Setting the Stage: A Glimpse Into the Eighteenth Century, 'The Age of Reason,' and the Industrial Revolution
Any literary or artistic work, or any such record, reflects the age it is produced in, be it in appreciation, or criticism; poets, authors, and artists are hence rightfully called, the representatives of that age. Literature and art, capture the spirit of an age and give the artist a place to sketch out the social, cultural, and economic aspects of a nation or culture, with both beautiful and terrible intricacies which are otherwise, often neglected in innocent ignorance.
The eighteenth century is often called the ‘Age of Reason’, primarily for its emphasis on reason, and rationality, above everything else. Everything about the age was very refined, with all its social, cultural, and literary inclinations being uptight, and poised, befitting the cultivated societal mannerisms, which had then become the focus of all social circles. There was a gradual rise of the middle class, and with it, the popularity of the drawing room culture and etiquette. The literary traditions of the age too were largely trying to cater to the supposedly enlightened and cultured patterns of this drawing room culture. Additionally, the literature of the time greatly tried to mirror the classical Greek and Roman models, emulating the works of great writers like Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and other writers of the age of the Roman emperor Augustus Caesar, giving this age of literature the name of the ‘Augustan Age’. However, despite the fastidious poise and genteel of the time, the undercurrent of the expression in these literary works was very mechanical, and the focal point was regulation and convention, rather than vigor and emotion, something that is usually associated with literature and art.
The eighteenth century also marks the dawn of the infamous Industrial Revolution, which marked the shift from an agrarian to an industrialized economy. The first wave of the Industrial Revolution forced the economically affected classes to look for work in the factories which had slowly started coming up. They lived in terribly cramped, very unsafe spaces, and the factory conditions were even worse, with the long hours of work, and little to no pay, under unpleasant, and inhumane conditions. The revolution allowed the land-owning classes to openly exploit the landless poor, reliant on their labor to drag themselves for survival. The capitalist factory owners went on to prosper in wealth, the middle class rose, and the poor went on to become poorer. People were forced out of their primarily agrarian livelihoods with the advent of machines which replaced their hand labor and were left with no choice but to become part of this scheme of ruin.
With all of this going on, the mental state of the people was not at its best. It has been noted that many, including King George III, who was the embodiment of the perfect mannerisms of the eighteenth century, showed grave signs of mental illness. If not mental illness, everyone was at least bound to a corrupt existence, under hollow ideas of right, and for some, it was a perpetually dark time, with a lack of light. This spirit of the eighteenth century is not covered in the mainstream records, which boast of an age pivoted around regulation. Still, it is very soulfully captured in the works of small writers and poets, who could note and observe the grim reality of the overbearing times, and make a shift towards more natural ways of not just expression, but also diving into the simple facts about the time, with subtle romanticism which slowly started paving its way into literature by the end of the eighteenth century.
Pre-Romanticism
The eighteenth century was the great Age of Enlightenment and Neoclassicism, but somewhere in the middle of the century, some patterns which contradicted the times started paving their way into the sidelines. While the mainstream followed their “enlightened” trends proudly, some were being affected by what went on around them, a little differently. It was like the beginning of a subtle revolt against the conventions and stern regulations of the authoritarian regime of reason and rationale.
This was a time when the world was starting to witness some major events. The conflict between the residents of the thirteen North American colonies, and the American colonial government, was getting more aggressive, and eventually on the 4th of July, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was drawn up by Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration claimed that all men are created equal, and they all have some rights, by virtue of being human, including the right to Life, Liberty, and the “pursuit of happiness”. At almost a similar time, in France, sparks of an upcoming event were being ignited, and in 1789, with the attack on the Bastille prison, the flames set fire to what we now know as the French Revolution. The ideas that had been proposed by thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire, had paved their way into the minds of the people enabling them to want a change, free from the social chains that had bound them into an exploitative system for ages. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity became the motto of the revolution and the common folks of the third estate went up against the Clergy and the Nobility with full force to break away from the abuse.
These events greatly influenced the entire world, especially the minds of the young people who would go on to become the famous writers of the coming century. Both the revolutions aimed at an abolition of disparity, and proclaimed the natural rights of man, and hence inspired a lot of people from England. The French Revolution, in particular, stimulated intellectual debate, and political awareness. It sparked the artistic impulses of so many, especially poets like Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. It was like a reunion, and a reconnection with nature, and this further kindled the visionary and revolutionary instincts, and set aflame these inclinations of the writers and poets who would be called the Romantics in the coming age.
