In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake explores these two sides of the human soul through two sections of poems. The first section features the poems of innocence, which are written from a childlike perspective and feature senses of faith, naive wonder, and optimism that characterize childhood. The second section contains the poems of experience, which are more cynical and even tragic. They feature suffering and doubt in the goodness of the world. The segregation of the two sections is meant to suggest the inevitable progression from innocence to the experience that comes with living in a fallen world.

Blake further emphasizes his point by having certain poems act as direct parallels of one another. Sometimes these poems even have the same titles, such as "Holy Thursday." In the Innocence section, "Holy Thursday" describes a group of orphaned children going to the cathedral to sing. They are well cared for and happy. In the Experience section, "Holy Thursday" is much darker: the orphans, who seemed cared for and content in the original, are shown as miserable, their singing in the church less music and more a "trembling cry."

The juxtaposition of these two poems allows the reader a glimpse at Blake's strategy for contrasting man's good faith and knowledge of the evils of the world. Both poems depict the same situation, but the Innocence poem, sweet as it is, remains ignorant of the full situation., while the Experience poem, in its knowledge of the injustice done to children, cannot glimpse any beauty in the children's singing at all.

In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," William Blake wrote, "Without Contraries is no progression." This perspective helps readers understand Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, a collection of poems in two parts. Poems from Songs of Innocence present life from a child's trusting viewpoint in which a benevolent God and kind people soften the rough spots of life. Poems that represent "Songs of Experience" were added later and released in the combined volume in 1794. They view life in all its ugliness and pain. To best reach the truth, Blake suggests, one must consider both sides of a topic. Several poems in the first section have matched counterparts in the second section.

"Holy Thursday" from Songs of Innocence portrays a group of orphans, led by the beadles, filing into St. Paul's Cathedral. Described as "these flowers of London town," they have a "radiance all their own." Likewise, the elderly men, "wise guardians of the poor," are presented favorably. However, in the counterpart "Holy Thursday," readers see a dark and cynical description of the same event. The orphans are described as "babes reduced to misery, fed with cold and usurous hand." Instead of using flowers as metaphors, Blake uses "bleak & bare" fields and "thorns," insisting that "it is eternal winter" in the lives of these children. This poem decries the fact that children should live in poverty and hunger.

Likewise, Blake juxtaposes "Infant Joy" with "Infant Sorrow." The first poem praises the blessing of a newborn baby, repeating "sweet joy" four times within the twelve lines of the poem. "Infant Sorrow" presents an angry, struggling, sulking newborn whose parents "groand" [sic] and "wept" upon his arrival. Certainly these two poems represent the "contrary states of the human soul" well: "I happy am," and, "Into the dangerous world I leapt."

By presenting these two poles of human life, Blake allows readers to enjoy the pleasures of life from the perspective of naive optimism while also acknowledging the pain that people endure from their own choices and from circumstances they can't control. The beauty of life is more attractive when juxtaposed with the ugly, and the ugly is more stark when compared to the lovely. Looking at both honestly should motivate people to strive to eliminate the bad and cultivate the good.

Blake explores the two contrary states of the human soul in his collection of poems called Songs of Innocence and Experience, which is subtitled "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." The two contrary states he examines correspond to the Biblical state of innocence before the Fall—before humans ate of the tree of Good and Evil—and the state that followed. After the Fall, humans began to live, as we do today, in the world of experience, which includes a clear knowledge of evil.

Blake sees the child's experience of the world as one of innocence, and he explores that world through a child's simple eyes. Some of the most wrenching poems, such as "The Chimney Sweep," depict children who are still innocent and trusting despite being exploited for gain in the most evil of ways.

Poems like "The Lamb" are innocent lullabies about a gentle world where an all-loving, protective God is identified with meekness of the baby lamb. Other poems, like "The Tyger," raise questions about why the God who created the lamb also created a beautiful but predatory animal like the tiger.

The poems are a shout out for a return to a more innocent state, and as we read them all through the lens of experience, we fear for the innocent children who do not know how cruel the world can be. We wish the world were a kinder place. Blake's poems thus raise the question of why we don't work harder to make the world a kinder place and more like paradise before the Fall.

The universal ideology of Blake constructs a view of human life that is even more complicated than what conventional binary thinking produces. Blake accomplishes this through his poetic investigation of the “two contrary states of the human soul.” Blake’s complication of the binary is not detaching the two states from one another, but in fact, creating a new unity.

Discuss the "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" as "contrary states of the human soul."

William Blake organizes his poems using two large categories—innocence and experience—that have numerous commonalities and differences. One might view experience as either a sharp departure from innocence or the accumulation of knowledge that gradually moves a person away from innocence. Blake, however, insists that some qualities of innocence, such as fresh apprehension of nature, are constant features of human temperament. Even a singular event or a small amount of experience, similarly, may bring disproportionately deep understanding. Experience can be a negative factor, as in loss of innocence through sin or corruption.

The childlike state in which each person has a direct connection to divinity is one important element. His appreciation for these qualities is conveyed in the related poems “The Shepherd” and “The Lamb,” including such aspects as the meekness of Christ. Experience encompasses the idea of a lapsed soul, who loses his way as he adds to his store of mundane experience. In both volumes, Blake sometimes presents companion poems on similar themes; those concerned with divine image, for example, address positive and negative features of society that are both God’s creations; otherwise, they could not exist.

Discuss the "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" as "contrary states of the human soul."

Well, the simplest answer to this question is that the two states of innocence and experience are captured in the two groups of poems, and the difference between these two states is emphasised by the relationship between the parallel poems. Innocence seems to be a condition that is very similar to being a child. As poems like "The Lamb" and "The Chimney Sweeper" illustrate, this childlike state is one in which the natural and human world is regarded without fear and where we are secure and have a home. We can also equate the state of innocence in Blake's work to that of being happy with our sexuality and with our bodies. The state of innocence in this way deviates significantly from any biblical parallels with the Garden of Eden.

The collection of poems, however, point towards the way that innocence as a state is not eternal, although we can do our best to cling on to it through beauty, poetry and love. As we move into adulthood with its accompanying responsibilities, duties and cares, the state of experience supersedes the state of innocence. However, Blake appears to make it clear that this progression is inexorable, we as humans exacerbate this transition through all kinds of harshness and lack of forgiveness politically, religiously and personally. Hence the famous phrase of the "mind-forg'd manacles" that dominates "London." Blake thus points towards the way that we enchain ourselves through our customs and traditions and through our own personal outlook on life. Through this phrase Blake points towards the forces of violence at work in society at large, but he also indicates that this is a process of internalisation as we accept these forces without question and as facts of life.

Discuss the opposing states of the human soul in William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience."

If you look at the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience, one of the most notable differences is the absence and presence of hope and the power of God's love. In the songs of experience, William Blake uses moods of gloom and despair. The contrast between the two

For example, in "The Chimney Sweeper" there is a poem version for both the song of innocence and the song of experience collections. The Chimney Sweeper in the Song of Innocence notes in the fifth stanza:

"Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy" (Blake).

This quote, after detailing the difficult life of a chimney sweep in the previous stanzas, notes that even though the boy "weeps" as a bald-headed boy, he knows that God will reward the small children in heaven after the little boys' deaths. There is hope for the small boys here. In the complementary poem, The Chimney-Sweeper in the Song of Experience, William Blake portrays those who employ the boys in a harsh job as being God-praisers. They go off to church and "make heaven of our misery" illustrating that there is something corrupt and gloomy about their faith. Belief in a caring God is what those who are innocent believe, those who have experienced life know better than to believe in such naive views.