Tuesday, February 12, 2013

What is true?

As I was reading the Songs of Innocence and Experience, I just had this replaying thought of innocence pounding in my head matching to the drumbeat of a song I was listening to. Clearly, this is a theme that is evident in the poems. It is even in the title, but the twists that Blake uses with innocence caught me off-guard with both of the chimney sweepers. At first, I thought that the child in the Songs of Experience was the depiction of innocence. After all, that's how most children come into the world, innocent, naive and free from the troubles and the hardships of life, but then I saw the depiction of experience and innocence in the Songs of Experience being stripped from his innocence by his parents so that he may know the woes of the world. It was as if they were saying that innocence can only be truly innocence if taken away first. This is seen in both poems. In the Songs of Innocence, the chimney sweepers endured great hardships and were near death cleaning the chimneys. These were but small children forced to do the hard labors of man. They had no one to protect their innocence because it was taken away from them forcefully. Yet in both poems, it was God and heaven, the holiest of holies,  that brought back their innocence that had been stolen from them. Innocence was eventually returned to them but only after death and only after hardships. I thought to myself, could this truly be what innocence is? I always thought that innocence had always been that pure untouched spirit. That word untouched was the key to innocence. You had to be untouched by the deeds of the world; but in these poems, innocence was found after trauma, after experience, after being soiled so what is innocence after all? It's a fragile state of being, but once broken, can it really be brought back to its pure state even after death? Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps, this was just the hope that the chimney sweepers had to hold onto through their hard times as slaves to keep them going, that someday they would eventually return to their blissful state in heaven when they are children again without care in a world full of blissful innocence under the arms of their God once more.

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