The romantic period of English Literature began in1798, with the publication of “Lyrical Ballads” by Wordsworth and Coleridge, but almost half a century before this, some small writers started shifting and acting against the stern focus on reason and propriety, seeking to explore an emotional and imaginative realm. This is referred to as the Romantic Revival or the Pre-Romantic period. The first work of the Romantic Revival, that has been recorded is Thomson’s “Seasons”, and gradually, similar works slowly started showing up on the sidelines, as the mainstream was dominated by the Neoclassicists like Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, etc.
Other poets and writers of the Romantic Revival include Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper, Robert Burns, William Blake, Thomas Chatterton, James Macpherson. etc. Most of these writers were romantic in essence, but neoclassical in attempt, as they had the precision of the classical school of writing, but their works had a reawakened interest in nature, the supernatural, etc. with an emphasis on sentimentality. This was a period that laid the foundation of the upcoming romantic movement.
William Blake: The Pre-Romantic Visionary
William Blake is an important name one comes across when reading about pre-romantic literature, and age. Though unrecognized during his lifetime, today he is remembered as one of the best and most visionary poets of not just the Romantic revival, but also English poetry in general. His gifts extended beyond his writing and he possessed known skills as a painter and engraver. He is often remembered as a true and pure artist, in body, mind, and soul. However, it is often said, that he was believed to be mad by his contemporaries, for his idiosyncratic views.
Born in London, in 1757, to a modest working-class family of a hosier, Blake was raised in a time of social and political upheaval. Everything in England was changing, and being a part of the working class, his family faced a lot of harsh challenges of the English urban life of the times. Even as a young child, He apprenticed as an engraver at a young age, which helped develop his artistic skills and his profound and prophetic imagination. Blake’s interests and imaginative prospects were quite evident, and he supposedly had “visions” of the supernatural too. All of these factors shaped his socially unconventional worldview, and eventually set him apart and hence much removed from his contemporaries.
Blake is remembered as a radical thinker, who prioritized observation, inner human passions, and feelings, over the pseudo-righteousness and the stern patterns of his age. Influenced by the French and the American revolutions and their ideals, he was against anything oppressive. Be it colonization, capitalism, industrialization, or organized, farcical religion, Blake was firmly against and openly criticized such repressive institutions through his works. His works, very evidently, rebelled against the dry intellect, and the controlling obligations of the Age of Reason. His works, which carry within them, a decoction of revolt, were a step toward the liberation of thought, body, soul, and humanity itself.
His poetry has philosophical and mystical colors and is very much in sync with his visions, showing his remarkable prowess in creativity and expressiveness. His famous artworks include, “The Ancient of Days”, “The Ghost of a Flea”, “Newton”, “Albion Rose”, etc., and his some of his popular poems include “The Lamb”, “The Tyger”, “London”, “The Sick Rose”, “The Poison Tree”, etc.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Exploring the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul
Most of Blake's celebrated poems form a part of his much-famed anthology, “The Songs of Innocence and Experience”, a collection of illustrated poems. The publishing process took place in two phases. The first few first copies of it were printed and illustrated by Blake himself in 1789, under the name, “The Songs of Innocence”. This was a collection of about 483 poems, written in a sweet pastoral style, mostly describing innocent aspects of childhood, except a few poems like, “The Chimney Sweeper”, and “The Little Black Boy”, which introduce a slightly darker undertone to the naive atmosphere of the poems. In 1794 this initial version was combined with a set of 26 new poems in a single volume, “Songs of Innocence and Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.” It is regarded as both a literary and artistic work.
The collection has songs and poems, as the title claims, of innocence and experience, written in the style of eighteenth-century children's poems and songs, written in a meter and in rhymes which were often a part of poems for children. But, unlike those sweet and innocent songs, his songs are laden with ambiguity, and maturer themes, often making the reader dive for deeper, more profound, and complex meanings in the things that we take for granted or often neglect. The images created through his songs and poems are rooted in his visions and the dark realities of his time. Most of the songs are woven into a sugary thread with his rhyme and rhythm but highlight concerning things. They serve more like a social commentary and often explore themes of abuse, poverty, child labour, etc. The work polemically attacks and openly challenges eighteenth-century England's oppressive institutions and organizations.
