In William Blake’s poetical verses explaining the two contrary states of human existence, he observes the world with an extensive view from a state of “innocence and of an imagination unspoiled by stains of worldliness” (Keynes 12), and from a state of “indignation and pity for the sufferings of mankind as he saw them in the streets of London (Keynes 12). Holding firm to such ideologies as proposed by John Milton and Emmanuel Swedenborg, Blake believed in the philosophy that because all men were innocently conceived as children in a massive world filled with iniquity and immorality, we should return to this state of incorruptibility and flee from the devilish ways that clouds this world with darkness. As stated by Morton Paley in the introduction
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The human state of innocence is a state where one’s soul, esp. a child’s, is at liberty from the transgression and moral depravation of the world. Theologically, Paley believes that Blake’s state of innocence “externally and generically, applies to the condition of man before the fall; internally and psychologically to the child who has not yet experienced the inner divisions of human life” (Paley 2). As a radical Protestant and interpreter of the Great Code of Art, Blake believed that before man and the ground he walked on were cursed, before the crafty serpent deceived Eve to eat of the tree of Life and Knowledge in the sacred garden of God and before she convinced her husband Adam to also eat of the forbidden fruit, and before Satan crept his way into the Garden of Eden, the world was pure and free of all evil having had no knowledge of its existence. During this Golden Age of Innocence—or the days of creation when God first created the “heaven and the earth, light, the firmament and waters, sea and earth, vegetation, the Sun, moon, and stars, fish and fowls, animals, man and woman” (Genesis 1)—man had not yet been exposed to the lower states of fallen and morally-debased earth that Blake viewed around him, and that we still see
The human state of innocence is a state where one’s soul, esp. a child’s, is at liberty from the transgression and moral depravation of the world. Theologically, Paley believes that Blake’s state of innocence “externally and generically, applies to the condition of man before the fall; internally and psychologically to the child who has not yet experienced the inner divisions of human life” (Paley 2). As a radical Protestant and interpreter of the Great Code of Art, Blake believed that before man and the ground he walked on were cursed, before the crafty serpent deceived Eve to eat of the tree of Life and Knowledge in the sacred garden of God and before she convinced her husband Adam to also eat of the forbidden fruit, and before Satan crept his way into the Garden of Eden, the world was pure and free of all evil having had no knowledge of its existence. During this Golden Age of Innocence—or the days of creation when God first created the “heaven and the earth, light, the firmament and waters, sea and earth, vegetation, the Sun, moon, and stars, fish and fowls, animals, man and woman” (Genesis 1)—man had not yet been exposed to the lower states of fallen and morally-debased earth that Blake viewed around him, and that we still see