Fahrenheit 451 219and its innocent counterpart, the lamb. Throughout
Songs, Blake emphasizes God’s divine abilities and
love for humans as favored over the popular image
of God as a wrathful creator.
Blake treats the theme of spirituality differ-
ently in both parts of Songs. The lyrics in Innocence
sound like religious hymns, connecting each worldly
experience, even the miserable ones, to elevating
spiritual experiences, such as baby Jesus’ salvaging
humans in “A Cradle Song.” The poems in this sec-
tion also repeatedly promise afterlife rewards for the
oppressed, a fact soothing the abused in poems such
as “The Chimney Sweeper.” The readers, supposedly
children, are repeatedly encouraged to shun worldly
and material comfort and retain a spiritual outlook.
The lyrics thus overemphasize spiritual benevolence
and offer comfort through repeated images of Jesus
aiding the needy, as in “The Chimney Sweeper,” and
“The Little Black Boy.” Even parental negligence
and abuse in poems such as “The Little Boy Lost”
and its counterpart “The Little Boy Found” is excus-
able because of the pervading spiritual optimism,
guarding and rewarding children.
Five years after publishing Songs of Innocence,
Blake offered a further radical view of spirituality,
revealing great abhorrence of workplace abuses and
skepticism of the optimism expressed in Innocence.
In Songs of Experience, Blake questions the beliefs he
had formerly offered by presenting the same inci-
dents from a different viewpoint, that of experience.
Childhood is no longer a happy and carefree stage,
and spirituality fails to comfort the abused. The
oppressed reject otherworldly rewards of spiritual-
ity, arguing for immediate relief and exposing the
patriarchy, parents, and religious and national rulers
for their failed roles.
The lyrics in Experience repeatedly question the
good of worldly and spiritual fulfillment in light of
the existing corruption pervading churches, work-
places, and homes. Such questioning was seditious
at that time because church and state were viewed as
interchangeable and sacred concepts. Blake reveals
the social reaction to such questioning toward the
end of Experience in “The Little Boy Lost.” After
poems on two lost children, he traces a boy’s being
lost spiritually, which causes him to be burned.
Blake questions institutionalized religion through
the young boy, who is doomed for merely wondering
at the discrepancy between conventional teachings,
theoretical beliefs, and their actual implementa-
tion, which tends to generate injustice and hatred
rather than highlight God’s all-encompassing love
and benevolence. By such criticism, Blake raises
questions as to the nature of belief and promotes a
subjective form of spirituality. With his young hero
suffering condemnation and his helpless parents’
woe at losing their child, Blake further magnifies
the evils of institutionalized religion and the need
for spiritual freedom.
In the previous examples, Blake’s innocents enjoy
spiritual freedom because they are shielded from
prevalent abuses, which they encounter once they
gain experience. While Innocence celebrates Jesus’
benevolence, his relieving the needy and spreading
happiness, Experience fails to relieve people, as exem-
plified in its abusive, tyrannical figures who initiate
mistreatment of children and the marginalized. The
spiritual tone of Innocence soon turns secular with
Blake’s supplications in Experience to resist corrup-
tion and to revive the bleak surroundings. Songs thus
revisualizes spirituality by questioning orthodox
beliefs and experimenting with a radical form of
spirituality that differs from organized religion and
ensures spiritual freedom.
Mariam RadhwiBRADBURY, RAY Fahrenheit 451
(1953)
Ray Bradbury (b. 1920) is regarded as one of the
most influential American writers of the 20th cen-
tury. More concerned with story and character than
technology, Bradbury’s science fiction is best cat-
egorized as “humanist.” In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury
imagines a world where books are illegal. Squadrons
of “firemen” are employed to burn books, and anyone
caught with a book is arrested. Published in 1953,
just as television was becoming a popular medium,
Fahrenheit 451 presents a world in which indepen-
dent thought and the questioning of authority are
subversive practices.
For Bradbury, storytelling is among the noblest
of human activities, and books, as transmitters of
story, are sacred objects. By destroying books, the