Born to a family of moderate means in 1757, Blake grew up in a London where he could still wander, a London almost unchanged since the days of Shakespeare. Yet, unknown to him, this was a London on the verge of industrialisation.

He laments on this dramatic shift in his poems of Experience, specifically in ‘London’ (1794), where his wanderings no longer open up a world of curiosity, but one of deprivation left unvoiced by the churning of politics and rigidity of false religion.

“I wander thro’ each charter’d street”

William Blake, ‘London’

Still, Blake was a highly spiritual man, embroiling his artistry with his understanding of the biblical message through the lens of gnostic mysticism (Gnostics believed that they held an esoteric insight into the realm of the heavens, sighting this insight as the spiritual illumination that sparked the transcendence into a greater understanding of the cosmos. They dealt in illusion and enlightenment rather than sin and redemption).

It was this new understanding that Blake believed allowed him to see the malakhim. He told a friend that he once saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.’ It is this insight that Blake muses in ‘The Tyger’ (1794), where he wears the skin of the divine, echoing the passage beginning with Job 41 v. 12, presenting the mythical Tyger to his very human reader. In this poem, Blake brings the imagination to the centre of the early Romantic movement, forcing its reader to evaluate the overstepping of humanity and the corruption of industry and greed.

With ‘The Tyger’, the Songs of Experience more clearly become contraries to the Songs of Innocence, written earlier on in Blake’s canon.  In contrast to the ideas of purity expressed in ‘The Lamb’ (1789), ‘The Tyger’ mocks the ignorance of its contrary animal, sitting just on the unknown ellipse of the veil between heaven and earth, watching the smoking cogs of industrialism move in manacles around Blake’s decadent London. With the Songs of Experience, Blake’s poetry becomes perhaps the truest analysis of Rousseau’s ‘Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains’ from ‘The Social Contract’ (1762).

“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

William Blake, ‘The Tyger’

Blake makes further satire of feigned religion in ‘Holy Thursday’ (Innocence, 1789), where the cold structure of false charity is made chillingly obvious by the distorted celebrations of the gospels’ Last Supper. Blake, in the poem, goes as far as to compare the acts of the church to the betrayal of Judas.

For the entirety of his adult life, Blake campaigned against organised religion, even following Emmanuel Swedenborg. Once enthusiastic about Swedenborgianism, Blake attended the first General Conference of the New Jerusalem Church in 1789. However, as soon as Blake began to notice the signs of organised faith within his friend, the poet soon turned on him in the sardonic poem ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (1790).

Blake’s unchanging ideals on Social Action carried through into the Songs of Experience. Appalled at the poverty in his once blessed city of London, Blake wrote the contrary ‘Holy Thursday’ (Experience, 1794). Making further allusions to the gospels, specifically the Parables of Christ, Blake envisages a world without the suffering of children – children neglected by the industrialisation of London. These two poems also engrain his canon with a feeling of hope, one not expressed in ‘London’ (1794).

It is Blake’s need to give voice to the suffering that explains why, whether by design or accident, Blake found himself at the front of the mob that burnt down Newgate Prison.

The influence of Wollstonecraft also embeds itself on the Songs of Experience, specifically in ‘The Sick Rose’ (1794), where Blake challenges the secrecy of the prostitution industry and the deaths of unknowing women due to sexually transmitted infections. The power in his poetry explains why Blake is considered a seminal figure in the history of the arts, whilst being largely unrecognised during his lifetime.