Religion was the primary theme and motive of all 's art, poetic and pictorial. His illuminated verse is primarily social in its concerns, focusing on historic and psychic origin of religious faith on religious influence on human behaviour, Blake was convinced that religion profoundly affects every aspect of human life - political, economic, psychological and cultural and that its influence has generally not been a positive one. He detected flawed religious thinking at the root of most of the social disorders affecting England in his time and found that even the highest virtues associated with religion "Mercy, , peace and love" were routinely misconceived or manipulated for destructive ends. Blake's poetry is a sustained prophetic denunciation of the cruelties, mental and corporeal, everywhere perpetrated in the name of God, by those who claim to be doing His will. In a time of intense political agitation, he came to believe that a radical transformation of the nation's religious consciousness was the first prerequisite to serious political or economic reform.

The atmosphere of religious crisis that pervades Blake's poetry is partly a reflection of the times in which he lived. The passions driving the ideological conflicts of the 1790's were religious as well as political character. He saw religious error as so profoundly ingrained in the human psyche that disestablishment of one corrupt form of it would not begin to effect the radical change that was needed, In Blake's early prophetic books, there is a sense of impending crisis, an atmosphere of gathering evil and repressed passion waiting for release and each of his three longer prophecies The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem climaxes in a cosmic and psychic convulsion that transforms the earth, puts an end to time and brings humanity into the life of eternity with Jesus, who has triumphed over the enemies of mankind. Blake called corrupted Christianity as natural religion or deism.' Blake referred to state religion as "The Abomination that muketh desolate", a phrase fiom the book of Daniel 1 1. 3 1. To Blake's apocalyptic imagination, the established Church is a tool, if not an embodiment of Anti Christ. In the new dispensation, religion was entrusted to the guidance of reason and what Blake called "The Selfish Virtues of the National Heart" (J.52 E 201).

Against this preference of religion to destroy religion, Blake proclaimed what he understood to be the true religion of Jesus, the distinguishing qualities of which were radical demand for social justice, the cultivation of mutual love and forgiveness and the fostering of creative freedom in religion, morality and arts. The difficult mission that Blake undertook was to combat the deformed Christianity that had become the national religion of Britain, to take religion back from the priests who had subordinated it to the political, economic and cultural agenda of the routing classes and to make it a truly revolutionary force in society. He undertook to accomplish all this through the media of poetic and pictorial art. One might characterize this program as another romantic retreat from political activism to the quiet detachment of an artist's life, but it was not disillusionment, timidity or nattetd that made Blake believe in the capacity of art to affect the national character by altering its religious vision.

He was convinced that Milton's Paradise Lost contributed substantially to the religious ideology that dominated life in Britain by its reinforcement of belief in a distant judgemental God who took pleasure in crushing rebellion against authority and who required the future death of His only Son before he could bring hielf to pardon the son of Adam and Eve. In the poem Milton, Blake realizes the extent of his influence and returns from eternity to undo the hann His errors have done on earth. Blake reasoned that the art of poetry could influence the national religion in negative trays and it should have power to change it for better. He believed that religion and poetry were interconnected and interrelated.

In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he argues that religion originated in poetry, and that the priests abstracted theological systems from poetic tales and 'enslav'd the vulgar' (MHH 11, E, 38). Milton goes further to suggest that religion exists on earth as the fallen form of the eternal art of poetry. To repair the damage done by the fall of humanity they would entail transforming religion back into poetry. Blake's strategy resembled what twentieth century theologians would call demytholization. The Christian revelation refreshes its impact, and detaches it from the religious practices of institutional churches.

In Blake's myth of the origin of the universe, the most radical theological premise is that religion ought not to exist at all, that its presence in this world is a disastrous consequence of humanity fallen condition. The vision of religious history is developed in the first book of , sometimes sublime and sometimes comical recalling of the Biblical creation reveals that human race as one knows it and the cosmos one inhabit is the products of an outbreak of psychic warfare among a community of beings whom Blake called the eternals, one of whom, Urizen rebelled against the collaborative community and assumed control of it as a sole presiding deity. It is at this point in cosmic history that the genesis story begins; but one has learned from Blake that the God who presides over creation in the Biblical account is actually only a fragment of more complete eternal being, a damaged psyche that is unduly concerned with authority and obedience. As Urizcn began to impose control over the cosmos, a new element appeared in the universe of things, extruding from him as from a spider's abdomen, All of these theological, political, economic and sexual situations are related products of an moneous conception of God, and Oothoon infective by following the intricate web back to its source in "Urizen", "Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of Heaven" (P 1 .5; E.48).

