The Meaning of Night and Day in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience

            Late Tuesday morning I went dark on social media in order to spend the rest of the day and the next morning on my essay, since it would be due in 24 hours. I started out by typing my lecture notes from Monday though since it was on Blake and so was my essay and there might be something I could use. As I expected, I got sleepy around noon and so I slept till 13:30, had lunch and then tackled my paper with a fresh brain. I worked for a steady four hours until my prune got weary again. I lay down for half an hour to recharge and then kept going till bedtime, with a quick dinner break in between. It was mostly done by the time I went to bed but there were a few things I had to resolve.

< align="left" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;">             Since it was mostly done on Tuesday night and since so much other than writing my essay happened on Wednesday I’ll post my completed essay here:

                                             Daylight come and me wanna go home

                                                  The Meaning of Night and Day

                              in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience represents human consciousness as being divided into day and night. Within each of these he creates a pantheon of tropes with characteristics that he associates with one or the other half. His symbolism of the daytime uses sunlight and images such as bright clouds, white sheep, flowers and birds that are typical of daytime pastoral settings to represent the natural state of human existence, or the good part of man. On a tour of the dusk side of Blake’s twilight we will find some of his richest and creative imagery. He uses winter as a metaphor for poverty, and shows its coldest conditions by depicting its effect on the orphan children that work as slaves to clean the chimneys of the rich. Also infesting Blake’s nighttime of the human psyche we will find the worm that represents the negative aspects of lust that reach across the terminator into Blake's day to infect female sexuality as symbolized by the rose. Finally we will discover that Blake’s night nourishes a twisted urban jungle in which the king of beasts is the tyger of industry. The question that arises from the division between these two contrary states of what Blake calls “the human soul” is, are these two sides reconcilable? The answer will be yes and no. We are bound to darkness but we can draw nourishment from light.

The sun represents the inner warmth and light to which all good people aspire and so the mother in Blake's poem “The Little Black Boy” says that god lives in the sun. Its rays are like gracious tendrils of soothing, luminous love that make the skies happy and bring comfort and joy to all living things.  The merry activity of the children on the ecchoing green of the Earth begins with sunrise and then the sun presides over, nourishes and encourages their play. Even indirect and fading sunlight blesses their frolic, as they are allowed by the solar nurse to continue their sport between the golden and the blue hours of twilight till the light is gone. In “The Ecchoing Green” Blake is describing the history and future of humanity, which begins at the dawn of man because of the grace of the sun. Mankind persists and thrives without poverty and hunger only where there is sun in harmony with rain. When its light no longer touches us there will be no more happy activity on our darkening green planet and man’s poem will end.

The sun in Blake’s Songs of Innocence persists beyond the physical world and still shines upon the spirits of those liberated from their bodies, at least in the dream of a young chimneysweeper whose body is denied its light. The speakers in his poems “The Little Black Boy” and “Ah! Sunflower" believe that humanity should be consciously drawn to the solar rays. As the sun's light and warmth is mankind’s source it must also be its place of return. The absence of the sun induces sleep, but spiritually it is unconsciousness that brings about the paucity of sunlight. To not pursue the light of the sun is equated with death and to illustrate this two figures are shown. One is a youth in a grave of inactive sexual yearning and the other is a snow-shrouded virgin that is frigidly holding passion at bay. This young man and woman are shown rising from their respective places of burial to a natural life of seeking the warmth and light of the sun in each other.

The light of nature is essential to the growth and well being of humanity and Blake draws attention to this by showing what life is like for those that are denied the touch of those nurturing rays. He exposes the plight of impoverished children that are forced to bear the brunt of winter cold. Starved of sunlight by an uncaring populace and held back from nature in a parentless prison of urban circumstance, these waifs are denied the joys of singing and dancing on the echoing green. Instead they sleep on beds of soot, wear clothing of death and the black stains on their heads and faces depict the darkness of the night in which they live in the day while ironically cleaning chimneys that heat the homes of the rich. These innocents are the most extreme example of the vulnerable poor that crouch shivering at the cold and dark bottom of a heartless class system that feeds on night and generates winter as waste.

