in songs of experience blake reveals " ugly terrifying world"?

Answer 1

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience is one of the truly effective and captivating poetic cycles written in the English language (or, for that matter, in the Western world).

I'm not sure where you got the phrase "ugly terrifying world" for Experience, for it is not altogether accurate. Experience refers to what we think of as normal, everyday, human experience, seen realistically. Hence, it includes all the problems and evils of our "ugly terrifying world," but also it includes normal life: eating, drinking, living, breathing, sex, birth, growth, death, temptation, the fall, and the struggle.

Experience is a state of "contraries." We tend to see things as either/or: one way or another, and never the twain shall meet.

The best poem in the cycle to illustrate this basic condition of Experience is "The Clod and the Pebble":

"Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sang a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet;
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

In Experience there is selfless love (represented by the clod), in which one is totally submissive, allowing oneself to be trampled upon. Or there is selfish love (represented by the pebble), in which one demands submission, dominating and maintaining one's own independence. In the olden days, those would have been the respective roles of wife and husband. These are "contrary" views of love and life. In childhood, or Innocence, one is as yet unaware of these "contraries," and all is at peace. In true love or marriage, which Blake called by the term Beulah, or "married land," two become as one, and neither is the clod or the pebble, the purely selfless or the selfish, the submissive or the dominant.

Many poems in Songs of Experience picture children being inducted into the world of Experience, or of "contraries." For example, "Holy Thursday" ("Babes reduced to misery, / Fed with cold and usurous hand"), "Chimney Sweeper" ("They clothed me in the clothes of death, / And taught me to sing the notes of woe"), "The Nurse's Song" ("Your spring and your day are wasted in play"), "Garden of Love" ("And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, / And binding with briars my joys and desires"), and quite a few others.

Other poems in Songs of Experience depict human nature in a world of "contraries"; for example, degrading sex ("The Sick Rose," with its "dark secret love"), social conditions ("London" with its "marks of weakness, marks of woe"), psychology and religion ("Human Abstract," "A Divine Image"), and mythic or symbolic ("The Tyger" with its "forests of the night").

As "ugly" and "terrifying" as much of the imagery of Songs of Experience is, the world of Innocence is always implicit as the "contrary" of Experience. There is the naive innocence of the child, as yet unaware of the ugly "contraries"), the adult innocence of marriage or sexual love, the innocence of dreams or illusions, and the higher innocence of vision or creativity ("Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the lamb make thee?")

These "contrary" visions, implicit in Songs of Innocence and Experience, are ultimately developed more explicitly in Blake's later poems and letters as the four-fold vision:

"Now I a fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And three fold in soft Beulahs night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep." (Letter to Thomas Butts)

Experience, which Blake later calls Generation, is twofold vision. As one critic [1] has pointed out, "Men of twofold vision [or Experience] see the world dialectically, according to contraries." Such thinkers are often called "realists." However, "Threefold vision [Beulah or adult Innocence] enables one to recognize the contraries and see that they are not absolute . . . ." Such folk are sometimes called "romanticists."

What Blake does not deal with explicitly in Songs of Innocence and Experience are the two ultimate states of humanity. The lowest, or worst, of course, is "single vision, or Newton's sleep"; that is, the dogmatic vision of rationalists and empiricists in which all is reduced to what can be derived from a purely materialistic vision. Such single vision, for Blake, was eptimotized by Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. Tirzah, or Mother Earth, in the song of that title, "With cruelty didst mould my heart, / And with false self-deceiving tears / Didst blind my nostrils, eyes, and ears, / Didst close my tongue in senseless clay."

The highest, or best,state is fourfold vision, or human creativity, vision, or imagination. These two states Blake eventually will call Ulro (the lowest) and Eden (the highest).

Ulro, or single vision, is ruled over by Urizen ("your reason"); Experience or Generation, twofold vision, is ruled over by Tharmas (the hand, the body, or the senses). Innocence or Beulah is ruled over by Luvah ("lover" or passion, human emotion, empathy also faith). Eden (the creative) is ruled over by Urthona ("earth-owner," vision, imagination, or Spirit) called Los in the fallen world of Experience ("loss"). Blake's own poetry, of course, is an example of the work of Los, the fourfold vision, but working still in our world of Experience.

Remember that in the Introduction to the Songs of Experience, Blake gives us an explicit description of the singer's, or visionary's role.

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, and Future, sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees . . . .

The last quatrain of that poem tells the reader, a child of Experience, how to make use of this natural world of "contraries" in which we find ourselves: "The starry floor, / The wat'ry shore, / Is giv'n thee till the break of day."

So what you call this "ugly terrifying world" also provides us the images with which the imagination (Los) can construct a world beyond Innocence and Experience, Eden if you will, or "the break of day."

Read these songs carefully, and you may experience Experience as a visionary might, as a creator of "The Tyger," not a victim of a tiger.

Answer 2

i could might desire to declare that I even have skilled non secular Ecstasy, for the checklist ecstasy comes from the basis be conscious 'ex stasis' to stand exterior oneself. With that definition in ideas i could say that I even have had quite a few such studies, ones that individuals might label as Out Of physique studies, close to demise experience, previous existence reminiscence, Astral shuttle, Oneness and likewise the bliss attainable to us for the time of altered states of wisdom. All non secular phenomenon are puzzling to describe, depict and proportion by their very nature of direction. What i will declare is that states of non secular Ecstasy might look alien in case you do not bear in mind having skilled them (all of us have at it gradual had one so some distance as i'm in touch) yet while they are occurring we grow to be conscious that they're a element of our generic state of being, our very own complete human nature. now and lower back they go away us extremely joyful, now and lower back afflicted, yet continuously surprised.