Oothoon's strong protest does not free her from the various forms of bondage she endures. A more formidable and effectual challenge to Urizen's repressive regime comes fiom , the revolutionary spirit who inspired rebellion in America and France and who like Oothoon, soes clearly the link between religion and political repression. Orc proclaims in America,

Thefieryjoy, that Urizenperverted to ten commands. That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroad To the four winds as a torn book and none shall gather. (Leases. P1.8.E.54) The rhetoric is impressive enough, but in Blake's illumination of the text Orc's manifesto appears beneath an image of Urizen that shows him still very much in control. A religion that is so intricately "twisted like to the human brain" is not easily disposed of and Blake will observe in Milton how those who condemn religion and seek to annihilate it "can themselves become" "causes and promoters" of religions that are oppressive as the ones they have tried to eliminate (P1.40 (46) E.141). While he was composing America Blake might have observed the dechristianization campaign in France.

Blake grew more aware of the negative aspects of revolutionary and iconoclastic passion, so he began to devote more attention to the cultural processes by which a better human society might be developed. Blake himself has undertaken the task of defining the errors of Urizen and from this point on identifies himself ever more explicitly with 's effort to redefine religion, transforming it into a more human system than the one devised by Urizen. Los's response to Urizen is more constructive than Orc's and finally more productive. One can see the difference illustrated on plate 18 of Milton, a well known image that at first glance might appear to represent Orc getting ready to stamp the stony law to dust and its author with it, but the following plates reveal that the nude figure confronting Urizen is actually the repentant poet Milton.

As an expression of this insight, Songs of Experience begins with an invitation from the Bard summoning earth to embrace the freedom that is hers by right, an offer that earth rejects complaining that she is forever imprisoned by a jealous God who has complete control of her deity.

In the address To the Diests that begins the third chapter of Jerusalem, Blake wrote "Man must and will have some religion: if he has to go to the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan. He will erect the synagogue of Satan, calling the prince of this world, God and destroying all who do not worship Satan under the name of God (J 52, E.201). Blake's Satan is not the malevolent supernatural power of Christian tradition that tempts human beings to sin. It is the name he gives to the destructive and anti-social instincts that exist within every individual and stand in the way of imaginative health and psychic integration. Satan is the will to power that encourages us to use others for ow own advantage that dissolves the bonds that should unite the human common hindering love, compassion and mercy. Ultimately, Satan exists in all as the barrier preventing access to the Paradise.

Blake sometimes calls Satan "the God of this world". He is the God most Christians actually worship and persecute others for not worshipping. The religion of Satan is the one that is practiced in most churches on Sundays, an ideology that accepts the present defective order of the world as a manifestation of God's eternal will. But the question is 'who is the Jesus that Blake opposes to Satan and invokes as the exemplar of a more liberating religion?' In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the character and teaching of Jesus are matters of dispute between angels and devils, each party claiming him as an exponent of its own moral and theological position. His name is mentioned only once briefly, in the other books that Blake produced during the 1790s. But in the Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem, Jesus is given unparalleled eminence as the eternal divirre humanity who must intervene at a moment of apocalyptic crisis to save the human race from eternal death. He is called ''the image of the invisible God" and God the dear Saviour who took on the likeness of menw/Becoming obedient to death, even the death on the cross.

Although, Blake's poetry seems more interested in the Jesus of eternity than in the man who walked the earth twenty centuries ago, the gospel stories are recalled frequently enough to suggest that he did not want the historical life of Jesus to be forgotten,

The Divine Vision still was seen Still was the human form, divine Weeping in weak and mortal clay 0'Jesus still the form was thine And tine the Human Face and Thine The Human Hands and Feet and Breath Entering thro the Gates of Birth And passing thro ' the Gate of Death.

