Blake's Moods in Songs of Innocence and Experience"When you put two minds together, there's always a third mind, a third and superior mind, as an invisible collaborator."William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, "The Third Mind"We are primates who use symbols in search of the ultimate Truth. No poet understood and exploited this idea more successfully than William Blake, and this was due solely to his mysticism, to the fact that his doors of perception had been purified. What is his world like then? In the "Songs of Innocence and Experience" we are apparently presented with two different worlds, narrated by two different narrators. A closer reading will present several interesting correspondences between the two. For example, the meek "Lamb" becomes the fiery "Tiger". The former seems to favor syllogistic reasoning, a format of simple questions and easy answers in the midst of its catatonia, we are unnerved by what we as readers bring to the text, inserting our own extraneous (to the pastoral scene) ghosts of our experience. The latter poem, although it torments us with unanswered questions and majestic images, is, curiously, a more comfortable read as it better suits our perception. It seems that the open prairie and the dark forest belong to two completely different worlds, but it is my belief that it is not the Lambor the Tiger itself that makes the difference but the way in which they are treated, that is, narrated. Sweeper's poems seem to be about the same situation. What clearly changes is the narrative.
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