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Upon establishing innocence as a state of being in Songs of Innocence, Blake uses Songs of Experience to explore the ways in which innocence is inevitably lost over time as a result of experience.

One of the ways Blake explores the loss of innocence is by exposing the general vulnerability of children as manifestations of innocence. For example, in the poem “Infant Sorrow” the speaker, a newborn child, expresses the immediate pain they feel upon entering the world. “Into the dangerous world I leapt,/helpless, naked, piping loud,” he says, describing the experience of birth (53). His inherent purity leaves him vulnerable to all of the dangers of the world, and he instantly feels this struggle for the preservation of his innocence. “A Cradle Song” also explores this sense of vulnerability via the image of the sleeping child, who “in thy sleep/little sorrows sit and weep” (59). The infant’s mother watches over her baby and remarks on the “little pretty infant wiles” that creep in the baby’s resting heart (59). These wiles corrupt the peaceful vision of the sleeping child, which would otherwise impart a sense of serenity in the mother, as she can only focus on the things that spoil her baby’s innocence.

Other poems more specifically explore the way in which innocence is corrupted through the experiences of modern society. For example, in the poem “Holy Thursday” the speaker remarks on how the experiences of the charity school children, referred to as “babes” to emphasize their vulnerability, reduces them to misery (33). This misery is brought about by the “cold and usurous hand” that feeds them, meant to symbolize the extorting spirit of the charity school owners, and ultimately leaves them wanting (33). “The Garden of Love” focuses on the way in which the experiencing of organized religion corrupts innocence through the symbol of the chapel. When the speaker returns to the garden that he used to play in as a child, he sees the chapel now obstructing the green and the flowers that used to grow there. As such, the chapel, as a symbol for organized religion, inhibits the speaker’s ability to experience the pleasures of his youthful innocence. Then, in “London” the speaker looks toward the experiences of the modern city as a threat to innocence as “the youthful harlot’s curse” and the other dismaying sounds of the city “blasts the new-born infant’s tear” (51).

Blake further emphasizes the loss of innocence to experience by emphasizing the fleetingness of youth in several of his poems. In “The Angel” the speaker feels an ambiguous sense of anxiety that persists throughout the entirety of the poem. While this “witless woe” goes unnamed, it causes the speaker to weep all night and day, and hide from her angel her “heart’s delights” (44). When the speaker’s angel leaves, by the time he returns she has “armed [her] fears/with ten thousand shields and spears,” making it impossible for the angel to console her before “the time of youth was fled/and grey hairs were on [her] head” (44). Thus, the speaker’s fears caused her to lose her youth, and therefore her innocence, before she even realized what was happening. In the poem “Nurse’s Song” the speaker makes a similar remark on the fleetingness of youth as she listens to the children playing on the green. Reflecting on her own youth, an act that turns her face “green and pale,” she says of the children “your spring and your day are wasted in play,/and your winter and night in disguise” (41). The suggestion that the children are wasting their youth, coupled with the description of winter and night as waiting in disguise, implies that the speaker feels as though maturity and adulthood came upon her so quickly she did not have time to fully appreciate her youthful innocence before she lost it to experience.

The loss of innocence through experience is also accentuated through Blake’s repurposing of titles from Songs of Innocence for use in Songs of Experience. Several poems from the former collection, including “The Chimney-Sweeper,” “Holy Thursday,” and “Nurse’s Song” are reimagined in the latter as poems of the same name. The versions of the poems in Songs of Experience, however, are much darker than their innocent counterparts, marked by sorrow and tragedy. In doing so Blake asserts that innocence is necessarily lost to experience as the innocence in his original poems is literally lost or erased in their revised versions under the title Songs of Experience.