INNOCENCE/EXPERIENCE

Wikipedia Commons

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Copy Z, Plate 32

Quoting from William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Edited by Andrew Lincoln:

Introduction, Page 10

"The Songs of Innocence and of Experience rarely offer simple choices - as between moral absolutes - but tend to emphasize the relativity of particular images and points of view. 'Mercy, Pity, Love and Peace' can reveal the innate divinity of all human life, or mask the selfishness of the natural heart. To accept the one view and refuse the alternative would be to turn away from an unpleasant truth or to accept a reductive view of human feeling. Some poems contain contradictory views within them, and as we shall see, Blake's technique generates ambiguities that repeatedly complicate interpretation. Few books offer such a challenge with such a disarming appearance of simplicity."

When I learned that Bono and U2 had named their tour in 2014-15 Songs of Innocence and had followed up with Songs of Experience in 2017, I wanted to learn the connection between Bono and Blake. They topped it off with a combined tour Innocence and Experience in 2018.

Here is what Bono had to say in an Interview with Rolling Stones:

What are the common themes that tie the songs on Songs of Experience together?
"I try not to talk about William Blake too much because it sounds pretentious quoting such a literary giant but it was his great idea I pinched to compare the person we become through experience to the person who set out on the journey. If you’re talking about innocence, you’ve probably already lost it but I do believe at the far end of experience, it’s possible to recover it with wisdom. I’m not saying I have much of that but what little I have, I wanted to cram into these songs. I know U2 go into every album like it’s their last one but even more this time I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt. So a lot of the songs are kind of letters, letters to Ali [wife], letters to my sons and daughters, actually our sons and daughters."
...
And one that I didn’t realize until too late that I was writing to myself, “It’s the Little Things Give You Away.” In all of these advice type songs, you are of course preaching what you need to hear. In that sense, they’re all written to the singer. One other piece on Blake, I don’t know if I’m explaining too much here but the best songs for me are often arguments with yourself or arguments with some other version of yourself. Even singing our song “One,” which was half fiction, I’ve had this ongoing fight. In “Little Things,” innocence challenges experience: “I saw you on the stairs, you didn’t notice I was there, that’s cause you were busy talking at me, not to me. You were high above the storm, a hurricane being born but this freedom just might cost you your liberty.”

At the end of the song, experience breaks down and admits his deepest fears, having been called out on it by his younger, braver, bolder self. That same conversation also opens the album with a song called ”Love Is All We Have Left.” My favorite opening line to a U2 album: “There’s nothing to stop this being the best day ever.” In the second verse, innocence admonishes experience: “Now you’re at the other end of the telescope, seven billion stars in her eyes, so many stars so many ways of seeing, hey, this is no time not to be alive.” It’s a chilling moment – in the chorus I was pretending to be Frank Sinatra singing on the moon, a sci-fi torch song “love, love is all we have left, a baby cries on the doorstep, love is all we have left.”

Here is a quote from Hopeful Symmetry: A Blakeian Look at U2’s Songs Of Experience:

"But as with U2’s Songs of Innocence, and much of U2’s music, out of the darkness comes light.  Joyful defiance.

You see now why we cry: the raw honesty of the letters to loved ones, the thought of losing Bono, the thought of losing things we hold dear – like freedom, democracy… the empathy for what Bono might have gone through during and after his scare, the empathy with refugees. This album is an emotional juggernaut.  It hits you with all the feels…"

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Bono sings Let your love be known

It seems clear to me that Blake's goal was that readers of Songs of Innocence and of Experience not approach the poems as an intellectual exercise. Although the poems can yield much insight to the intellect, they speak just a powerfully to the emotions and to the Soul or Imagination (to use Blake's term.) Symbolic language necessarily connects differently to each mind that it enters according to the gifts of the beholder. It is not surprising that a musician responds to the Songs as an intuitive, emotional experience. 

Bono and U2 seem to have assimilated Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and produced in their own media and style, groups of songs based on themes and techniques used by Blake. But the musicians work is directed toward involving the audience in emotional responses. Bono uses what he is familiar with, his own life experience, to drive home his feelings of sorrow and joy, anger and delight, fear and trust. Blake wanted to show the two contrary states of the human soul; Bono aims to do the same. As rock music, innocence and experience become insistent and visceral.    

Jerusalem, Plate 91, (E 251)
"Go, tell them that the Worship of God, is honouring his gifts
In other men: & loving the greatest men best, each according
To his Genius: which is the Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other
God, than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity; 
He who envies or calumniates: which is murder & cruelty,
Murders the Holy-one: Go tell them this & overthrow their cup,
Their bread, their altar-table, their incense & their oath:
Their marriage & their baptism, their burial & consecration:
I have tried to make friends by corporeal gifts but have only    
Made enemies: I never made friends but by spiritual gifts;
By severe contentions of friendship & the burning fire of thought."

Jerusalem, Plate 53, (E 203)
"loud the Furnaces & loud the Anvils          
Of Death thunder incessant around the flaming Couches of
The Twentyfour Friends of Albion and round the awful Four
For the protection of the Twelve Emanations of Albions Sons
The Mystic Union of the Emanation in the Lord; Because   
Man divided from his Emanation is a dark Spectre                 
His Emanation is an ever-weeping melancholy Shadow
But she is made receptive of Generation thro' mercy
In the Potters  Furnace, among the Funeral Urns of Beulah
From Surrey hills, thro' Italy and Greece, to Hinnoms vale.
PLATE 54
In Great Eternity, every particular Form gives forth or Emanates
Its own peculiar Light, & the Form is the Divine Vision
And the Light is his Garment This is Jerusalem in every Man
A Tent & Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness Male & Female Clothings.
And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of Albion" 

Four Zoas, Night I, Page 13, (E 308)
"But purple night and crimson morning & golden day descending  
Thro' the clear changing atmosphere display'd green fields among
The varying clouds, like paradises stretch'd in the expanse
With towns & villages and temples, tents sheep-folds and pastures
Where dwell the children of the elemental worlds in harmony,     
Not long in harmony they dwell, their life is drawn away    
And wintry woes succeed; successive driven into the Void
Where Enion craves: successive drawn into the golden feast

And Los & Enitharmon sat in discontent & scorn             
The Nuptial Song arose from all the thousand thousand spirits 
Over the joyful Earth & Sea, and ascended into the Heavens
For Elemental Gods their thunderous Organs blew; creating
Delicious Viands. Demons of Waves their watry Eccho's woke!
Bright Souls of vegetative life, budding and blossoming      
Page 14
Stretch their immortal hands to smite the gold & silver Wires
And with immortal Voice soft warbling fill all Earth & Heaven.
With doubling Voices & loud Horns wound round sounding
Cavernous dwellers fill'd the enormous Revelry, Responsing!
And Spirits of Flaming fire on high, govern'd the mighty Song.   

And This the Song! sung at The Feast of Los & Enitharmon"

Four Zoas, Night I, Page 12, (E 307)
"The Earth spread forth her table wide. the Night a silver cup
Fill'd with the wine of anguish waited at the golden feast
But the bright Sun was not as yet; he filling all the expanse
Slept as a bird in the blue shell that soon shall burst away

Los saw the wound of his blow he saw he pitied he wept   
Los now repented that he had smitten Enitharmon he felt love
Arise in all his Veins he threw his arms around her loins
To heal the wound of his smiting

They eat the fleshly bread, they drank the nervous wine" 

Although William Blake never had the opportunity to attend a rock concert, he may have been able to appreciate the vitality of a multimedia production of poetry which had the capacity to console as well as disturb.