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  The Notion Of Duality Of The Human Soul In                                                               William Blake’s Songs Of Innocence And Experience

                                                                         Tembong Denis Fonge

Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience generally subscribe to the main stream appreciation that they present the reader with two states of the human condition - the pastoral, pure and natural world of lambs and blossoms on the one hand, and the world of experience characterized by exploitation, cruelty, conflict and hypocritical humility on the other hand. However, Blake’s songs communicate experiences that go beyond the ordinary, to demonstrate that the human soul essentially, is like a two sided coin.  This makes it difficult to give the poems simplistic treatment as may be suggested by the simplicity of language and form of the songs. On this score, I strongly identify with Shadrack Ambansom’s opinion that “it would therefore be myopic to consider Blake as a simple poet… indeed no poet who was capable of presenting penetrating studies of the devious and treacherous human heart as ‘The Human Abstract’, and ‘A Poison Tree’ etc can be called simple” (24).

Blake, like Marlowe in Dr. Faustus, exhibits in his Songs of Innocence and Experience that the human soul has a dual nature, essentially made up of both the good and evil phases. Songs of Innocence for example, do not only represent the innocence of the human soul at its early stage of life called childhood, but also describe the spiritual attachment of the soul to its creator. Blake attaches extreme importance and gives orthodox treatment to this divine connection between the creator and his creation. In the same vein, Northrop Frye thinks “when we say that the goal of human work can only be accomplished in eternity” (58) it means that the cot that binds man to his creator goes beyond the physical.

On the other hand, Songs of experience represent the inherent evil side of the soul. The human spirit, Blake seems to suggest, possesses this dual nature of the good and evil from inception or creation. Therefore the ability to do good or evil is inherently present in man and only needs to be tickled by favourable factors or circumstances to give the required expectations.  In this, Blake seems to be saying that good and evil complementarily exist in the heart of man, separated only by a thin layer.

It is important to note that the lasting consequence of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden establishes the foundation of evil in the soul. The bible confirms this where it says “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom. 5.12). This reveals the soul as having dual character - that of possessing the capacity to do good and evil. Blake explores this knowledge of the genesis of creation to project the two sides of the individual represented by innocence and experience. Innocence echoes the original life of man before the fall while experience echoes the adulterated life after the fall.

“The Divine Image” for example, illustrates how the poet uses personification to dramatize Christ's mediation between God and Man. Beginning with abstract qualities (the four virtues of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love),  the poet makes these abstractions the object of human prayer and piety. The poem does not explicitly mention Christ, but the four virtues that Blake assigns alternately to man and God are the ones conventionally associated with Jesus. Because Christ was both God and man, he becomes the vehicle for Blake's mediation between the two. From this perspective therefore, Blake reveals the very conception of the human being by his creator, by re-echoing the Biblical assertion that God created man in His image. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…” (Gen. 1:26). If man was made in God’s image, then the attributes of God - mercy, pity, peace and love are possessed by man and so constitute part of human nature. In the same light, Blake argues that the presence of these virtues in man make him a reflection of God who is an incarnation of love. Bible makes this point clearer where it points out to the fact that “he that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:8). Thus, where mercy, pity, peace and love duel there God dwells too.

The existential question - “who made thee?” posed in “The Lamb” by the child is crucial because it taps into the deep and timeless questions that all human beings pose, about their own origins and the nature of creation. Of course through this Blake creates the traditional Christian belief where (man) the creation must be linked somehow to (God) the creator. The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus. The traditional image of Jesus as a lamb underscores the Christian values of gentleness, meekness, and peace. The image of the child is also associated with Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a special solicitude for children, and the Bible's depiction of Jesus in his childhood shows him as guileless and vulnerable. These are also the characteristics from which the child-speaker approaches the ideas of nature and of God.

If we consider John Holloway’s opinion in “Blake: The Lyric Poetry”, we understand clearly the notion of the duality of the soul, where he refers to "The Human Abstract" as a poem which "asserts that the conventional Christian virtues like 'Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love' are parasitic on evil and bring it about." He contends that "The Human Abstract", and "A Divine Image," must be read together. Read together, I suppose, our sense of the constituent parts of the soul will be more glaringly clear.

