he could not be charged with a crime. He believed that with true spirituality, the individual could fully engage in their faith and attain eternal salvation without the intrusion of organized religion—for the Church is solely concerned with subduing
Christians with an orthodox emphasis on reason. Its rigid practice of faith, Blake denounced, actually is a restrictive barrier to the stairway to heaven. He, instead, viewed imagination as the foundation to spirituality, the bridge between the worldly body and the divine soul; creative energy, thus, is the simplest yet most direct connection to God.
Readers may initially annotate Blake's set of poems called the Songs of
Innocence and the Songs of Experience as an ironic juxtaposition of the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against the experienced, adult world of corruption and repression, but Blake is reflecting something deeper in meaning. In these oppositely related volumes of Songs, William Blake is not simply evoking an ironic contrast of good and evil, but subtly reflecting on the nature of Christianity, ultimately arguing that, whereas organized religion tends to suppress the power of energy and imagination with the arrogance of reason, true spirituality comes from such qualities.
----------Through the eyes of children, Blake offers a skeptical look at contemporary Christianity by examining a docile society that mindlessly conforms to the practices of religious zealotry. He reveals the contradictory reality of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity when he captures the premature thoughts of both innocent, obedient children, and witty, mischievous children. In the Songs of Innocence, Blake proposes children as naïve and submissive to the practices of Christianity. When the narrator in "The Lamb," whom can be perceived as a child, asks, "Little
Lamb, who made thee?", he gives his straightforward answer to the question:
"Little Lamb, I'll tell thee: / He is called by thy name, / For he calls himself a Lamb" (l.9, 12-14). However, in the Songs of Experience, Blake depicts children as, essentially, too witty for their own good; In "A
Little Boy Lost," a child offers his premature view on Christianity by questioning the two greatest commandments in the Law of God: "And Father, how can I love you / Or any of my brothers more [than myself]?" (l.5-6).
Blake emphasizes this ironic connection between both naïve and mischievous children with the use of heavenly, joyful images versus dark, morbid images. For example, in "The Chimney Sweeper," from the Songs of Innocence,
Blake describes a boy with hair that even "the soot cannot spoil" as having a dream that his friends were locked inside the chimney, but "an Angel who had a bright key, / ... opened the coffins & set them all free" (l.8, 13-14).
However, from the Songs of Experience counterpart, Blake does not capture the purity and whiteness of youth but portrays a child as "[a] little black thing among the snow" ("The Chimney Sweeper (Experience)" l.1). Through the eyes of children, Blake does not convey parents as a part of a family that raises their children with love and care, but as a group of individuals who mindlessly partake in their religious chauvinism. A child in opposition to attending service in Church weeps, "Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold" ("The Little Vagabond" l.1). When another child is asked: "Where are they father & mother? Say?", he replies: "They are both gone up to the church to pray" ("The Chimney Sweeper (Experience)" l.3-4). With such a skeptical outlook of Christianity, some may perceive Blake's perspective as a form of his own "religion."
-------Though Blake questions contemporary the values of Christianity, he also reveals his condemning attitude toward the Church by creating an ominous and melancholic atmosphere, ultimately asserting that the Church, supposedly a symbol of purity, is corrupt. He portrays the Church as overly restrictive and authoritative using physical images of constraint and limitation. For example, in "The Garden of Love," the narrator sees a chapel that was built where he used to play, and the gates of this Chapel were "shut, / [a]nd 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door" (l.5-6). Blake also captures this sense of restriction in describing the voices of people:
"In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forg'd manacles I hear" ("London"
l.7-8). By illustrating the "pure" Church with a physically dark hue, Blake reveals his disposition on the seemingly "white" Church—asserting that in reality, it is corrupt. In both "The Garden of Love" and "Holy Thursday
(Innocence)" Blake boldly depicts church officials as fraudulent. While the
"[p]riests in black gowns" "[walk] their rounds," Blake believes that these authorities are responsible for "... binding with briars ... my joys and desires" ("The Garden of Love" l.11-12). He describes the Church officials in "Holy Thursday (Innocence)" as "[g]rey-headed beadles" who "[walk] ... with wands as white as snow"— such a description hints at the irony of the supposedly holy, but actually wicked and "[g]rey-headed" authorities ("Holy
Thursday" l.3). Although Blake attacked the Church for imposing its authority over people, he did not attempt to reestablish its principles and values, but partook in his own form of Christianity.
-------Based on Blake's prospect of true spirituality, the human soul's power to captivate imagination and energy serves a more critical part to connecting with God than the body's ability to reason and rationalize. In his Songs of Innocence, Blake almost worships the childlike state in which imagination is free to roam and cannot be dulled by the reasoning of the outside world. For example, in "The Chimney Sweeper (Innocence)," he portrays a child as capable of interpreting his own dreams, from which he gains a form of spiritual knowledge: "And the Angel told Tom if he'd be a good boy, / He'd have God for his father & never want joy / ... / So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm" (l.19-20, 24). In both the Songs of
Innocence and the Songs of Experience, Blake reflects the significance that energy has on his spirituality. Evidence in "The Tyger" suggests that Blake may be capturing a series of furnace metaphors to ultimately create a sense of energy with the illustration of a tiger:
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? (l.13-16)
In "The Lamb," the question proposed, "... who made thee?" is simple and rhetorical, leaving the reader the image that God did indeed give the lamb its "clothing of delight, / Softest clothing, wooly, bright" (l.5-6). But in "The Tyger," the question is not "... who made thee?" but "What immortal hand or eye, / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"—the movement and energy stirred in this poem suggest a more complex and "experienced" connection with God's divine mystery of creation (l.23-24). Blake's perception of spirituality can further be explained with an analysis of its direct impact on the human soul.
------To Blake, imagination is not only the simplest and most efficient connection to God, but also the force that connects the gap between the soul's human and divine natures. The outside, sensory world may initially seem to have no inherent meaning, but it becomes meaningful through the contributions of the human imagination. In "To Tirzah," for example, the
"commonplace" is found "contemptible and human affections inadequate or distasteful, and this may be even when there is a preoccupation with the divine." The "commonplace" that Blake criticizes is the dishonor of the human, worldly body that the narrator expresses versus his favor of the spiritual, divine soul (Gilham 101). The question, "Then what have I to do with thee?" addresses the material part of him which "[m]ust be consumed with the earth" ("To Tirzah" l.2, 4). However, with the power of imagination, he may finally propose this final statement: "The Death of
Jesus set me free" (l.15). Although Blake portrays imagination as a prevailing quality, he recognizes the social and intellectual restrictions that exist in reality, which mentally obstruct and limit the mind from employing its power. In "Holy Thursday (Experience)," Blake puts forward a subject that relates society to this restraint of imagination. The narrator clearly describes his "land," where the "sun does never shine, / And their fields are bleak and bare, / And their ways are filled with thorns"—in short, "It is eternal winter there" (l.9-12). However, according to Blake, once the power of imagination is used effectively, the individual gains freedom from the restrictive bonds of unimaginative thought and ultimately, realizes the connection between both human and divine natures. In "The
Divine Image," the narrator subtly asserts that "... Mercy, Pity, Peace, and
Love" are not God's characteristics but his substance: qualities embodied by God Himself (l.1). While most may perceive these as "virtues of delight" that are unattainable by humans, Blake asserts that with imagination, man can finally discern such qualities from deep within the soul (l.1, 3). He claims that these qualities are those that are embodied in humans, and are recognizable because "Mercy has a human heart, / Pity, a human face; / And
Love, the human form divine, / And Peace, the human dress" (l.9-12). In
"Earth's Answer," Blake also approaches a similar breakthrough of the soul's confined imagination; "Break this heavy chain / That does freeze my bones around" (l.21-22). Thus, the soul and body, according to Blake, are not of separate natures but are directly related.
