Audiobook · read by volunteers
Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Blake (1757–1827)
Read by Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Denny Sayers (d. 2015), Chip, Marian Brown, Gord Mackenzie · 47 chapters · 1 h 21
About the book
Two books of poems, bound together, and two ways of seeing the world. In Songs of Innocence, children play on the green, a lamb is blessed, and a piper plays a happy tune. In Songs of Experience, the same world looks different: a tiger burns in the forest of the night, a rose is sick, and the chimney sweep's cry is heard in the streets of London. William Blake placed these poems side by side to show what he called the two contrary states of the human soul. His lines are simple, musical and deeply strange, equally suited to a child and to a philosopher. Forty-seven short chapters, about an hour and a half, and five voices to carry them. A wonderful collection to dip into, or to hear from beginning to end.
Introduction
William Blake (1757-1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker who worked outside the artistic establishment of his day and was little appreciated in his lifetime. Today he is regarded as a major figure of English Romanticism. He engraved and printed his own books, illustrating them by hand, and combined image and text in a way that was entirely his own. The plain diction and ballad-like rhythms of many of the poems make them easy to follow by ear, and the pairing of related poems from the two books invites the listener to compare them.
Songs of Innocence and Experience, which appeared in its combined form in 1794, reflects his conviction that innocence and experience are “the two contrary states of the human soul”. Songs of Innocence contains poems either written from the perspective of children or written about them. Many of the poems appearing in Songs of Innocence have a counterpart in Songs of Experience, with quite a different perspective of the world. Many readers link the darker mood of Songs of Experience to Blake's disillusion with the course of the French Revolution. Blake also believed that children lost their innocence through exploitation and from a religious community that put dogma before mercy.
The recording has 47 short chapters, each titled with the poem and the section it belongs to, so it is easy to compare the pairs. It lasts about an hour and a half and is shared among five LibriVox volunteers.
Today the poems remain striking for their directness and their strangeness. They are short, memorable and endlessly rewarding.
Public domain
William Blake died in 1827: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text