Again it will be necessary to consider Deborah Noel’s opinion, which holds that one of the more recent readings of "The Human Abstract" is located in E.P Thompson's Witness Against the Beast, where Thompson posits that “if ‘The Divine Image’ is the hinge upon which the Innocence Songs turn, we should expect to find a similar significance for Experience in “The Human Abstract.” But, disputing both Hirsch and Gillham, Thompson discounts the possibility of a satirical reading of the poem. He opines that “in the most simplified terms, the one is about the source of ‘good’, the other about the source and origin of ‘evil.’

In “Holy Thursday”, Blake presents the movement of children from school to church, in vivid imagery by likening the lines of children to the Thames River, which flows through the heart of London, whereby the children are carried along by the current of their innocent faith. First, they become “flowers of London town.” This comparison emphasizes their beauty and fragility. Also, the children are described as resembling lambs in their innocence and meekness, as well as in the sound of their little voices. The image transforms the character of humming “multitudes,” into something heavenly and sublime. The lamb metaphor links the children to Christ (whose symbol is the lamb) and reminds the reader of Jesus's special tenderness and care for children. “And looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God!” (John 1:36) The children are fortified in strength as their combined voices directed towards heaven in singing, evoke something more powerful and puts them in direct contact with God. In this poem the reader is made aware of the manifestation of the ‘good’ side of the heart. That side that communes with God and places man as a special creature that possesses the attributes of the Supreme Deity.

However, Blake in this poem turns the other side of the soul to manifest.” “Holy Thursday” in the world of experience is a demonstration of yet another pretentious behaviour of the heart that commits evil and guises it under the blanket of holiness. The poem picks up where its contrary 'Holy Thursday' in Songs of Innocence left off, with reference to the annual Holy Thursday (Ascension Day) service in St Paul's Cathedral for the poor children of the London charity schools. Yet there can be nothing 'holy' about a service which shows us how many thousands of children are 'reduced to misery' in England. The poem challenges the very image of Great Britain as a rich and civilised nation in the 1790s. The poem also attacks the whole system of caring for poor children as 'cold and usurious'.  Our critical interest here is the fact that good and evil lies at the same place.

The nurse’s song communicates principally, the children's innocence and simple joy. The reader appreciates the fact that children’s happiness persists unabashed and uninhibited, and without shame the children plead for permission to continue in it. The sounds and games of the children harmonize with a busy world of sheep and birds. They think of themselves as part of nature, and cannot bear the thought of abandoning their play while birds and sheep still frolic in the sky and on the hills, for the children share the innocence and unselfconscious spontaneity of these natural creatures. They also approach the world with a cheerful optimism, focusing not on the impending nightfall but on the last drops of daylight that surely can be eked out of the evening. A similar innocence characterizes the pleasure the adult nurse takes in watching her charges play. Their happiness inspires in her a feeling of peace, and their desire to prolong their own delight is one she readily indulges. She is a kind of angelic, guardian presence who, while standing apart from the children, supports rather than overshadows their innocence.   

Again in this poem, Blake does not only celebrate innocence, but he celebrates the communion between God and his creation. The unlimited happiness of the children against the natural background shows how Blake paints god through nature. Nature which is graceful, peaceful, and harmless and gives the fulfilment that only God can offer.

For C. M. Bowra, the “Nurse's Song” in both Innocence and Experience shows how “destructive forces” replace “childlike innocence” when experience intrudes on this innocence. He also associates the freely playing children on the green as emblematic of the “carefree play of the imagination when it is not spoiled by senseless restrictions.” In Experience, “imprisoning fear” destroys the liberty of the human spirit.

