fferent states under the influence of John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” of which he addresses the state of “Beulah or Organised Innocence and Generation or Experience” specifically (Harold Bloom). In doing so, Blake employs the imagery of these respective realms to show the immediate and irretraceable degradation of the society in England post Industrial Revolution. But the Songs constitute symbols that uncover a drastically unique ideology of Blake himself. In the binary opposites of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake suggests a political thought and mystic idea which follows the heritage of Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Bohme, where it is through the juxtaposition of one and the other that spiritual emancipation can be achieved. 

The Songs of Innocence as Harold Bloom has opined, is the realm of a dreamy state nearing oblivion. Yet it is clearly divorced of ignorance than wisdom, while its contrary – The realm of Experience is devoid of wisdom and inhabited by ignorance of the self. There is double irony in play between Innocence and Experience as states of being, in moving from Innocence to Experience the progression is both organic and creative while the fall back occurs at naturalistic and imaginative level. It is therefore that the symbols of each of the realms as well as their associations with each other points at the duplicity of their contraries. 
The Songs of Innocence start with a note from the “piper” who elaborates on his encounter with the muse that inspired him to create the Songs. It relates the lyrics to the pastoral convention and the engraving of the lyric shows the green and endearing face of nature. In such a place where nature blooms at its best, the encounter presents the Piper as a man who is “guiltless” or unbent by the burden of the original sin and hence innocent. 
To its contrast, The Introduction to the Songs of Experience is narrated through the mouthpiece of a Bard, who is a man of the society and sees all “Past, Present and future”. Unlike the endearing lap of nature where the piper writes the songs, the Bard struggles to form a bond with his natural mother as he exclaims: ‘‘Turn away no more/Why wilt thou turn away?”. Thus the Bard is abandoned by the nursing hand of Nature. 
Blake’s Beulah then abides by the myth of Isaiah and Bunyan where man and Nature are “married” and hence united by man’s innocence. However in the realm of generation the focal perceptivity of the same man is “reduced” by his encounters with civilisation and its institutions which is why he lingers in the “forest of the night”. And therefore, the Man of Experience is not overborne with the Christian guilt but his own ambitious endeavours which have lead to his perversion.

The symbol of the “Tiger” placed in the “forest of the night” against that of the young boy and lamb inherit a contrast which is born out of Blake’s distrust in the religious institutions and his apprehensions of Man without his imaginative power. As Harold Bloom notes – “The Man of Innocence is a Natural Man, prone to all brutalities of Experience while the Man of Experience is a Creative creature that gives birth to a nature beyond brutalities”. To the idea thus conceived, the symbol of the Lamb and the Tiger becomes most appropriate to the function. The Lamb and the boy associate with their “Father” by sharing the same name “He is called by thy name/For He calls Himself a Lamb/He is meek, and He is mild/He became a little child. I a child, and thou a lamb/We are called by His name”. And thus, for the ‘Innocent’ Man his equality with nature allows him to gain closure to his Maker. However, the creative and frantic Bard of Experience which locates the origination of the “Tiger” in the industrious works of Man continuously draws his apprehensions against the Maker as the “immortal hand or eye” which “dare” frame its fearful symmetry. It is such apprehensions of the Bard that locate him in the “night” for he doesn’t realise his ignorance fails to see the tiger as only a poor creature of the design (which Blake has tried to emulate in the engraving by showing the tiger as a lost and meek figure with an expression of fear).

As many critics note, the leading images of Beulah are the moon, love, water, sleep, night, dew, relaxed drowsiness and eternal spring. However, the leading images of Experience or Generation become the moonless night, autumn season, anxiety, fear and bitter rhetoric. In the context of the realms that Blake defines, Innocence is continuously associated with fertile images which are threatened with “darkened greens” like in Echoing Greens or the “black coffins” of The chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence). However, the metaphors of Experience, symbolise a diminutive vision of human life in a world which is contracting and stagnant thus it unconsciously builds “a hell in heaven’s despite.’’ (The Clod and The Pebble, Songs of Experience)

In the light of the above, Frye’s observation of the dominant themes in the two books of the Songs becomes utterly seminal. As he observes the dominant theme of love evoked by the objective correlatives of the “little tender moon”, “eternal spring” etc gives an account of transformations which occur in the Natural Man such that the object of poetry becomes the beloved. 
However, in the Book of Experience, the destructive force of Art which transforms the created according to the whims of its creator, dominates through the symbols of infertile imagery. The same characteristic movement which Frye points out in Shelley’s poetry as wavering between these rival modes – “between the epipsyche or emanative beloved and the deliberating dying metaphor, whose vanishing liberates the object from its fallen status” 

Then it can be conclusively said that the symbolism used in The Songs of Innocence and of Experience generates a larger conflict between blind naturalism denoted by the emotion of love and devastating power of creative energy. In such a larger picture, Blake incorporates the images and symbols from Industrial London to comment on the various structures that lead to the spiritual depreciation of the state of Man.