-------However, Blake asserts that the natural role of knowledge and reason is trivial—and perhaps detrimental—to the human soul. He believes that the
Church and its role of reason serve to diminish the very nature of spirituality; the body of the Church and the souls of individuals are incompatible. In "A Little Boy Lost," Blake illustrates such a mismatched pair; when a child, as mentioned earlier, questions the values of
Christianity, a priest "[i]n trembling zeal ... siez'[s] his hair" and says,
"'Lo! what a fiend is here! ... / One who sets reason up for judge' / Of our most holy Mystery [of God]" (l.10, 14-16). Blake also constructs a similar paradox when he juxtaposes the "healthy & pleasant & warm" "Ale-house" with an uninteresting and perhaps, boring, Church ("The Little Vagabond" l.2).
With "some Ale, / And a pleasant fire our souls to regale," the narrator would never "wish from the Church to stray" (l.8). Blake condemned orthodox religion, in usurping its authority, for attempting to impose self- limitation rather than giving form to creative imagination. In "Holy
Thursday (Innocence)," for example, Blake depicts the "[g]rey-headed beadles" as "the aged men, wise guardians of the poor; / ... [who] drive an angel from your door" (l.11-12). Such church officials seem to enforce their austerity among any departure from their deep-rooted values—which
Blake proclaims to be the imagination—; "children walking two & two, in red
& blue & green," whom perhaps were ordered to do so (l.2). The soul, therefore, cannot rely on reason but flourishes in the power of imagination. ------Blake's ultimate motive in pairing the collections of poems of
"Innocence" and "Experience" is to heighten the reader's awareness of the two contrary—and seemingly simple—states of human spirituality: imagination, often expressed in the Songs of Innocence, and reason, often found in the Songs of Experience. In such a manner, he is able to represent the human soul as a complex source of spirituality. Many of the individual poems in each collection show an awareness of the contrary state; while some poems in the Songs of Innocence hint at the perils of experience, some in the Songs of Experience resonate with a sense of the absence of innocence. For example, in "The Echoing Green," a poem in the Songs of
Innocence, Blake captures a subject that would appear in the Songs of
Experience: that when "[t]he sun does descend / ... our sports have an end," and "[n]o more can be merry" (l.22-24). In "The Garden of Love," a poem in the Songs of Experience, he portrays an alternative from "the gates of this
Chapel [that] were shut,": "So I turn'd to the Garden of Love / That so many sweet flowers bore" (l.5, 7-8). Blake's use of repetition and trochaic meter, both of which are standard in children's verse, may initially imply a seemingly simplicity within his work (Price). In "The
Tyger," for example, he repeats the line composed of trochaic meter,
"Tyger, Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night," in the first and last stanzas to emphasize the foreboding mood it creates (l.1, 21).
Alongside these simplistic techniques, however, Blake employs such poetic devices as paradox and irony to denote the sophistication of his work. When the speaker in the "Introduction" to the Songs of Innocence says, "And I made a rural pen / And I stain'd the water clear / And I wrote my happy songs / Every child may joy to hear," Blake may imply that he dips his pen in ink, but also uses his writing to make matters, or his thoughts, clear.
Or, perhaps, he obscures the seeming clarity of the water with the pen's ink. In "Earth's Answer," Blake proposes opposing events that further create a complicated delineation of his ideas. "Does spring hide its joy /
When buds and blossoms grow?" and "Does the sower / Sow by night, / Or the ploughman in darkness plough?" (l.16-17, 18-20). Such events are clearly unnatural, but with their descriptions, Blake captures a rupture of harmony. Both volumes of Songs denote a more complex examination of Blake's look at spirituality, which evidently, is highly intricate and complex.
------True spirituality, according to Blake, cannot suffice in a world where reason arrogates power over the human mind; the power of imagination and creative energy must transpire beforehand. He accused the Christian
Church for taking advantage over its political power and propagating its emphasis on reason—to Blake, such a progression is only detrimental to achieving the state of true spirituality. In the Songs of Innocence and
Songs of Experience, Blake juxtaposes the contrary states of the human soul, ultimately creating a paradox that captures his perspective of religion, per se. Perhaps Blake himself had trouble mapping, or understanding his soul, considering his premeditated execution of such a complex work of poetry.