Northrop Frye, in “Fearful Symmetry”, identifies Nature as "a kindly old Nurse," and discusses the protective role of angels in the care of children. Frye explains that Songs of Innocence descends from pastoral convention with its "vision of a simplified rural existence." He also suggests satiric possibilities in pastoral as it "points up the artificiality of the court or city that it leaves behind." These ideas seem to be pertinent when we consider the “Nurse's Song” in Innocence as satiric pastoral.

The picture Blake paints in the “The Tyger” drives into the reader’s memory, the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, in some way must reflect its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger? In more general terms, what does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God, and what does it mean to live in a world where a being can at once contain both beauty and horror? Blake puts to the reader, the two dimensions of mortal man. The “tyger” is perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive, Blake's tiger becomes the symbolic centre for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world. Since the tiger's remarkable nature exists both in physical and moral terms, the speaker's questions about its origin must also encompass both physical and moral dimensions.

Interestingly, Blake creates the tiger as the mental picture of what the soul is. The beauty of the ‘tyger’ is just the one side and the violent nature of the same tiger, the other. So its violent nature betrays the beauty of the tiger. Again when the reader literarily sees the lamb on the one hand, and on the other the tiger, it reminds him that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and so lives him with the notion of duality of the soul and its implications. It also invites a contrast between the perspectives of “experience” and “innocence” represented here and in the poem “The Lamb.”

In the poem “The sick Rose” the rose exists as a beautiful natural object that has become infected by a worm. This depicts the entry of sin into the world. That is, the corruption that penetrated the beautiful, peaceful and graceful Garden of Eden. Also it depicts the literary rose, the conventional symbol of love. The image of the worm resonates with the Biblical serpent and also suggests a phallus. Worms are naturally attached to the earth and so are earthbound, and symbolize death and decay. The "bed" into which the worm creeps denotes both the natural flowerbed and also the lovers' bed. The rose is sick, and the poem implies that love is sick as well. Yet the rose is unaware of its sickness. Of course, an actual rose could not know anything about its own condition, and so the emphasis falls on the allegorical suggestion that it is love that does not recognize its own ailing state. This results partly from the insidious secrecy with which the "worm" performs its work of corruption--not only is it invisible, it enters the bed at night. This secrecy indeed constitutes part of the infection itself.

Nathan Cervo considers “The Sick Rose” as “one of the most enigmatic and baffling poems in the English language...” He reads it as a Christian allegory in which the Rose signifies the human soul, blessed by the gift of salvation, yet vexed nonetheless by sin the “invisible worm”, a connotation he believes Blake derived from Dante's Divine Comedy. “The worm is the Other,” Cervo argues, “and serves to existentialize the Rose,” to lend substance to her salvation and refute the notion of predestination. Cervo also sees the word "crimson," used with vaguely sexual connotation to describe the Rose's "bed" as a pun playing on its derivation from the Sanskrit words krmi (worm) and jan (generate.)

In this light of argument one would logically go beyond D. G. Gillham’s opinion that “The Sick Rose” is one of Blake's poems that specifically details the "sexual act and the sexual parts" (163), but that the reader must fill in the details based on personal experience (163). Gillham also posits that "The Sick Rose" offers a satire on "an unhealthy attitude to sexual love" (165). He further suggests that sex is approached positively in the poem because the worm, while "relentless and without pity, is . . . not furtive or mean" (165). Gillham claims that the line "O Rose, thou art sick!" reveals the speaker's concern, and that the "dark secret love" is a part of this concern. It seems that Gillham's perspective is a bit difficult to accept completely because the worm is still the destructive agent in the poem. He also identifies "The Sick Rose" as a less controlled poem than, for example, "The Rose Tree," and that it illustrates the trend of Experience for poems "to expose motives and impulses normally concealed" (172).

What Blake presents in this poem is the idea that beneath the beauty of the rose flower is the worm that gradually corrupts it unnoticed and eventually causes it to die. The Garden of Eden, with its beautiful flowers, fruits and everything else, had a serpent lurking around which eventually brought about the fall and death of man through sin. Again, the image of good and evil as complementary concepts that exist in the same soul sink deep in the mind of the reader.

