I was introduced to the poems of William Blake and his collection, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, in another class. As someone who already has a fond appreciation of poetry, his works had an impact on me in a way that was hard to describe with words at first. I knew that the attitude of his writing had a personality that spoke to me, but it was not until I spent time analyzing the structure and parallels of his work that I realized that the choice of perspective is mirroring the outlook on life that I have at the moment. 

When people look at me, they tend to bring up how in touch I am with my childlike sensibilities. I seemingly find joy in the simplest of activities and I still watch family films regularly. The thing that people tend not to see, however, is that since I started attending college, I have felt personally that I have become jaded. Whenever I would work on an assignment, I would always assume that it would go wrong at some point along the way. I struggled a lot with making connections with other people, immediately causing me to feel a sense of loneliness. 

So as I first read Blake’s two “Holy Thursday” poems and subsequently his two “The Chimney Sweeper” poems, noticing how he used the perspectives of adulthood and childhood as a parallel to one another, a contrast to one another, and often a merge of each other, I was able to see how that applied to my state of mind. I saw how my innocence and experience formed the person I am today and learned how to come to grips with each part of myself. I wanted to make sure that in my attempt to analyze his style of writing with this piece that I would properly shed light on the aspects of his work that meant so much to me, using the words that I was unable to when I read them for the first time.