give me willium blakes 'songs of innocence' & 'ofexperience' imp ques & ans?

Answer 1

I see that you are new to Yahoo! Answers, and that your first four questions have all dealt with William Blake. But your have now arrived at a better question than any of your first three.

Instead of answers to your questions, you now ask for questions that you should be asking yourself. That's a step in the right direction. You are awaking from the naive innocence of childhood to the conscious inquiry of Experience. Now throw your heart into it and your imagination, and you will be on your way to the fourfold vision. (See my earlier response to your question, about the "ugly, terrifying world" of Songs of Experience. It isn't really ugly and you shouldn't be terrified.)

In "Infant Sorrow," Blake gives you his endorsement: a child who refuses to accept the bonds in which he finds himself, but "into the dangerous world I leapt."

Perhaps the subtlest and ultimately most inspiring of the Songs of Experience is "The Little Black Boy." I have spent years studying it and still have not deciphered all its details. But one of its messages is clear, albeit applicable on many levels: "And we are put on earth a little space, / That we may learn to bear the beams of love . . . ."

So as you make your way from Innocence through Experience, here are some questions you might ask of Blake:

(1) What are the most delightful images of innocence you see in Blake's poems (and in the world around you)?

(2) Now look at those images with the eye of experience. What potential problems do you see? (For example, what is likely to happen to those, woolly, bright, tender, meek, mild lambs?)

(3) What social, psychological, and economic problems do you see reflected in Blake's world (and in your own)? Remember, Blake's time was the era in which the French Revolution had fallen into tyranny, the United States had broken free of British dominion, but slaves were still being shipped to what had been the colonies, cities like London were becoming more dangerous and corrupt, child labor was evident and children were being mistreated, women were in subjection to men, men to the system, etc. Find signs of this in Blake's poems, and similar problems in your own.

(4) What roles do mothers play in the world of Blake's poems (and in your own) -- both beneficial and problematical?

(5) What images does Blake draw from nature, and how does he use them? (E.g., blossoms, lambs, roses, tigers, flies, sun-flowers, trees, lilies) Did he see beauty and growth? Did he see ugliness and decay?

(6) What images did he draw from the Christian scriptures, and what problems did he see with the institution of the church?

Now some more challenging questions, in order of difficulty:

(7) What aspects of Experience do you see foreshadowed in the Songs of Innocence?

(8) What aspects of Innocence do you see surviving in Songs of Experience (not being destroyed, but actually surviving)?

(9) What roles do you begin to see for creative persons (for example, singers, makers, artists) in the songs?

(10) What relationship do you see between the human and the divine in Innocence? in Experience? beyond Innocence and Experience?

Those are some good questions. Pick and choose among them. Or, better yet, make up your own.

Look for "contraries" among the poems; for example, "Infant Joy" and Infant Sorrow," "The Blossom" and "The Sick Rose," "The Divine Image" and "A Divine Image" (also "Human Abstract," and notice how "image" seems to be a positive word with Blake and "abstract" a sinister one), and the like.

You will see that not only do they express different views of our experience but also they require and reward different readers. "Infant Joy" is the quintessential song of Innocence: a sweet, simple, innocent shout of joy. "Infant Sorrow," on the other hand, is a subtle song of Experience, rewarding a cynical reader but also requiring a sensitive reader to see the child in so many dimensions simultaneously: (1) helpless, naked, (2) piping loud, (3) a fiend hidden in a cloud, (4) struggling and striving, (5) bound and weary, (6) sulking, (7) and all the while, leaping into a dangerous world -- not falling or being pushed, but LEAPING.

Find a copy of the poems that have the original illustrations reproduced in color if you possibly can. You'll begin to see even more "contraries"; for example, compare the design for "Infant Joy" in Songs of Innocence with "The Sick Rose" in Songs of Experience. In the first one, you will see the bright, colorful, open, rising flower, sheltering an innocent, almost fairy-like nativity, growing from a graceful, steady stem. In the second, you will see a dull, pale, drooping, clinched rose, growing from a twisted, thorny stem, hiding a worm, and who knows what else.

Have a good experience with Songs of Experience!

And if you grow interested in Blake, you will find many, many commentaries. I recommend you begin with the chapter on Blake in Sheldon Cheney's Men Who Walked with God, to see him in the context of other visionaries, such as Lao Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Plotinus, St. Francis, Meister Eckhart and (one of Blake's person progenitors) Jacob Boehme.

Answer 2

you know what - it is always polite to say "PLEASE!" - 'Give me' gets you nowhere!