The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XI. The Period of the French Revolution.
§ 8. Songs of Experience
Up to this point, Blake’s writings preserve the spontaneity and confident strength that mark The Marriage: his faith in the immediate efficacy of passion to free itself by revolt gives energy and freshness to the measure and language. But, from this time, his outlook becomes increasingly overcast. He comes to see that the will to freedom is not all-powerful, but must endure, for a time, the limitations of temporal experience. Salvation is still to come through passionate revolt, and, in an indefinite way, this is associated with the French revolution; but Blake now emphasises the strength of the moral heresy, and the impetuous enthusiasm of America and Visions is, to a considerable degree, checked. The simplest indications of this change occur in Songs of Experience (1794) and those poems in the Rossetti MS. belonging to the same period. The contrast between these and Songs of Innocence is not merely formal, but is the direct expression of the change already referred to. In the early collection, there are no shadows: to Blake’s unaccustomed eyes, the first glimpse of the world of vision was pure light. But, in the intervening years, experience had brought a fuller sense of the power of evil, and of the difficulty and loneliness of his lot who would set himself against the current of this world. So he writes of himself
Signs of the change lie on every hand. If the introduction in Songs of Experience be compared with its earlier counterpart, the piper is seen to have become the more portentous bard, the laughing child upon a cloud gives place to “the lapsèd Soul weeping in the evening dew.” And there is, also, apparent, at times, the vague consciousness of “some blind hand” crushing the life of man, as man crushes the fly. This, however, is not quite constant, though something of the same mystery lies behind the question in The Tiger,
Such is a summary of the main ideas embodied in these Songs. There are, indeed, moments when this passion of disputation tells heavily against the verse, prosodically perfect though it is; only the unfaltering sincerity and directness of Blake’s spirit bears him safely through. Indeed, he never surpassed the best work of this period. Notably in The Tiger, his imagination shakes off the encumbrances of doctrine, and beats out new rhythm and new imagery for a more exalted vision of life. The poem proceeds entirely by suggestion; its succession of broken exclamations, scarcely coherent in their rising intensity, gives a vivid impression of a vast creative spirit labouring at elemental furnace and anvil to mould a mortal form adequate to the passion and fierce beauty of the wrath of God, the “wild furies” of the human spirit: it is as though the whole mighty process had been revealed to him in vivid gleams out of great darkness. Of a lower flight, but still unequalled before Keats, are poems in the “romantic” mood of human sorrow, in harmony with the more desolate aspects of nature. Such are the Introduction and Earth’s Answer, the lovely first stanza of The Sunflower or the manuscript quatrain, almost perfect in its music, beginning “I laid me down upon a bank.” Yet, Blake could ruin the effect of such lines by adding an atrocious verse in crude three-foot anapaests on the iniquity of moral law. He gives his own version of this obsession in another manuscript poem: