Songs of Innocence and of Experience Reading Order

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Innocence: 1789; combined edition: 1794) by William Blake is one of the most deceptively simple and most profoundly complex works in the English poetic tradition — two sets of short lyric poems printed and illustrated by Blake himself using his method of 'illuminated printing,' in which text and image are combined in plates etched and hand-coloured by Blake. The Songs of Innocence present the world through the consciousness of childhood innocence — a world of pastoral care, divine love, and the shepherd's protection. The Songs of Experience present the same world — or poems in deliberate dialogue with the Innocence poems — from the perspective of experience, revealing the exploitation, oppression, and cruelty that the Innocence perspective cannot see or will not acknowledge: the 'London' of 'experience' is a city of 'mind-forged manacles,' chartered streets, and the cry of the chimney sweeper and the harlot. The most famous poem of the set is 'The Tyger' — 'Tyger Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night' — which asks what divine power could have made a creature of such terrible beauty. Blake's poems are printed at primary-school level but read at the level of philosophical theology; they operate simultaneously as children's songs, as political radicalism (the chimney sweepers, the child soldiers, the harlots are all real social presences), and as the first phase of Blake's vast mythological system.