Paper Summary:

An extremely close reading of two poems in "Songs of Experience". The essay analyzes "The Garden of Love" and "The Little Vagabond." Read in isolation, "The Little Vagabond" might be interpreted as an indictment of liquor and the ways in which the formidable substance has degraded religious virtue. However, when read in context with "The Garden of Love," the poetic dialogue suggests that the Church has both created and nourished this schism of physical and spiritual. Examined as a cohesive pair, "The Garden of Love" and "The Little Vagabond" create a resounding indictment on the evolution of the Church and its effect on future generations.

From the Paper:

"William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience" depict a dialogue between "contrary states of the soul" which manifest in "shifting tensions" that are designed to reveal the inextricable interplay between the two qualities. (16) Although these two "states" are "contrary" the former characterized by resilient purity, the latter by irreversible bitterness, they interact with one another to produce syntheses in turn beginning a new dialectic. Growth emerging from "strife" generates direction, negating any notion of stagnancy within either contrary. (17) Jaded and melancholic in tone, the Songs of Experience offer a recurring theme of "blighted and embittered children." (17) The discrepancy presented between the mental and physical age of "blighted" children locates the remedy for the disjunction in the child's search to reunite these entities."

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