The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Blake · an illuminated book of songs in two contrary halves · Songs of Innocence etched 1789, Songs of Experience etched 1793 to 1794, issued together from 1794 · relief-etched on copper, printed by Blake and coloured by hand by William and Catherine Blake · scored as words and designs together, read from knowledge; English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Illuminated lyric book; the hymn and moral song for children turned to prophecy, in two contrary halves, word and design etched on one plate
Mythos
The fall rebuilt as two states of the soul held side by side; the Lamb and the Tyger under one maker; the jealous sky-father; the Bard who sees present, past and future
Phase
Songs of Innocence etched in 1789 and issued alone; Songs of Experience etched in 1793 to 1794 and issued with it from 1794; printed to order for more than thirty years
Presentation
Relief-etched plates printed by Blake and coloured by hand; the colouring and the order of the plates differ from copy to copy, four poems pass between the halves, and one song is added late
Register
From the nursery song and the hymn stanza to the Tyger’s furnace and the curse of London; the child’s voice, the nurse’s, the Bard’s
Scale
Two books of short songs; a chimney, a charity school, a garden, a rose, the streets and river of London, and the soul between its two states
Governing Proposition
Two books of songs face each other. In the first a piper, a child, a nurse and a sweep sing in the voice of trust; in the second a Bard, a second sweep and a walker in London answer in the voice of a world that sells its children and owns its river. The wager of the book is that neither voice is the truth alone: innocence and experience are states of the soul and not stages of a life, each blind to what the other sees, and a song a child could sing can carry the indictment the child does not make.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The general title plate is dated 1794, and it names the whole: Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The book it heads was made in two stages. Songs of Innocence was etched in 1789, the date on its own title plate, and issued alone. Songs of Experience was etched in 1793 and 1794, and from 1794 it was issued only with the earlier book, under the general title. The second book did not replace the first. It was bound to face it, and the title says what the facing is for: two states, contrary, of one soul.
Blake made the book with his own hands, by a method he called illuminated printing. The words were written in reverse on the copper and the metal bitten away round them and round the designs, so that text and picture stood in relief together and printed from one plate. The sheets were printed in colour or in monochrome and finished by hand, coloured by Blake and by Catherine Blake. No publisher, no compositor and no engraver stood between the maker and the page. The trade book of the time was set in type at one press and given its pictures by another hand; this one was a single object made by one hand, outside the trade altogether.
It was printed to order, copy by copy, for more than thirty years, and the copies differ, in their colouring and in the order of their plates. Four poems, The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found, The School Boy and The Voice of the Ancient Bard, stand in Innocence in some copies and in Experience in others. To Tirzah was added later. A poem called “A Divine Image” was etched and left out of the book. What is taken here is the book in its settled late form, words and designs together, and not the colouring of one copy. Across its two halves the titles answer one another: an Introduction, a Holy Thursday, a Chimney Sweeper and a Nurse’s Song stand in each, and Infant Joy answers to Infant Sorrow, The Lamb to The Tyger, The Divine Image to The Human Abstract, and the Little Boy and Little Girl poems to one another.
Movement II
Innocence opens with a piper. A child on a cloud asks him for a song about a lamb, then for the song again, then for the songs to be written down, and the piper writes them for every child to hear. The voice is the voice of the hymn and the moral song for children, the form Isaac Watts had set in his Divine Songs of 1715, and Blake keeps it whole: short stanzas, plain rhyme, a speaker who trusts. The Lamb asks the lamb who made it and answers with a maker who is himself called a lamb, the oldest Christian figure of the creator as creature. Spring, Laughing Song and The Blossom keep the register low on purpose. That lowness is the state the book is showing.
Within that voice the world comes in. The Chimney Sweeper of Innocence is a boy sold “while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep”, and he sleeps in soot. He comforts a younger sweep, who dreams of an Angel opening the coffins in which the sweeps are locked and setting them free into a green plain. On waking they go to work in the dark, and the poem ends on the moral the boy has been taught: “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm”. The line is true to the child who says it. It is also, without a word of comment, an indictment of the duty and of the people who taught it to him. The book makes its charge by what the child does not say.
The rest of Innocence holds the same double sight. The Little Black Boy speaks of a love that he hopes will make the English child love him, and his tenderness is the measure of what is done to him. The Nurse’s Song calls the children in at dusk and lets them play until the light is gone. In Night the lions weep over the folded lambs. The Divine Image names four virtues, mercy, pity, peace and love, and finds God in the human form that carries them. On Another’s Sorrow asks whether anyone can see another’s grief and not be grieved. These are songs of trust, and the trust is not mocked. It is set where the other book can see it.
