William Blake’s Innocence and Experience: The Lamb and The Tyge

William Blake, one of the leading figures of Romanticism in the UK, is a highly symbolic poet and his poetry is rich in symbols and allusions. Almost each and every other word in his poems is symbolic. His simple style is mainly accomplished through parallelism, a simple rhyme scheme, repetition of simple words or phrases, uses of opposite words. His style is simple but rich with recurring symbols. In his major work Songs of Innocence and Experience, there is hardly any poem which does not possess a symbolic or allegorical meaning Nature and human nature, animals and plants, opposite states in human spirit such as good and bad, or the status of innocence and experience are portrayed as symbols of deep forces. The purpose of this paper is to show this simple but strong style of Blake by examining The Lamb and The Tyger poems from The Songs of Innocence Experience collection. These two poems are intended to be read together so that the paired poems comment on each other. These poems present a very simple structure and highly individual use of symbols. With the analysis of the symbols we can have a deeper approach necessary to understand Blake's ideas. It is concluded in this paper that these poems are two of the most prominent examples which are often juxtaposed when teaching his work to demonstrate his observations about the power and contradictions of a creator who could create both such meek and fierce creatures. One could argue that these animals also symbolize contradictions in human nature, especially since Blake and his contemporaries believed in Transcendentalism or the idea that God exists within all living things.