‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear as it is, infinite.’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 258) Comment on the value of reading Blake’s poetry through this proposition and support your argument with at least two poems.

Suspended between the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century and the early phases of Romanticism, William Blake belongs to no single poetic age. Only in the twentieth century did wide audiences begin to acknowledge his profound originality and genius. In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Blake stated that “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear as it is, infinite”. This suggests that the removal of social ideologies, class and racial constraints and direct and indirect oppression from an individuals life, they would then be faced with endless possibilities, opportunities and different ways of viewing the World and its occupants. ‘The Little Black Boy’1 and ‘The Chimney Sweeper’2 from Blakes’ Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience respectively, both which were written in the late eighteenth century demonstrate the nature of oppression upon an innocent and accepting chil

The cloud will vanish; we shall hear his voice,

“Blackness” to the child is problematised, so that the voice which is heard is not cynical but a voice of innocence which is being destroyed by an increasing consciousness that “blackness” in this eighteenth century English society is a mark of inferior ‘otherness’. This stanza supports this as well as displaying the master-servant relationship present between the two children of different races. The fact that the little black boy peacefully takes up his role of servant to the English boy is perceived ironical from the readers point of view when he then states “our fathers knee”, displaying the same common fatherly figure. This can be connected to the idea of God creating the wonderfulness of the lamb, then following up by creating ‘thy fearful symmetry’3 of the tiger addressed in the poems “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” also taken from Songs of Innocence and Experience respectively.

Blake employs the voices of “black” children to undermine the ideology and embedded structures of racial oppression operative in England in the late eighteenth century, but at the same time these voices also reinscribe traditionally accepted ideas of the time (slavery) through the innocent acceptance of oppression.

And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,”

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