Movement III
Experience opens with a different singer: “Hear the voice of the Bard! / Who Present, Past, & Future sees”. Where the piper wrote for children, the Bard calls the lapsed soul and the fallen Earth to wake. Earth’s Answer refuses the call, and names her jailer, a jealous father in the starry sky, the figure who becomes Urizen in Blake’s prophetic books. The Clod & the Pebble sets two songs of love side by side: the clod’s love gives itself away and builds a heaven, the pebble’s binds another and builds a hell. Both are called love. The book has found its method, which is to make one word mean two things in two states.
The pairs then answer, title for title. The Holy Thursday of Experience looks at the charity children of the first book and asks how a rich land can call this holy. The Chimney Sweeper of Experience is a child alone in the snow, and he names the system the first sweep could not see: his parents have gone to praise “God & his Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery”. The Human Abstract takes the four virtues of The Divine Image and shows what they rest on: “Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor”. Charity is shown to need the misery it relieves, and the second poem does not cancel the first. It shows what the first could not see.
Desire and anger are given the same treatment. In The Garden of Love a chapel stands where the speaker used to play, and “Priests in black gowns” are binding “with briars, my joys & desires”. A Poison Tree begins with two couplets, “I was angry with my friend; / I told my wrath, my wrath did end”, and then follows the anger that was not told as it is watered with fears and grows into a fruit that kills the foe who steals it. Ah! Sun-flower longs for a country it will not reach, and A Little Boy Lost is put to death by the priests for what he says. The songs are short, and each states a whole condition.
Movement IV
London is four quatrains, sixteen lines. A walker goes through the streets beside the Thames, and the poem gives the street and the river the same word: both are chartered, both are owned. Its second stanza is a catalogue: “In every cry of every Man, / In every Infants cry of fear”. What the walker hears in every voice is “mind-forg’d manacles”, a bondage made by the people who wear it. The chimney-sweeper’s cry falls on the blackening church, and the hapless soldier’s sigh runs in blood down the Palace walls.
The last stanza goes into the midnight streets and hears the harlot’s curse. It blasts the newborn infant’s tear, and the poem ends: “And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse”. One curse falls on birth and marriage together, and the last two words join the wedding and the funeral in one carriage. Nothing in the poem is a figure of speech that could be dropped. The child, the soldier, the woman, the church and the palace are the parts of one machine, and the machine is in the mind as much as in the street.
The smallest complete world in the book is The Sick Rose, eight lines: “O Rose thou art sick. / The invisible worm, / That flies in the night / In the howling storm”. The worm has found out the rose’s bed, and its dark secret love destroys her life. The poem is all image and no comment, and it holds a whole account of desire turned to destruction. The two births stand beside it. Infant Joy is a newborn who names itself joy, and is sung to. Infant Sorrow begins: “My mother groand! my father wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt”. The same event is seen from the two states, and neither account is false.
Movement V
The Tyger is six quatrains, twenty-four lines of trochaic tetrameter in rhymed couplets, and almost all of it is questions. “What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” The tiger is not described so much as forged: the poem stands in a smithy, with hammer, chain, anvil and furnace, and asks “In what furnace was thy brain?” Then it rises to the creation itself, the hour “When the stars threw down their spears”, and puts the question on which the two books turn: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The last stanza repeats the first with a single word changed, “Could” turned to “Dare”. The question has become a question about courage.
The pairs are not refutations. Innocence is not cancelled by Experience, and Experience is not answered by Innocence; each sees what the other cannot. The book ends, in the copies that close it so, with The Voice of the Ancient Bard calling youth to a new morning. One song sits awkwardly in the whole. To Tirzah, added late, turns on the mother, “Then what have I to do with thee?”, a renunciation of the body that speaks with a voice unlike the rest. The book is wide enough to hold it, and it is the one place where the law of the two states strains.
The book was made against its time. It was printed to order for a few buyers, and its maker died poor and was read as eccentric or mad. In the decade of its making English poetry was turned by Lyrical Ballads, not by Blake. For about seventy years the songs were all but unread, until Gilchrist’s Life of 1863 brought them out; through the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne and Yeats they came into the language, and in the twentieth century they reached Allen Ginsberg. The Tyger and London are now among the most taught poems in English, read in schools across the English-speaking world, though most of their readers meet the words in type and never see the plates. The title still holds what the book is: two states of one soul, each seen from the other.