In another instance, Blake plays with the imagery of light and darkness, in “The Little Blake Boy” to drive home, the message that what separates darkness from light is indescribably small or thin. Although darkness and light are contrastively very different, they are at the same time very close to each other. The contrast in the first stanza between the child's black skin and his belief in the whiteness of his soul lends poignancy to his particular problem of self-understanding. In a culture in which black and white connote bad and good, respectively, the child's developing sense of self requires him to perform some fairly elaborate symbolic gymnastics with these images of colour. So in other words good is not far away from evil.

The boy’s mother persuades him, according to conventional Christian doctrine that earthly life is but a preparation for the rewards of heaven. In this context, their dark skin is similarly but a temporary appearance, with no bearing on their eternal essence: skin, which is a factor only in this earthly life, becomes irrelevant from the perspective of heaven. Body and soul, black and white, and earth and heaven are all aligned in a rhetorical gesture that basically confirms the stance of Christian resignation: the theology of the poem is one that counsels forbearance in the present and promises a recompense for suffering in the hereafter.

Harold Bloom's book, in which "The Little Black Boy" is called "the best poem in the series," also carries his remarks that it is "one of the most deliberately misleading and ironic of all Blake's lyrics" (48). Bloom argues that the little black boy accepts all that he is told by his mother as truth, and that the poem thus demonstrates the "inadequacy of Innocence, of the natural context, to sustain any idealizations whatsoever” (48). Like Bloom, E. D. Hirsch also argues that the child in “The Little Black Boy” accepts his mother's argument that earthly life is a life of acute suffering. Hirsch thus views the mother as a “guardian-Christ,” the little black boy as “the guardian-Christ of the English child,” and "God as the ultimate guardian who comforts us through life and then mercifully releases us from it” (180-81).

This argument is convincing enough to show the extent to which Blake attaches importance to the relationship between God and His creation. In this line of thought Blake intends to conserve the divine attachment of creation to the creator – of man to God. This is the only hope of the orthodox Christian believer.

A critical look at the “Chimney Sweeper”, leaves the reader with the picture that it is essentially about innocence rather than being innocent in nature, as Blake chooses to employ a narrator who is clearly of a more experienced mind set in terms of being at least partially, if not entirely, aware of the deception and false hope, that is being fed to Little Tom Dacre by the angel of the poem. Blake uses phrases like ‘leaping’ and ‘sporting in the wind’ which at face value could be seen to be a glorious celebration of heaven in terms of the pastoral imagery. But beneath this lies Blake’s intention of exposing the capacity of the Christian religion to enforce the dangerous charges of cruelty and injustice, as the Angel (usually used as a symbol of divine guidance) is reinvented as an instigator of society's murderous fiction. Indeed, this is reflected in the line "if all do their duty, they need not fear harm", which ultimately reflects Blake's bitter indignation at the church's willingness to collude with other forms of tyranny to bring about the dire consequence of children being made victim to their own innocence.

This again takes us back to the idea that at any one point, man has the capability, no matter the circumstances, of manifesting its dual nature – that of good and evil. Even the church actively displays this phenomenon of the existence of good and evil as complements. This poem is a demonstration of youth and inherent innocence. The boy was sold almost as a baby and has learned to accept the life that was given him. What is worthy of note is that Blake in this poem is suggesting that the heart that sold this young boy to slavery and torture, is just the other side of the heart that manifests pity, peace, love as seen in “The Divine Image.” Unlike the one in Songs of Innocence, “The Chimney Sweeper”, in Songs of Experience is very dark and pessimistic. This poem also seems to be very judgmental and gives motives for everything, but unlike Song of Innocence, the sweeper in this poem does not free himself from his misery.

