Zac Hart Professor Bailey Eng. 260B 29 October 2015 Title William Blake’s Songs of Innocence is a collection of poems that all share similar motifs, symbols, and characteristics such as religion, God, children, the lamb, and innocence, or rather the illusion of innocence. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word innocent as “Doing no evil; free from moral wrong, sin, or guilt (in general); pure, unpolluted” and also offers another definition as “having or showing the simplicity, ignorance, artlessness, or unsuspecting nature of a child or one ignorant of the world”. Blake’s frequent use of children in his poems allows him to depict a seemingly innocent nature about them. However this “innocence” is simply a false bottom and is used as a means of satirizing various issues in society. For example, the poem “The Chimney Sweeper” criticizes the harsh working conditions that children in late eighteenth century London were subjected to. In “Holy Thursday” Blake criticizes the church and questions the true nature of religious people behind closed doors. In this essay I will be revealing how although these poems are meticulously …show more content…
Blake achieves this curtain of innocence by writing his poems in such a way that “compels the reader to reduce complex verbal associations to essential images, and consider them moment by moment, the method of the vision itself” (Bolt). However, closer analysis of the poems reveals hidden meaning and implications of the loss of innocence. The poems “The Little Boy Lost” and the “The Little Boy Found” appear consecutively and “admit with remarkable dramatic economy the inevitable division between father and son” (Dike). At first glance the poem “The Little Boy Lost” seems to be simply about a young boy who becomes separated from his