The collection explores two aspects of the human soul, and human existence: innocence, and experience, examined through Blake's rebellious lens and filtered through his artistic visions to paint a lovely picture with ugly details. Blake’s narrative stitches together stark revelations in innocent images and harmless questions, making a fearless attempt to highlight, and shatter the “mind-forged manacles”.
The “Songs of Innocence” present images of youthful innocence, and childlike naivety. We see a morally unambiguous gullibility, which is the result of a mind uncorrupted by experience, and an innocent ignorance of harsh realities. The collection emphasizes the purity, and carefree blessedness of childhood, which is almost imaginatively utopian to an extent. There are some poems however, that point out the challenges of a threatened childhood, but their representation is relatively subtle.
However, there are several deeper layers to this, even with this subtlety. While the weight of the dark world is missing from these poems, the themes under the surface are much more complex, touching upon the several threats that could jeopardize the innocent utopia of childhood. Blake meticulously uses harmony and melody to enchant the readers, and at the same time allows the readers to dive into the layers of complex meaning beneath that aesthetic charm.
The “Songs Of Experience”, on the other hand, sketch out the perspective of a mind that is aware of itself, and of others, and the otherness of those others. The collection depicts a loss of innocence, and its replacement by a developed intelligence, and a knowledge of the viciousness of the world, a knowledge that becomes destructive as it progresses. The progression between the two segments, Innocence and Experience, analyzes the loss of an innocent paradise, as one gradually experiences the cruelty of a lost, dark, and bleak world.
Critics have noted that the work has some biblical parallels in the transformative movement from innocence to experience, likening it to the loss of bliss and innocence in the prelapsarian state before the fall of man and the subsequent loss of Paradise. The world received after the fall has a clear knowledge of evil, and with this knowledge comes experience, which eventually results in the erosion of innocence.
Blake draws a clear distinction between the two states, not only in the language and meaning, but also, by using several poems in pairs- one in the "Songs of Innocence", and its counterpart in the 'Songs of Experience". The most famous of these "companion poems" are “The Lamb” and “The Tyger”, from "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience", respectively. The former presents, a “meek and mild” creation of the Almighty, in the lamb, which represents childhood, and purity and God Himself, for “he became a little child”. The poem is written in the form of sinless rhetorical questions, posed to a lamb by a child. The latter, "The Tyger", is also written in rhetorical questions, but rather than innocent, these questions point out fear-inducing aspects like the "fearful symmetry" of the fierce tiger. The poem also asks, "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" aptly wondering how two beings, so different from each other, could have the same creator.
Both poems offer the readers a sharp contrast of not only the two creations, at opposite ends of the food chain, but also a noticeable difference in innocence and experience, with varying perspectives, and ideas.
“The Chimney Sweeper" from the "Songs of Innocence" shows us the plight of poor children dragged into the profession of chimney sweeping, having to live in piles of soot, leaving their days of play and merriment. However, there is a tone of hope towards the end of the poem when the children are seen believing that “if all do their duty, they need not fear harm”. Doing their duty secures them protection from their heavenly Father. The child is seen believing that an angel will rescue him, and others like him, and they’d be able to happily bathe in the river, and play in green fields.
On the other hand, “The Chimney Sweeper”, from Songs of Experience presents a hopeless world, covered in bleakness, and the hypocrisy of “God and his priest and king”, who are praised in negligence by the parents of the children who they “clothed” in “the clothes of death”, falling under illusions of pseudo-happiness. There is no hope of an angelic rescue in this poem, only eternal darkness and despair.
Another pair of contrasting poems is “Nurse’s Song”. The poem from the "Songs of Innocence" shows a very happy and merry picture of children playing in the green fields, not wanting to go to bed until the light “fades away”. Images of childhood are seen in the sky with little birds flying, and the hills full of sheep. The poem from the "Songs of Experience", however, turns a similar image into something darker, where the children playing is not happy or pleasant, but a “waste” of day. The voice of affection for children and their youthful vigor in the former poem turns into restrictive rebuking for the same in the latter. In “The Echoing Green”, from the "Songs of Innocence", we see a realm of happy childhood play, but in “The Garden of Love”, from "Songs of Experience" something ugly and dark is observed.
