Rossetti Manuscripts and Innocence and the Songs of...

Rossetti Manuscripts and Innocence and the Songs of Experience Innocence and the Songs of Experience, and the poems from the Rossetti manuscripts, are the poems of a man with a profound interest in human emotions, and a profound knowledge of them. (Grant, Pg 507) These two famous books of poetry written by William Blake, not only show mens emotions and feelings, but explain within themselves, the childs innocence, and mans experience. A little over two centuries ago, William Blake introduced to the English literary world his two most famous books of poetry: the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience. In his own day, he was widely believed to be quite mad, though those who knew him best thought otherwise.†¦show more content†¦Blake uses a fairly clever conceit in the last stanza to have the Piper manufacture a rural pen out of a hollow reed, rather then to pluck one from a bird, for it is a routine pastoral fact that pipes are made of hollow reeds; the pen, then, is thus a transformed pipe. And I made a rural pen, And I staind the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs, Every child may joy to hear. Clear suggests innocent and to stain clear water is symbolically to corrupt innocence, water being as clear and fluid as the air or cloud which are home to the child. Yet staind in one context may have moral connotations, while in another it may not. For instance, in church, one is not troubled by the thought of stained-glass windows? This is one example of Blakes ambiguities. Blake is filled with secondary and tertiary counter-meanings that lurk like quicksand or trapdoors underfoot, and an innocent reader of Blake must learn from experience to tread tiptoe through the primary level (which turns out not to be primary after all) and to leap and dance along all the others. (Ferber, Pg 5) Another example of this allegedly ambiguity is within the first stanza of The Shepherd: How sweet is the Shepherds sweet lot, From the morn to the evening he strays. The shepherd, who should be looking for stray sheep, has gone astray himself. This subversive