The Poets John Donne & William Blake

Conversely, the Songs of Innocence satirize the present of recognise" (Frye 237). On the other hand, Victor Paananen writes that "Attempts by critics to wangle the Songs of Innocence ironic, to suggest that Blake undercuts or even mocks the perspective and verbiage of innocence, are based on an inadequate grasp of Blake's prospect" (Paananen 74). Paananen sees the Songs of Innocence and Experience not as satirical or ironical, exactly as sincere and distinct expressions of the poet's understanding of the inventive (innocent) and analytical (experiential). Still, the question remains open with think of to the military capability of Blake toward his material and the spiritual development of human beings.

With respect to Donne's poems, on the other hand, there is no sign that he is anything precisely straightforward. There is no irony in Donne's---or the poems' speaker's---relationship with his God. This does not mean(a) that the critics are entirely aligned in their synopsis of the poems, however. J.B. Leishman writes, for example, that, with respect to the Holy Sonnets, Donne's restless intellect, forever re-examining and leading him to doubt the premise which his combine has accepted, hinders that complete self-surrender and perfect union with Christ for which he longs (Leishman 88).

The commentator in the Norton Anthology, however, writes that Donne in the Holy Sonnets is "voicing broad(a) repentance and devotion to

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I run to death, and death meets me as fast,

Donne accepts himself as a sinner, as a failure in terms of living a Christian life, but he also sees himself as save by Christ. Christ is the answer to life's woes for Donne, and though he surely expresses his awareness of those woes, he even more certainly expresses his faith in Christ, the Trinity, and the Church.

This is not to say that Donne does not express the degenerate part of his spirit, for he does. However, the trouble has not to do with the benign of experiential paradoxes with which Blake struggles. To the contrary, Donne has all his energy aimed Heavenward, and his concerns include only issues which are thoroughly religious.

In Sonnet 18, for example, Donne feels sorrow over the divisions in the Church:

The irregularity of the metrical pattern of these lines gives them a senses of ambivalence which is missing from Blake's poem "London."

Humanity has failed and fallen in Donne, but is redeemed in Christ. In Blake, humanity has failed and fallen, but seems to be unredeemed by God and on its own. The reasonable terminus is that Blake intends the Innocence and Experience Songs to be taken together to do work wisdom, if not religious redemption: "Without the perspective of Innocence, we would not be aware of our powers and wound remain unable to benefit from what the analysis of the Songs of Experience offers us" (Paananen 77). Blake's answer, if he supplies one, seems to be the capacity of the person to imaginatively create out of his or her innocence and experience some sort of portrait not of a ain redemptive God, but "the Divine Humanity in timeless existence" (Paananen 74).

Blake has compassion for a manacled humanity, but he also makes progress to that part of the responsibility for that imprisonment rests on the shoulders of the prisoner himself or herself. In addition, the implication is just as clear that the undivided is responsible for
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