![]() ![]() The title “Songs of Innocence” grows from this tree, such that the title becomes the tree’s foliage and plumage. Yet, the tree grows upward and outward, until it literally covers roughly two-thirds of the title plate - it looms over the two children and the adult woman, though it does not cast a noticeable shadow over them. Behind them, a tree grows prominently, sharing the same foreground on the right as the two children and the adult woman on the left. Though he does not use Adam and Eve at the moment they realize paradise is lost - which expresses both the meaning of “innocence” and the meaning of “experience,” when the former is circumvented by the latter - we find, here, two children, likely a boy and a girl, epitomizing “innocence.” More than that, the two children stand at the seated legs of an adult woman, and the two children are engaged with a text positioned in the adult woman’s lap. Rather, Blake is more implicitly theological, focusing more directly on the meaning of “innocence” before the fall. In the above, the 1789 edition of Songs of Innocence, before it was subsumed into the Songs of Innocence and of Experience of 1795, presents a visualization in its title plate that excludes the explicit biblical imagery of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |