1042 William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience Part 1 of 8

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Many attempts have been made to set Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to music, including classical composers, William Bolcom (1984), Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and folk singers Greg Brown (1987), and Finn Coren. The attempt I am most familiar with is by hip poet, Allen Ginsberg, who accompanied himself on harmonium on his 1970 recording. • As a lover of Blake's poetry I decided to try recording the complete collection of poems, set partly to original music and partly to adaptations of folk tunes. It is presented here in eight videos, with some help from my sister, Annette, also a lover of Blake, and my nephew, Lachlan. • William Blake (1757-1827), now famous for his unique poetic and artistic vision, was not recognised in his own lifetime. His incredibly rich and imaginative poetry expresses a romantic and mystical view of the world, and, though he loved the Bible, an extreme hostility to established religion and the conventional view of marriage, which earned him a reputation for madness or at least eccentricity. • Blake believed Innocence and Experience were the two contrary states of the human soul, and both essential for life. The poems in Songs of Innocence either express a child's point of view or are about children. Many have a matching poem in Songs of Experience , giving a different and darker perspective.Though Blake believed children needed to become experienced, he blamed social exploitation, such as child labour, and dogmatic religion for their loss of innocence. • 1. Introduction - Songs of Innocence (with Annette and Lachlan) • 2. The Shepherd - Songs of Innocence • 3. Introduction - Songs of Experience • 4. Earth's Answer - Songs of Experience • 5. The Echoing Green - Songs of Innocence • 6. The Garden of Love - Songs of Experience • Blake was very much aware of the irony of presenting songs, basically ephemeral because of their oral nature, not only in written form, but elaborately engraved. His Introduction to The Songs of Innocence seems to cast doubt on the Romantic notion that the spoken voice could be truly captured in writing. The three instructions given by the child to the piper - to play his pipe, to sing his songs, and to write them down - implies a descent from the pure essence of music, through singing, still spontaneous but restricted by language, to the written word, which, once created, can exist on its own without the need for a human being to bring it to life. The act of writing itself, it is suggested, leads us away from nature to experience . • The song of The Shepherd is a simple description of the shepherd's joyful relationship with his flock, obviously a reference to the love of God in the eyes of an innocent child. The image of people or animals guarding their children is a major motif in these songs. • Whereas the Introduction to Songs of Innocence presents the song-writer as a piper, the Introduction to Songs of Experience shows him as an ancient bard, asking the sinful earth to return to God. Whether he is a benevolent prophet weeping for the fallen world or a jealous tyrant, he does not represent Blake, who values the world of experience as an essential part of life. Rather, he is Urizen, a figure who turns up many times in Blake's works. • The Introduction is followed by the complex song, Earth's Answer. Earth perhaps represents the world of experience. Whether she should take the bard's advice or try to remain free in her fallen state depends on our interpretation of the bard's motives in the Introduction. She seems to see herself as imprisoned by his jealousy in a world of darkness. • The Echoing Green presents a day in the life of a group of children playing from sunrise to sunset. The cyclic nature of the song is reinforced by the old folk who watch the children and remember playing on the Green themselves as children, so the daily cycle is a metaphor for the cycle of life from birth to death. The image of the children returning to their mothers at the end of the day on the darkening green suggests the joyful return to God when life is over. • The Garden of Love shows that the natural Eden-like setting for the children's innocent play has been destroyed by the institutions of organised religion, with its rules and restrictions. We find the gates of the chapel were shut / And 'Thou Shalt Not' writ over the door, and the final lines beautifully express this restrictiveness not only in the imagery, but also In the tight internal rhymes: Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds / And binding with briars my joys and desires . The priests have turned the Garden of Love, where I used to play on the green, into a garden of punishment and death, where the flowers have been replaced by graves. • My website: https://raymondsfolkpage.wordpress.com

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