Winter and night go hand in hand in Blake’s Songs of Experience poems to represent the unhealthy environment created by negative aspects of human nature. The poem from this section called "Holy Thursday" declares that any place where children are poor has “fields ... bleak and bare, and … ways … filled with thorns”. Although these poems are set in the city, Blake is describing here a type of rural wasteland known as a heath. Poverty then is equated with the type of location that is essentially an untillable English desert. But he adds that it is also "eternal winter there", and so pauperism for children is not only symbolized as the worst place but also as the coldest time. Blake refers to the heath-in-winter image again in his Songs of Experience poem “The Chimney Sweeper", which paints a before-picture of a child that is poor in the snow on the heath but nonetheless happy because he has parental care. When that love is removed however, we have the after-picture of a child that has descended into deeper poverty with a landscape so barren that even the heath is gone and where he suffers as a blackened urchin bent alone against the hoary burghal onding.

This winter imagery is hinted at more subtly in the Songs of Innocence poem “Holy Thursday”. In this poem a multitude of children, like the chimneysweeper described above, are escorted by beadles that carry weapons “white as snow”. As these church police officers walk ahead, the children are symbolically made to follow winter and therefore to comply with a poverty that is perpetuated by the church. This child poverty, as the Songs of Experience poem “Holy Thursday” indicates, is a land of eternal night.

Night in Songs of Experience is not only engendered by poverty but lives in symbiosis with a variety of other destructive passions, or “delight chained in night". These facets of negativity are presented, through the use of nighttime symbols drawn from the natural world, as coming from a part of human nature. One example is the worm that inflicts illness on the rose. The rose in Blake's symbolism as shown in “My Pretty Rose Tree”, is female sexuality. The speaker is offered the flower of sex by a beautiful woman but turns it down because he has a rose tree at home in the form of a pretty wife. But like “The Sick Rose” some of these flowers have been afflicted with the curse of venereal disease from the phallic worm that flies in the night as it carries the infection from blossom to blossom. The sex trade worker has passed the worm onto the husband who in turn transmits the curse of an incurable and potentially deadly pox to his own pretty rose tree. The worm is invisible because of the undetectable nature of syphilis, because of its symptoms being concealed by the carrier and because of the dark secrecy of the husband that has brought the worm with him on his return from flight to his secret love of the young “harlot” of the London night.  

Night in Blake’s imagery is not bound by chronological time but is rather a caliginous aspect of the human mind. This homo sapien darkness sows the seeds of its own jungles of trees of mystery where terrible creatures like the worm thrive. But at the top of this food chain of hominin horror is the deadly tyger. The habitat of this creature is not the night of the forests but rather "the forests of the night" and a forest that is of the night would not exist in the light of day. To be “of” something is to be part of it or to come from it and so these jungles are not fixed locations, but rather negative spaces generated by the always adumbral part of man’s psyche.

Although Blake’s illustration of “The Tyger” is clearly modeled after the panthera tigris, the name of this creature is spelled differently to distinguish it from the cat species of Asia. The tyger is man-made and created with the force of shoulders, dread hands and feet to assemble its working parts. Verse four uses entirely industrial terminology to speculate on the construction of the beast. This language of the blacksmith’s tools of hammer, furnace, anvil and clamp are metaphors for the process of constructing a tyger that is the embodiment of the predatory side effects of the industrial revolution. One example of these is the need for taller buildings with longer, narrower chimneys that required smaller people to clean them. The readiest supply of diminutive humans to enslave for this purpose were the very young, and so the result was that the industrial tyger effectively ate the children that crawled inside of its maw.

Blake’s speaker wonders if the same nature that made the lamb also made the tyger or if it was a different and contrary nature. Another poem, “A Divine Image” confirms that it was human nature that gave the tyger its genesis and lit the artificial light that makes it burn so brightly. The tyger’s brain was heated in the human face, or human character, which is a sealed furnace. The poem completes the industrial analogy by explaining that the human heart is the flame in the mouth of the furnace and the human form with its shoulders, hands and feet is the fiery forge that shaped the tyger’s brain. Indeed, if one looks at Blake’s illustration for this poem one can see that the eyes of Blake’s creature are round like those of a human being rather than oval like those of a tiger.

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience uses metaphors taken from the nature of nighttime to represent the facets of human nature that work against the natural world. It in turn adopts pastoral symbols from daytime to depict humanity’s innocent nature. But is it possible for us to cross into and live in the sunlit world of the Songs of Innocence and to eschew the darkness of the night and winter of his Songs of Experience? There is no harmony or reconciliation between the two sides, as although the light of natural happiness must be continuously reached for, we have in our physical nature an entity that generates its own psychological midnight. In our brain grows, as it did for the first man, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and so the darkness of psychic nighttime is in our DNA. Of free will, a hybrid of the voices from the two books might say that we have the ability to access our innocent nature that pipes down the wild valleys with glee, but we must do so from where we are rooted in the darkness and can only turn towards the light like the sunflower.