ABSTRACT
Few people read Songs of Innocence and Experience in ways the poet intended. Most encounters with the poems, one may safely assume, will be through reading anthologised selections in black-on-white print. From Innocence to Experience is part of the process, for ‘without Contraries is no progression’: the fourfold vision requires the reconciling of body, reason, emotion and spirit. What Songs of Innocence and Experience in conjunction make possible is the dialectics from which the Energy of Eternal Delight is released. If Innocence is associated with pastoral then that may be said to be its glimpse of eternity, a glimpse which poems hold in perfect stasis. In Songs of Innocence the figures are normally upright or seated, with the children dancing or at rest in the laps of their mothers; a sense of sharing, of community is usually emphasised or implied.
