Both Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence serve as a mirror Blake held up to society, the Songs of Experience being the darker side of the mirror.

Blake's Songs show two imaginative realms: The two sides to the human soul that are the states of Innocence and Experience. The two states serve as different ways of seeing.

The world of innocence as Northrop Frye saw it encapsulated the unfallen world, the unified self, integration with nature, time in harmony with rhythm of human existence.

Frye saw the world of Experience as a fallen world, with the fragmented and divided self, with total alienation with nature, destructive.

Written in the time of the Romantic Movement, societies actions, hopes, fears and aspirations are all held within the poems in Blake's Songs.

This essay...