Poems of William Blake

Poems of William Blake is a digital compilation containing Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Book of Thel. The included works originated in Blake's illuminated books of the late 1780s and 1790s rather than in a single collection published in 1827.

Songs of Innocence, first printed in 1789, presents childhood, play, pastoral music, and spiritual trust in deceptively simple lyrics. In 1794 Blake joined it to Songs of Experience, whose answering poems expose poverty, repression, institutional religion, and the damage done by adult social life.

Pairs such as the two "Chimney Sweeper" and "Holy Thursday" poems make innocence and experience competing perspectives rather than a simple before and after. "The Lamb," "The Tyger," "London," and the other songs combine memorable rhythms with radical questions about authority and creation.

The Book of Thel extends those questions in a brief prophetic narrative about a shepherdess who seeks to understand mortality but recoils from the world of embodied experience. Blake's originals unite words and engraved images; this text edition primarily preserves the poems.

"Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a Lamb!"
So I piped with merry cheer.
"Piper, pipe that song again;"
So I piped: he wept to hear."

This Project Gutenberg compilation contains Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Book of Thel.