The Road of Excess: Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience

Abstract

C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce starts with a confession for which Blake’s readers, and his critics especially, may be glad: ‘Blake wrote of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant.’ Blake’s poetry certainly reflects his genius, in that it is usually immediately striking, and lingers in the mind. But although it often sounds aphoristic it remains baffling; readers are more apt to ‘sense’ lurking truths, than to explain what their Nature might be :

Every night and every morn Some to misery are born. Every morn and every night, Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night.