Blake paints a picture of the duality of the human soul through songs of innocence and experience to show how people in songs of innocence thought that everything was okay, but in Songs of Experience, they have their eyes open to the reality of human nature. The poem “Infant Sorrow” is not the just the separate opposite of “Infant Joy”. Rather the two may be read as the development of the two sides of the same human heart.  This line of argument ties with the opinion held by E. D. Hirsch who reads “Infant Sorrow” in terms of a paradigm of inverted Christian virtues seemingly derived from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He views the infant's apparent indolence as expressive of his or her transgressive self-assertion and energy, qualities he believes Blake lauds in him or her. He writes that, "the willful perversity of the rebellious infant in 'Infant Sorrow' is his mark of excellence and divinity." The child's "sorrow" is owing to the constriction of his energy which experiential maturity seemingly necessitate, the "repressive forces of the world into which he has thrust himself."

Hirsch reads "Infant Sorrow" as complementary to "Infant Joy," rather than contradictory. This point of view drives home the notion of the development of the good and evil components of the human soul which complement each other right from the inception and creation of the human being.  Hirsch views "Infant Sorrow" as "a highly affirmative poem" and values the child's resistance to parental authority as an exemplary expression of the human spirit. "Because the world is dangerous," he concludes, "the rebellious energy and self-seeking autonomy of the infant have positive val ue. We may then add that these qualities are bound to develop because they constitute part and parcel of human nature. The world is made up of human beings. The world will not be dangerous if men were not evil.

 Joseph Wicksteed's seminal “Blake's Innocence and Experience: A Study Of The Songs And Manuscripts "Shewing The Two Contrary States Of The Human Soul” largely on the basis of the poem's illustration, Wicksteed concludes that "Infant Joy" evokes a child's innocence not merely at birth, but at conception itself. In the etching, the flower inside which the mother cradles her child is equated by Wicksteed with the womb. It frames what he calls "the rapt moment of holy generation or conception." The angel figure in the scene signifies for him both the father's "life factor" and God's agent in a ceremony of "Annunciation" heralding the child's conception to the mother in a manner mirroring the announcement made to the Virgin Mary regarding Christ's birth in the Bible. Wicksteed also assumes, seemingly arbitrarily, that the respondent to the infant in the first verse is his or her father, and in the secon d verse, his or her mother

Robert F. Gleckner thinks that in “Earth’s Answer” The two symbolic acts of being lost and being found are quite different in innocence and experience. Both are possible in innocence, which means, then, that one can never be truly lost. In experience, however, one is never found, "experience is the state of being lost." In "Earth’s Answer," Earth is lost at the hands of God, but she, as the lost soul, cannot rely on an angel or God to be found, but, because she now through experience has self-identification and self-realization, she must rely on herself to be found and be free of her bondage (102-103). We must also retain that the evil develops and lead the the individual to level where he / she may not be able find himself. While good leads the individual to highs that he / she can communicated with the forces of nature and eventually makes the individual to manifest the attributes of God.

References

Frye, Northrop. “Treatment of the Archetype” English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism ed. M.H. Abrams. London: OUP, 1975.

Ambansom, S.A. Radiacal Romantics: A Study of Five English Romantic Poets Bamenda: ENS Bambili, 1995.

Hirsch, E.D. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to William Blake. Chicago: UP, 1964.

Holloway, John. Blake: The Lyric Poetry. London: Edward Arnold Publishers LTD, 1968.

Thompson, E.P. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and Moral Law. New York: The New Press, 1993.

Bloom, Harold . Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument . Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1963.

Cervo, Nathan. "Blake's 'The Sick Rose.' " The Explicator. Vol. 48, No. 4. Summer 1990. 253-254.

Gillham, D. G. Blake's Contrary States. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966.

Bowra, C. M. The Romantic Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1947.

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947.

Gleckner, Robert F.. The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1959.

About the Author

Tembong Denis Fonge, born on the 10/08/1968 in Fonki Village, Nguti South West Province of Cameroon. Educated in GSS Fontem, GBHS Buea, Ecole Normale Superieure Yaounde and the University of Yaounde I, where he obtained the DEA in English Literature and a Postgraduate Teacher’s Diploma. He is currently a research student in the Department of English University of Yaounde Cameroon.

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