Uzbekistan state university of world languages english philology faculty

CHAPTER II. THE PECULIARITY OF BLAKE'S POETICS
2.1 Features of poetics of early creativity - "Poetic Sketches", "Songs of Innocence", "Songs of Experience"
As we noted above, Blake's artistic vision was too innovative to be understood and resonated with by the people of the time, as Blake, like many great artists, was ahead of his era.
The strangeness of Blake's world is still not accessible to everyone, because Blake's poetic world is less focused on any norms, and even "burdened" with complex religious searches and revolutionary aspirations. Despite all this complexity, as Zverev notes, "Blake's poetry was brought to life by its time and, almost without exception, was a direct response to its events. It first expressed the longing for the unattainable freedom of spiritual existence, which became almost the central motif of European and American poets in the twentieth century⁸."
At the same time, Blake began with quite ordinary romantic poems collected in the collection "Poetic Sketches". Here are some examples of poems from this collection:
"O bright genius with wet curls,
Looking out of the washed-out windows of the morning!
You look angelic eyes akin
Our Western Island: it's waiting for Spring! " ("To Spring")
"Winter, close the diamond gate!
To the North, your gloomy shelter goes deep into the earth.
Do not shake it, do not rot the support with an iron chariot.
He can't hear you! Over the yawning abyss rushes heavily,
Raising your fearsome scepter and unleashing a flock of storms"
("To Winter").
After these invocations to the seasons, "Mad Song" appears in the same collection:
Like a fog, I'm floating
And in the cloud I cry.
I live at night
I'll disappear in the morning.
I'll turn my back to the east,
I will not be tempted by his bait,
For the light burns my brain,
Like molten wax
With a typically romantic dissonance between the nightmarish reality and the bright hopes of the author, because even behind the brightest, joyful verses of this youthful book, one can guess not openly expressed, but already visited by Blake, the feeling of the contradictory nature of the world, it’s inevitable and necessary disharmony, the ambiguity of its phenomena.
Blake's insanity is not an anomaly, nor is it a means to rise above the prosaicism of life, which was later glorified by Romantics, but the "normal" existence of an adherent of generally accepted moral ideas, unable to cope with reality.
"Songs of Innocence", created in 1784-1789, is a cycle of poems united by a system of cross-cutting images and symbols, poems of light, joyful, imbued with traditional ideas of Christianity. Faith in the Lord's mercy and divine protection is one of the main themes of the cycle. To get into the true meaning of the poet, it is necessary to take into account the two-dimensional nature of each poem: they clearly distinguish the cycle of uncomplicated, transparent poems, where images are used that are understandable to the child, but if you look at the poems from a different point of view, it turns out that each image also has a different, extremely deep meaning, and the child for whom "Songs of Innocence" were written is a Person in general. "Innocence" is primarily an instinctive, unconscionable belief in God and, as a result, closeness to God.
But knowledge is an inevitability for everyone, and it invades even the bright world of a child, and Blake writes "Songs of Experience"
"Songs of Innocence "(1789) and "Songs of Experience" (1793) were combined by the author in one book. Both cycles are distinguished by a clear ideological and artistic concept and composition. The first book depicts the bright world of childhood as if through the prism of infant consciousness, not yet tempted by life experience. "Songs of Experience" reveals a picture of the moral and social evil that destroys this naive idyll.
For example, the two poems "The Lost Boy" and, in contrast, "The Found Boy" as two chapters of the boy's terrible experience of learning:

1. 
   And exactly! Darkness on all sides, swamp dew
   

In vain he cried out, confused, only steam curled around him!

2. 
   He screamed, but then the Lord appeared: his own father,
   

He petted the foundling and took it to its mother.
Wandering with a cry in the great forest...
The meaning of the book, its essence - the idea of the inseparability of the spiritual experience of man, of its integrity, the idea of unexpected, even paradoxical, sometimes tragic, but the strongest ties that bind dream and reality, childhood and adulthood of humanity, its Ignorance and Knowledge.
Therefore, almost every poem in the cycle of Ignorance has its own correspondence in the cycle of Knowledge, and the relations within these pairs are relations of contrast⁹.
Lamb, white lamb!
How are you made, lamb?
Who brought you to graze
To our green spring valley,
Gave you a wavy down,
A voice that can't be heard?
Who is he, the sweet lamb?
Who is he, the sweet lamb? ("The Lamb")
Is it really the same power?
The same powerful palm
And she made a lamb,
And you, nightfire?
Tiger, O tigerthat burns brightly
In the depths of the midnight thicket!
By whose immortal hand
Created a formidable image of you? ("Tiger")
The poem "Lamb " or" Lamb", a hymn to meekness, gives special expressiveness to the images of the "Tiger" - it is a real bundle of fierce energy. But "Tiger" is not an antithesis, but a necessary complement: here it is, a crushing rage that-so it seemed to Blake - may be able to overcome the errors and evils of the world rather than Christian humility and love. And who knows if this energy will not be in demand by humanity, who decided to break through to the light of genuine truths?
However, the artistic content of the "Songs" is immeasurably more significant than their specific polemical task. Here, too, there is a human lack of freedom from the cruel real world. It could be overcome after the soul takes in the experience of Knowledge and transforms it in accordance with the ideals of spirituality that the human Imagination and Vision possess¹⁰.
There is an evolution of Blake's poetics in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. At first, the poet's attention was almost entirely focused on the extraterrestrial existence of the soul, on the idyllic Eternity, in" Songs of Experience " Blake radically changes his point of view and shifts his attention to the earthly reality.
Blake calls his vision " one-sided "and his ideas" limited " but not wrong. Experience does not deny Innocence, but gives it only a special place as one of the aspects of the diversity of the world. The world is designed to be perfect, but the human spirit lives in lies and pretense - this is Blake's new philosophy. And the task of a Clairvoyant Poet, a prophet, is to show people the way to the liberation of the Spirit.