Yet here, below the dim, twisted roots of the Tree of Physical Being, whence the embryo Man was plucked like a mandrake, is the house of the worm. “I have said to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister,” quotes Blake enigmatically, beneath this leprous dream of mortality. But the enigma has a solution, for the worm at least destroys that body of generative and divided nature to which it is itself so nearly akin, and which has cramped and imprisoned eternal Man while on earth. So that we may be grateful to the worm in the end, for
Weaving to dreams the sexual strife,
And weeping over the web of life.
I have quoted an illuminating phrase here and there from the lines which Blake wrote and called the Keys of the Gates of Paradise. These, however, are but fugitive hints and thoughts suggested by the plates, and not in any real sense “keys” at all. Blake leaves each man to unlock the innermost mystery of those designs for himself. They are steeped all through in his own peculiar hues of thought, subjective to the very verge of the subjectivity allowable to art, but each of them exhibits that pictorial sense without which, however poetical and rare the meaning expressed, they could have no raison d’être—no artistic right to exist. They induce the mood which assists us to their sympathetic comprehension.
After the “Gates of Paradise,” Blake began the production of the London “Prophetic Books,” but we will consider these in the next chapter, and will conclude this early phase of Blake’s work in book making by the consideration of the “Songs of Experience,” which appeared in 1794—five years later than the “Songs of Innocence.”
Again we take up the little book which was the first we handled in the Print Room, for the “Songs of Experience” are bound with the “Songs of Innocence.” The Museum copy bears the double title on the first page as well as the two separate ones, which occur appropriately before each book. Into this first plate, with its kindling title flashing across the page—“Songs of Innocence and Experience showing two contrary states of the human soul”—Blake has wrought some of that intense and passionate feeling which makes the work so valuable as much psychologically as artistically.
Two energetic and expressive figures, a male and a female, symbolize Innocence and Experience, while flames of Desire and Aspiration burn fiercely around them, leaping up to lick the letters of the title, which lie on a ground of flickering and fainting colour.
In the “Songs of Innocence,” the marriage of the poems and designs was complete, and matter and form (poetic and artistic) attained an almost complete identity.
Here, however, the case is somewhat different, the task to be accomplished not being so easily achievable, for the mood is less lyrical and more mystic.
Experience is a hard teacher concerned only with this material life and its limited conditions, and sets itself against the Innocence which retains, in Plato’s phrase, “recollections of things seen” by eternal man before generation here. Experience has nothing to do with vision, but only with facts, and it deals with the results of concrete experiment; never with the flashing spark of heaven-sent inspiration.
Thus the “Songs of Experience” are of far less simple mood and single utterance than their bright forerunners. Something of the remorselessness of experience has passed into these lyrics—for lyrics they still are, though Blake has lost the spontaneity and felicitous gush of melody which came from him so naturally, so rightly, six years previously.