Songs of Innocence and Experience are a series of poems on how we see the world at different stages of our lives. The fact that Blake himself described the collection of poems as ‘shewing the contrary states of the human soul’, must be seen as an invitation to view the poems of Innocence and Experience in relation to one another.

Both collections contain poems of a similar title, such as The Chimney Sweeper / THE Chimney Sweeper and Nurse’s song / NURSE’S Song , and as the slight difference in title suggests; the poems in Songs of Experience contain an alternative perspective to the versions in Songs of Innocence.

Each collection shows comparative images of children, babies, religion and the general world in which we live, and how we see things differently when we are first in a state of innocence and when we reach maturity. The poems are presentations of a contradiction between innocence and experience, two areas of life through which we all must pass and are, in initial appearance at least, very similar to the genre of late eighteenth-century children's poetry, in terms of theme, title and simplicity. The subject matter of the poems would have been fa

An example of the ‘contrary state of the human soul’ can be found in the two versions of ‘The Chimney Sweeper’. Its seeming endorsement of the social conditions which allowed children to be used as sweeps, and thus its apparent contradiction of Blake’s known opposition to the trade in children makes it something of a paradox. On the simplest level however, it does hold out to those ‘who do their duty’ the hope of release and joy, even though this happiness is deferred to the future, leaving the present unchanged. Tom is also promised that ‘he’d have God for his father, and never want joy’. This hope and promise, flimsy and even unhelpful though they may be, contrast with the complete lack of comfort offered in Experience’s version. Here the sweep’s unfeeling sanctimonious parents have ‘clothed him in the clothes of death / and taught him to sing the notes of woe.’ Religion is seen to be firmly on the side of the parents who ‘are both gone up to the church to pray’. God himself is implicated in the child’s condition — ‘God and his priest and king, / Who make up a heaven of our misery.’ – Effectively God is transformed from father to oppressor.

Your spring and your day are wasted in play,

The poem has two stanzas, each containing five rhymed couplets. Repetition in the first and last couplet of each stanza makes these lines into a refrain, and helps to give the poem its song-like quality. The flowing l's and soft vowel sounds contribute to this effect, and also suggest the bleating of a lamb or the lisping of a child's chant.

In the Songs of Experience version, the narrator introduces the boy chimney sweep as no more than a 'little black thing'. The child is so young that he cannot even pronounce the traditional cry of 'sweep, sweep' which the chimney sweeps of Blake's time called out to advertise their presence as they walked through the streets. When the narrator asks him where his parents are, he simply replies that they have 'both gone up to the church to pray'. He then tells how they sold him to be a chimney sweep but still refuses to accept that they have done him any wrong.

And your winter and night in disguise.’

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