37 minAudiobook4 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when childhood wonder meets a world of hunger, fear and cruelty?
William Blake sets two ways of seeing side by side in this collection of short poems. Songs of Innocence opens with a piper, a valley and a child on a cloud who asks for a song about a lamb. Play and trust fill this world, but shadows fall across it too.
Songs of Experience answers with anger and doubt. Its opening Bard calls to the fallen earth, and Earth speaks back. Across the collection, The Lamb faces The Tyger, while paired versions of The Chimney Sweeper reveal different views of suffering. Blake asks you to feel both innocence and experience, without choosing a simple winner.
What you’ll discover
- Wonder with a shadow Meet children, lambs and pipers in poems where trust does not keep suffering away.
- Two ways of seeing Explore innocence and experience as contrasting views of the same troubled world.
- Poems that answer back Read the paired Holy Thursday and Nurse's Song poems for echoes across the divide.
- A child's hard world Hear the small chimney sweeper whose father sells him into work and soot.
- Music in short lines Read aloud to feel the strong beats, simple rhymes and echoes between poems.
Who will love it
You will love this book if you enjoy short poems with simple music, if you like seeing one idea from two sides, or if you read poems aloud to children or friends.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Innocence sings of lambs, play and care
- God and kindness live close to children
- Even in Innocence, hardship shows through
- Experience asks harder questions of the same world
- The best-known poems of Experience: tiger, rose, garden
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Canciones de inocencia y de Experiencia
by William Blake · 1794
A piper, a lamb and a tiger sit side by side in poems that see one world through two pairs of eyes.
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In short
Why does a lamb sit beside a tiger in one small book? Songs of Innocence and of Experience gives you shepherds, sweeps, roses and tigers, and shows how the same subject changes when the viewer does.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Innocence sings of lambs, play and care
The first set opens with a piper in the valleys who meets a child on a cloud. The child asks for a song about a lamb, and then asks the piper to write his songs in a book so that all may read. The poet makes a pen from a hollow reed, and the collection begins.
The poems that follow are bright and trusting. In The Shepherd, the keeper hears his flock's calls, and the sheep know when he is near. In The Echoing Green, children play until sunset while Old John laughs with the old folk, and the little ones gather round their mothers' laps, ready for rest.
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What is Songs of Innocence and of Experience about?
It is a pair of poem collections by William Blake. Songs of Innocence views the world through trust and play, while Songs of Experience views the same world through awareness of suffering, rules and power.
What does The Tiger mean?
The poem asks who could make a creature of such fierce beauty. It sets the tiger against the lamb and leaves the question open, inviting wonder about the nature of creation.
Who are the chimney sweepers in the poems?
They are the poor boys sent up London chimneys to clean them. Blake writes about them twice, once in each book, to show a child's hope and then a child's hard treatment.
The author
William Blake
1757–1827 · English poet and artist
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. He was born in London in 1757 and died there in 1827. He also lived in Felpham, Sussex, from 1800 to 1803. He published Songs of Innocence in 1789 and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1794.
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