ABSTRACT
Many readers approach Songs of Innocence similarly, as offering up speakers for emotional self-identification. The Wordsworthian, even Browningesque dramatic narrators that readers tend to construct out of the dislocated spirit voices of Songs of Innocence stand merely at the "bound or outward circumference" of William Blake's irony. Critics have documented Blake's debts to the hymn tradition of religious songs for children, children's reading chapbooks, and polyphonic choral music. Blake prolongs and modulates the act of speaking-through that the seventeenth-century poets typically depict as authoritative and final. Blake burlesques the self-centeredness, hysteria, and violence that result from the islanding of context and meaning. Blake is writing about actual people he knows, some as close friends, others perhaps as daily neighbors. Blake's constant misspellings, "percieve" and "recieve," provoke a similar double take as they defamiliarize the reader's perception and reception of the words heterologically. Blake's dialogism enables the reader to re-perform the Nurse's adult experience of the bliss of children's ignorance.