Act III · The Twelve
Inside the poem, necessity is near absolute. The Sick Rose has eight lines and none can go: “O Rose thou art sick. / The invisible worm, / That flies in the night / In the howling storm”. London uses one word twice, for the street and for the river, because the repetition is the argument: both are owned. The pairs are required, since each half of a pair means what it means against the other. The test cuts at the level of the book. Blake moved four poems between the halves, reordered plates from copy to copy, etched “A Divine Image” and left it out, and added To Tirzah later: the sequence was not compelled. Some songs are slight, The Blossom, Laughing Song, The Lilly, My Pretty Rose Tree, The Angel, and their loss would cost a tone more than a meaning. Innocence’s slight songs are required as a state, which lightens the charge without removing it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: innocence and experience are states, not stages, each blind to what the other sees. The sweep of Innocence, sold “while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep”, consoles himself with “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm”, a line true to his state and an indictment of the duty. The sweep of Experience names the system: his parents have gone to praise “God & his Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery”. Charity depends on the misery it relieves: “Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor”. Oppression is internalised, “mind-forg’d manacles”; repressed anger grows into a killing fruit; love is two opposite things under one name. Held off the top because some of the songs of Experience assert their meaning rather than show it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The ceiling is as high as English lyric reaches. The Tyger asks “What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”, and rises to the hour “When the stars threw down their spears” and the question “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”: terror and awe at creation in twenty-four lines. London ends in a curse that falls on birth and marriage together, “And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse”. The Introduction to Experience, “Hear the voice of the Bard! / Who Present, Past, & Future sees”, Earth’s Answer, the Holy Thursday of Experience, and Night with its lions weeping over the folded lambs are heights of a prophetic kind; The Little Black Boy and On Another’s Sorrow are heights of tenderness. Frequency is the limit. Innocence keeps much of its register low by design, in Spring, Laughing Song and The Blossom, and the low register is the state it shows, so it is recorded without being charged as a fault.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built in the pairing, not only evoked. The lamb, the oldest Christian figure of the creator as creature, is set beside a tiger the poem forges in a smithy, “In what furnace was thy brain?”, and the question of one maker of both is the structure, not an allusion. The fall is rebuilt: innocence is not lost once in Eden but held as a state of the soul beside its contrary, and the title says so. Earth’s Answer builds the jealous sky-father who becomes Urizen in the prophetic books; the Bard of the Introduction is a prophet calling the lapsed soul. The particular stays particular: the sweep in the soot, the Thames, a nurse calling children in at dusk. Held a step down because the full mythology is built elsewhere in Blake and is present here as seed, and because several figures, the rose and the sunflower among them, are emblems more than structures.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the hymn and moral song for children, above all Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs (1715), with the ballad and the emblem book beside it; and the trade book, set in type by one press and illustrated by another hand. The swerve is double. In form, Blake made the book himself, words and images etched together on one plate, printed and coloured by hand, outside the book trade altogether. In matter, he took the children’s hymn and its voice of trust and made it the instrument of an indictment of church, state and family that the trusting voice does not make and the reader cannot avoid; then he wrote a second book that answers the first. The stake was real and was paid: the copies were few, and their maker died poor and was read as eccentric or mad. Held just off the top only because the hymn form is kept whole even as it is turned.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The two contrary books are the argument: printed as one run of lyrics, the songs would be a mixture of the sweet and the bitter; paired, each state is seen from the other, and neither is the truth alone. The naive speaker is the instrument of Innocence’s knowledge, since the indictment is made by what the child does not say. The composite plate belongs to the knowledge as well: text and design are etched as one, the designs grow through the lines, and the copies answer the words differently in each. Held off the top for two reasons. Blake’s own reordering shows that the sequence within each half is not load-bearing; and most readers have met the poems in type, without the plates, and still received most of what they know.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise. Since Gilchrist’s Life of 1863 brought it out of neglect, the book has borne more than a century and a half of re-examination without being exhausted. The text holds its questions open: whether Innocence is ironised or true; whether the sweep’s dream of an Angel freeing the boys from their coffins is consolation or opiate; whether the Tyger’s maker is the Lamb’s, and whether the poem’s questions are awe or accusation; whether To Tirzah’s rejection of the mother is Blake’s own voice. Formal depth yields too: the copies differ, and the plates answer the words differently in each. Held a step down because the deepest of Blake’s yield lies in the prophetic books, and some of the songs are exhausted sooner than their fame suggests.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is English poetry of the late eighteenth century. The intrinsic force is very high: the book made the short lyric carry social prophecy without leaving the child’s or the nurse’s voice; it made the paired book a form; and it made the illuminated book, words and image as one object made by one hand. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. In its own years the book moved nothing: the copies were few, the readers fewer, and the redirection of English poetry in that decade came from Lyrical Ballads (1798), not from Blake. Force near the top, reach late. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after Gilchrist’s Life of 1863, the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne and Yeats; in the twentieth century Allen Ginsberg; the artist’s book, which descends from the illuminated one; and The Tyger and London, now among the most anthologised poems in English.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then on presence. The text survives whole, in Blake’s own etched copies, with nothing lost, and the work as words and designs survives in the copies themselves, which are its form. Presence spans more than two centuries, but for about seventy years the book was all but unread, a few copies in a few hands, until Gilchrist’s Life of 1863; that is long neglect, and it is charged. Since then presence has been of the widest: The Tyger and London are among the most anthologised and taught poems in English, read in schools across the English-speaking world and set to music again and again. A further charge: most readers meet the words in type, without the designs, so the work as etched reaches far fewer than its text, a gap facsimiles and the online archive have narrowed.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The verse is in full command. The Tyger’s trochaic hammer, in rhymed couplets, and its one-word change in the last stanza, “Could” turned to “Dare”; London’s anaphora, “In every cry of every Man, / In every Infants cry of fear”; the eight lines of The Sick Rose; the closed couplets of A Poison Tree, “I was angry with my friend; / I told my wrath, my wrath did end”. Innocence’s plainness is a made plainness, the hymn stanza handled to sound artless. The second medium is load-bearing: the text written in reverse on the copper and bitten into relief, the designs grown through the lines, the colouring done by hand. Charged: some designs are slight or perfunctory, the early colouring is thin, and a few lines strain for the rhyme.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Laughing Song, all green woods and laughter, and London’s curse; or Infant Joy, a newborn who names itself joy, and Infant Sorrow, “My mother groand! my father wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt”. One law governs them, and the title states it: each is true to its state, and each state is seen from the other. The law holds across a wide range, from nursery song to prophecy, from a fly to the starry heavens, from the Thames to the forests of the night. The pairs are not refutations: Innocence is not cancelled by Experience, and The Voice of the Ancient Bard closes the book on a promise of new morning. Charged: To Tirzah, added late, speaks a Christian renunciation of the mother, “Then what have I to do with thee?”, that sits awkwardly with the rest, and some songs of Experience are emblems rather than states.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as a body of short lyrics. Consciousness is held in the child, the nurse, the Bard and the angry man; the family in the sold son, the groaning mother, the parents gone to church; labour in the sweeps, the charity children, the soldier and the harlot; church and state in the Priest and King, the Palace walls and the “Priests in black gowns” binding “with briars, my joys & desires”; sexuality in The Garden of Love, The Sick Rose and A Little Girl Lost; the natural order from the clod and the pebble to the tiger; the sacred in the Lamb, the Divine Image and Earth’s Answer. One law, the contraries, holds them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form: these orders are touched in short songs rather than worked through, history is a pressure rather than an agent, and a lyric book cannot hold what a novel or an epic holds.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.3, with The Unconcealment, The Living Form, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.2. A departure double in form and matter, the children’s hymn turned into an indictment and the book made by one hand outside the trade; a disclosure of the two contrary states of the soul that can be stated and holds; two books whose pairing is the argument; and a survival that has come through seventy years of neglect into the widest presence.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.2, held by the form: many orders touched in short songs rather than worked through, and history a pressure rather than an agent. Above it, The Inevitable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6: a sequence Blake himself reordered, with songs slight on either side, and a reach that came seventy years after the book was made.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, Pressure on Tradition by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 107.4, the least sum the upper tier admits, and the work stands at 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, William Blake’s combined illuminated book of 1794, scored as words and designs together: relief-etched on copper, printed by Blake and coloured by hand by William and Catherine Blake. Songs of Innocence was etched in 1789 and issued alone; Songs of Experience was etched in 1793 and 1794 and from 1794 issued only with it. The book is taken in its settled late form, with To Tirzah. The copies differ in colouring and in the order of the plates, and four poems pass between the halves; where a copy is in mind it is copy Z, Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection, and no judgment rests on one copy’s colouring. “A Divine Image”, etched and left out of the book, is not part of the work. The words are known closely and the designs from reproductions, so the designs are described in general terms only. No text of the book was in hand and nothing was measured on a text; English is quoted only where its words are certain, in Blake’s spelling. Facts that could not be verified, among them the counts of songs, plates and lines, the number of surviving copies, the date of To Tirzah, the particulars of single designs, the early readers of the songs, the critical record after Gilchrist and the musical settings, are not given.