In “The Infant Joy”, from "Songs Of Innocence", a sense of joy and happiness is seen at the birth of a child, with a repetition of the phrase “sweet joy”, and in “The Infant Sorrow”, from "Songs of Experience", the parents of a newborn, are seen troubled, and angry at the birth of their child.
Another set of poems named, “Holy Thursday” appears in both parts, describing different sides of the state of the orphans, taken in by the London charity schools. Almost six thousand of these orphans were made to march into St. Paul’s Cathedral, supervised by beadles, and made to sing. The poem from "Songs Of Innocence", takes us to the church with these children, with their faces scrubbed clean, dressed in colorful clothes, through London, like the river Thames. They are compared to lovely flowers, and their song is described as something which could shake heaven. “Holy Thursday”, from the "Songs of Experience", gives us a different, and sadder side of the same. The speaker remarks that “ in a rich and fruitful land—" children are "reduced to misery”, describing how the visible polished surface of a flowery happy activity, remained rooted in layers of uneasy misery. The sad truth was that the plight of the children in these charity schools was marked by the loss of their childlike vivacity, and vital play in the greens, which remained covered in hunger, and other ills, that children should be away from. No sun shines on them, and “their fields are bleak and bare”.
“The Divine Image” is a poem from the "Songs of Innocence", that talks about the four virtues of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, which form a part of the constitution of divinity, and also take a shape in the human form. The four virtues make the human form a reflection of God, and so no difference and hate must prevail among humans. Its companion poem, “The Human Abstract”, talks of the same virtues, but the picture is turned around, as the speaker remarks how Pity wouldn’t be there if poverty was not there, Mercy would be unnecessary if everyone was happy, and Peace is something which is drawn out from fear. The human heart, in this poem, seems cruel and depicts a total loss of humility, and humanity.
Several other poems have similar alignments throughout the anthology. It is easily observable, that Blake here puts forth a strikingly truthful contrast between the two sides of the spectrum, innocence, and bliss, against experience and misery. The poems from the Songs of Innocence, are like sweet lullabies, painted in colors of happy optimism, and naïve joyfulness; and the poems from the Songs of Experience, are revelations of something bleak and dark. While the former represents bliss and paradise, the latter sketch the same as a forbidden pleasure.
Nevertheless, both parts aptly portray the two contrary aspects of the human soul, and the poems are juxtaposed in a manner to highlight these aspects in a very proper way. One aspect might seem darker and unpleasant, but it can’t be ignored for the sake of a happier and more fulfilling one. Both must co-exist to understand life in its natural state and go beyond what can be understood on the basic level. Their coexistence, however, should not be a weapon to overshadow the importance of and need of the other, and one must not push down the other into oblivion and destruction. The happy must not be outdone by the sinister, and the bad must be known to understand the good.
It is believed of the soul, that when it comes to life, it is made of nothing but love. Love is the natural, and the purest state of the soul, and this uncorrupted affection is what makes children, the epitome of innocence, so close to nature, and to God. The blessedness rises above all vexation and connects with the higher form of being. Blake criticizes the worldliness which threatens this purity and pollutes it. The soul gradually soaks itself in materialism, as a result of experiencing the world. It develops an understanding of everything around it, and starts seeing things for what they are, and the happy songs turn into lost “notes of woe”, and the lullabies turn into dreadful tunes. The blameless, sinless soul gradually becomes sinful, wicked, or sad and pitiful, both of which are away from natural purity.
In conclusion, Blake captures this tragic reality in his Songs of Innocence and Experience, with careful intricacy, hence justifying completely, the title of the volume. His poetry very beautifully captures contrasting aspects of joy and sorrow, purity and corruption, and innocence and experience. Life is made up of both bright and dark aspects, and embracing the connection between them is the only way to get an understanding of the deeper aspects of existence. Blake's deep symbolism and imagery present to us the journey from innocence to experience, while bringing to us the harsh realities of his time. The anthology, in essence, stands as a testament to the discovery, of self, and society, effectively portraying the complexities of human existence in a society full of dark and brutal flaws.
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References:
- www.blakearchive.org/
- www.bl.uk/collection-guides/william-blake
- www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-blake
- www.blakesociety.org/