ABSTRACT
Peter Ackroyd, Blake's recent biographer, began his work by declaring, "In the visionary imagination ofWilliam Blake there is no birth and no death, no beginning, and no end, only the perpetual pilgrimage without within time towards eternity." I Blake portrayed Innocence as a layered and fluctuating state. Between 1793 and 1818, various editions of Songs of Innocence were published, in which "no two copies ever contain[ed] the poems in the same order" (Ackroyd 118). Blake's decision to move certain poems from Innocence to Experience reflected his sense that the two "contrary states of the human soul" were fluid. He saw Innocence as a singularly fragile state that can only be approximated in its articulation-and then only in art, where it could be captured metaphorically in moments, almost like a still life. For, as Ackroyd said, "there is no birth and no death" for Blake but, rather, always the movement "towards eternity," Blake's higher innocence, the origins of which can be glimpsed in visions rather than fully realized in the real world. Nonetheless, through description of the shapes it takes in the real world, most directly seen in the figure of the child, we can approach its meaning for Blake in his best-known work, Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
