Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is William Blake’s illustrated poetry collection placing contrasting ways of seeing human life beside one another. Poems such as The Lamb and The Tyger use apparently simple forms to pose very different questions about creation and human understanding. Other songs attend to children, labour, family care, and the suffering that respectable institutions can overlook. Blake’s printed designs make image and word part of the same work. The contrast between innocence and experience offers no automatic guarantee that one voice alone contains the collection’s complete meaning.