초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Kyungsoo LeeBlake’s Songs of Experience, written in the early 1790s, reflects both the tyrannical and oppressive atmosphere of contemporary English society and the revolutionary hope given mainly by the French Revolution. In fact, Blake’s world of Experience is a very horrible one: a world of social, political, and psychological horrors, sickening human soul. But Blake’s ‘bardic optimism’ underlies the horrible world of Experience throughout. Such an optimism is firmly rooted in the poet’s ‘vision of paradise’, cherished and held from his happy boyhood in pre-Industrial England.In the opening poem, “Introduction”, the Bard prophesies the Earth’s prospective liberation, while in the closing poem, “The Voice of the Ancient Bard”, he declares the Earth being liberated at last. In between the two poems, we meet many revolutionary personae or Blake’s “Orcs”: the poor children of charity, the chimney-sweeper in clothes of death, the hapless soldier sighing against the palace walls, the harlot cursing the new-born infant, the little vagabond criticizing the cold church, the little boy burned to death, and the ‘tyger’ burning bright with revolutionary energy. All these are Blake’s potential warriors of liberation. Moreover, the two “Little Girl Poems” give us something of a vision of the liberated Earth, in which beasts and men live happy together in ‘higher innocence’. The profoundly optimistic poet implied in the poems invites us to read ‘a vision of liberation’ out of the heart of darkness of the Songs of Experience. The process of reading Songs, a profoundly rewarding one, enables us to take a step forward in liberating ourselves and the world in which we live.