Blake's pictorial representation of Jesus in the illuminated prophetic books and paintings are generally quite traditional in conception, resembling most likenesses of Jesus produced in Western Europe since antiquity. Robert Ryan says, "Blake's conception of a Divine Human Being who intervenes to save humanity from its fallen condition and restore it to a prelapsarian state of spiritual life is close enough to ~rthodoxdoctrinal disputation and the evangelicals tended to reduce conversion experience to an emotional acceptance of Jesus as saviour." ' Even a sc~puloustheologian like Coleridge found it possible to formulate a brief doctrinal description of Christians as those "who receive Christ as the son of the living God who submitted to become Man in the Flesh in order to redeem mankind.

The only qualification Blake might make in this formulation would be to insist, as Emmanuel Swedenborg did, that Jesus was himself the living God, embodying in his Divine Humanity, the fullness of the Godhead. As Harold Bloom pointed out the Swedenborgians adopted as a defining doctrine, the belief "that there is only one God, one person, in whom is the Divine Trinity, called Father, son and Holy Spirit," like the human trinity of soul, body and proceeding operation in every individual man; and that the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is that God. ' This formulation approximates closely Blake's ways of speaking about Jesus.

Blake twice substituted 'Yhe poetic Genius" where Swedenborg used "The Lord" and "God" and then wrote: "He who loves, feels love descend into him and if he has wisdom may perceive it is from the 'Poetic Genius' which is the Lord". Later, in Milton, this 'poetic genius', is described in more specifically Christian language,

The Bard replied, I am Inspired! I know it is Truthl For I sing According to the inspiration of the poetic genius Who is the eternal all protecting Divine humanily To whom be Glory and power and Dominion Evermore Amen. (Pls13-14(14-15)E107-8) Elsewhere in Milton and Jerusalem, imagination is called "The Divine Body of the Lord Jesus", blessed for ever (Milton and J5 E96, 148) and individual human imaginations are "those worlds of eternity in which one will live forever: in Jesus our Lord (Milton 1.E 95). The identification of the Eternal Jesus with the human Imagination is further developed in Blake's Vision of the Last Judgement.

The narrative structure and conceptual argument of Jerusalem seem to posit an ontological gap between the best efforts of human imagination, as represented in the creative and prophetic activity of Los, and the Slavonic power of Jesus. But Blake equates Jesus with the imagination so persistently that the reader is faced with an unusually taxing interpretative challenge. Even with a very large expense of mental energy, it seems impossible to stabilize that metaphor. Blake always saw the imagination as the conduct of religious truth, for it is imagination that puts us in touch with eternity, with its complete, fourfold vision of reality.

But Blake's equation may be read in a way that is not so amenable to a positive religious interpretation. He may be suggesting that the divine Saviour is simply a very noble figment of the human imagination. This is a possibility that occurs even to Jerusalem, the Bride of . Imprisoned in the dungeons of Babylon, she cries out to her Lord and Saviour, Ant thou alive and livest thou for evermore? Or art thou Not : but a delusive shadow, a thought that liveth not Babel mocks saying, there is no god nor son of god That thou 0Human Imagination, 0 Divine Body art all A delusion, but I know thee 0 Lord when thou arkst upon h$ weary eyes even in this dungeon and this iron mill. (J.60 E.211) Blake was aware that arises themselves must be on guard against their own personal beliefs, those resting places of the mind that he called the spaces of . As Harold Bloom observed, "The health of the creative life lies in the willingness of these forms to sacrifice themselves, so as to revive the mind's power to visualize fresh appearance."

When the focus of his sympathy shifted from Orc to Los, Blake came to understand the history of religion as the story of a more complex three-way interaction in which the imaginative, prophetic impulse in humanity arbitrates, even cultivates continuing conflict between belief and skepticism. So Blake's religion of Jesus never be a collection of dogmas, rituals and moral prescriptions. It is an endless imaginative negotiation between conflicting mental impulses, the goal of which is a momentary clarity of vision.

Those who attempt to understand Blake's religious opinions must accustom themselves to the way different dramatic voices express conflicting theological views, so that his verses can be quoted convincingly on both sides of any important religious question. For example, in 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' one comes upon the assertion that "All deities reside in the Human Breast" (PI 11, E.38). It appears to be a denial of belief in any transcendent divine power, but the meaning of "reside" seems to shift when in Jerusalem the Saviour says to :

I am not a God afar 08I am a brother andpiend, with in your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me. (J4 E. 146).

