The Delicate Balance Between Innocence And Experience

The Delicate Balance between Innocence and Experience William Blake’s â€Å"The Chimney Sweeper† in his Songs of Innocence is a literary masterpiece that is still relevant and impactful in the modern world. In lovely form and description, Blake explains the atrocities and hardships of the Industrial Age in a poem suitable for school-age children and with the beautiful simplicity that only a writer like Blake could produce. The Songs of Innocence is a look into the purity and wonderful outlook on life that children usually have. While in its counterpart, the Songs of Experience, Blake uses adults as protagonist. The Songs of Experience is a look at the effects that hardships and failures have on adults, therefore having a pessimistic outlook toward life. In his these two works, Blake produces a parallel universe between childhood and adulthood where the optimism of dreams of childhood and the bitterness and stagnation of adulthood never seem to know one another. The nar rator in â€Å"The Chimney Sweeper† is a young school-age boy, who never tells the reader his name, which speaks of the selflessness of child. In the first stanza, the boy tells his brief life story and about his mother’s death that leads to his father selling him into slavery. In the rest of the poem, the boy tells the reader about the brutal conditions of slavery that he and his peers must endure. Specifically, the boy tells the readers about Tom Dacre, a boy who is struggling with the misery of working endlessShow MoreRelatedThe Stolen Party1168 Words   |  5 PagesStolen Party† Innocence is a precious gift that we all have at some point. In Liliana Heker’s ‘The Stolen Party’, Rosaura experiences a loss of innocence after attending her friend Luciana’s birthday party. Before the party, Rosaura is unaware of her social standing and she believes has been invited as a friend. 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His poems allow us to see into ‘the eternal world of the spirit’ and his dreams of the sacred England he had always wanted, a place undamaged by technology, a place that is peaceful and tranquil. But not all his poems reflect this. In fact, from Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’ there are a number of poems, describing what life could be like and in reality whatRead MoreThe Lord Of The Flies1468 Words   |  6 Pagesplane is shot down during a war. Though the novel is fictional, its exploration of the idea of human evil is at least partly based on Golding’s experience with the real-life violence and brutality of World War II. Free from the rules and structures of civilization and society, the boys on the island in Lord of the Flies descend into savagery. Golding’s experience in World War II had a profound effect on his view of humanity and the evils of which it was capable. 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