Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Blake printed the Songs himself, engraving the text and the images on copper plates, and the result is a book in which the pictures are part of the argument. The poems are short, simple and often disturbing, especially when read alongside the Songs of Experience.
The famous pairs, The Lamb and The Tyger, The Nurse's Song in both versions, are designed to be compared. Blake's innocence is not naivety; it is a state that knows what it is missing. Read the two sequences together, and try to find an edition with the plates reproduced.
Public-domain status
First published in 1794. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; William Blake died in 1827, so this work has been free to republish there since 1898.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 1934 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855
- The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400
- Troilus and Criseyde — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1385
- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — Lord Byron, 1812
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
Find a print edition on Amazon · As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Disclosure