William Blake, please answer my question

The destruction of Innocence

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.