Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

Introduction: William Blake’s Vision of Experience

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , completed by Blake in 1793, while he was composing the Songs of Experience , includes the following lines:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear
to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow
chinks of his cavern.

This profound idea is not original to Blake. In its essentials, it is the same insight as that recorded in Plato’s metaphor of the cave in his Republic . It is even possible that the image of man seeing ‘all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’ may derive from the classical philosopher. Plato believed that ‘the doors of perception’ could be ‘cleansed’ by the kenosis of engaging in philosophical dialogue. By examining one’s received ideas and prejudices anew in the dialectic of an argument, the mind could, on occasion, be raised to an understanding of the true and the good.

Blake’s aim in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience is not dissimilar. Instead of actual debate, the manner in which the reader engages first with a vision of innocence , then later with one of experience , challenges preconceptions and received ideas with paradox after paradox, so that our ‘doors of perception’ are prized open. A key point about Blake’s doctrine of ‘Contraries’ is that both positions are necessary to a true understanding. This is made clear from the outset in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell : ‘Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.’ All of the three pairings he gives (and, by implication, all the other possible ‘Contraries’) ‘are necessary to Human existence.’ Accepting these contraries, Blake implies, and stretching our minds by combining paradoxical and contradictory thoughts, allows us to glimpse the ‘infinite.’

While this may seem a strange form of dialectics at first, it is interesting to note that there are actually numerous analogies to this mental process in the religious practices of the world – the use of koans in Zen Buddhism, for example, provides quite a close parallel. To see how it works in practice, however, it is necessary to examine Blake’s concept of experience in more detail.