Last week in class we were introduced to the great
Romantic writer, poet, and artist William Blake and also to one of his most
acclaimed works, Songs of Innocence and
of Experience. The collection of poems reflects many of Blake’s own views,
as he divided the collection into two parts, the first set of “Innocence”
including poems about the state of being before knowledge and “the Fall” of
humanity in many times an ethereal state of childhood ignorance, and the second
set of “Experience” having poetic works based around a world full of painful
knowledge and experiencing the torments of everyday life. Blake uses the positive
and negative aspects of both perspectives to remain in a paradox of his own,
where both are right. As we explored more and more poetic works from Blake’s collection,
it became increasingly evident of how many of the thematic and philosophical
ideas of John Gardner’s Grendel can also be traced back to the 18th
century figure. Many of Blake’s ideas concerning the folly of both the path of
the innocent and experienced are exactly like Grendel observing the folly of
the ways of the Shaper and the Dragon, with the Shaper being the way of
innocence and ignorance and the Dragon being that of knowledge and the
embracement of a cold and bitter reality. Blake seems to delve into the paradoxical
opinion of these two opposing sides by writing poems in the two separate parts
that seem to fit with each other, starting with “Introduction (Song of Innocence)”
and “Introduction (Song of Experience)”. The opening poem for the first part merrily
starts by saying, “Piping down the valleys wild,/Piping songs of pleasant
glee,/on a cloud I saw a child,/And he laughing said to me”. From these first
few lines, much can be said about the true nature of innocence and tie it back
into Grendel. For starters, Gardner also among the first
few chapters explores the childhood years of the infamous monster of the
English language, a time when he and his mother were “one thing, like the wall
and the rock growing out from it” (Gardner 17). But like the little child in
the poem, he has no idea of the true nature of the world because of him being
stuck in the realm of childhood fantasy. And to make things worse, neither
Grendel nor the child seem to have any true thought the real nature of the
person they are looking up to. For Grendel, his mother is revealed to a brutish
and rather stupid creature who cannot even speak properly, and for the child,
the Piper referenced may very well be an allusion to the Pied Piper himself,
the man who led all the children of Hamelin away after not having been paid for
curing the city of rats, never to be seen again. On the other end of the
spectrum is the idea of Experience, having all the knowledge that allowed for naiveté
to thrive in the days of youth, but also serves as an overbearing yoke of
sorrow and woe and the true nature of the world. The time of Experience is
recalled in Blake’s poem with, “Hear the voice of the Bard!/Who Present, Past
& Future sees;/Whose ears have heard/The Holy Word/That walk’d among the
ancient trees” . Blake’s poem almost carries a tone of prophecy, and sounds
eerily like the all-knowing dragon that Grendel encounters in Chapter 5, who
tells the confused monster, “I know everything…the beginning, the present, the
end” (Gardner 62). Both the Bard in Blake’s poem and the Dragon of Grendel bring forth the opinion of
experience, showing the truth after one has taken from the “ancient tree” of
knowledge. While the truth is illuminated in both perspectives, the idea that
absolute knowledge is truly good remains in question. Ultimately, each should
strive toward Blake’s own personal paradox, where both Innocence and Experience
can come together and work to create a perfect balance of naiveté and
knowledge, blindness and sight, and life and death.
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