In short, as Yoder Paul remarked, the reader of Blake is forced into the same negotiation between faith and skepticism that Los adopts in his dealings with Urizen and ~uvah.6 Discussing the religious dimension of 's artistry, one continually confronts a series of ironies and paradoxes. He saw that all religion posed a formidable danger to human welfare, and yet believed that one must cultivate certain forms of it in order to keep others hm triumphing. Although Blake was passionately dedicated to his religious mission, he does not appear to have derived much comfort from it in his life its an artist. Blake was not even given the satisfaction of knowing that his prophetic denunciation of the Christian churches was being heard. For this he had to blame his own choices of a hermetic style and a mode of book production that insured a limited audience. Blake had no noticeable influence on the religious consciousness of his socicty to compare with the impact of other poets like Wordsworth and Byron.

Innocence as it is presented in Blake's Songs of Innocence is self contained religious vision which sees God as man and man as at least potentially divine. As Anne Kosteanetz points out "The state of Innocence is compounded of the Pagan Age of Gold and Judeo-Christian Eden. Externally and generically, it 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." '

To live in Innocence is to know that God resides both within oneself and without and that heaven and earth are potentially one. In his works Blake accepts and builds Antimonial interpretation of the New Testament; the Pauline doctrine that faith achieves a new realization of Christ's vision in an age of love and spiritual liberty, when God is man. The Songs of Innocence depicts such a new age, a time when God is manifest in man and the natural spontaneous acts of man create a world of love and freedom. Man has become divine, thus a guarantee for the man of Innocence. This is the moral base of Blake's works. In the Songs of Innocence the symbols convey a special kind of existence or state of soul. In this state, human beings have the same kind of security and assurance as belongs to lambs under a wise shepherd or to children with loving parents. Blake did not believe that God exists apart from man, but says "expressly man is all imagination - God is Man and exists in us and we in him ... Imagination or Human Eternal Body in eve$ Man - Imagination is the Divine Body in Every man."

For Blake, God and imagination are one: God is the creative and spiritual power in man, and apart from man the idea of God has no meaning, When Blake speaks of the divine, it is with reference to this power and not to any external or independent God head, so when his Songs tell of God's love and care one ought to realize their full divine nature.

Blake accepts Lamb and child as symbolizing Innocence. In his Introduction of Songs of Innocence, the child on his cloud in a vivid presence, but an elusive one which vanishes from the sight of the Piper without an explanation and without the Piper wanting one; Piper sit thee down and write In a book that all may read So he vanishedjom my sight And Ipluck'd hollow reed.

The vanishing is abrupt, but the Piper plucks a hollow reed to make a pen of it and staining the tip of his quill in water and writes Songs of Hwpiness. The child symbolizes poetic inspiration and Biblically it refers to Jesus Christ. Similarly, 'Lamb' indicates Christ who is often refmed to as 'the Good Shepherd', King and 'Son of God' too. The valley with stands for the Pagan stage of the poet from where he has a spiritual transition to the stage of Christian religiosity. The Piper had a vision of the divinity of Innocence. The child is placed on a cloud because he is divine, but he is made to speak and act like a human child. "He, who would see the divinity must see him in his children", writes in Jerusalem. By and large, Blake has won the blessings of purative 'Muse' the so-called 'child on a cloud'. His Introduction unveiled the countryside simplicity where the music of his pipe reverberates in rich profusion.

In Introduction Blake is chiefly concerned with the conflict of Reason on one side and Imagination and Energy on the other, In Introduction Los is Imagination. He appears as the Bard. The purpose of introducing Bard as a poet is to reveal the word of God to man, and often instead of the Bard, Blake seems to have used Christ as 'The Divine Imagination'. Besides, dew and water symbolize materialism and forest trees and sleep are associated with the state of experience. His poetry is prophetic and brings a message. His inspiration comes from Divinity. Northrop Fve felt the need of the reading the first words of the poem to understand better. The following are the first lines of the poem,

Hear the voice of the Bard! Who present, past and fitwe sees Whose ears have heard, The Holy word, That walk'd among the ancient trees. The Bard speaks with authority like God, he hold present, past and future. Like God, he calls to the lapsed soul and pleads with a fallen qarth to return to the way of light. He speaks on behalf of God, 'The Holy word' and the 'True Light' which according to St, John made flesh and dwells among us. The Bard takes Milton one stage further and describes the world as 'weeping the evening dew', perhaps having Christ's agony in the garden of mind, as well as the judgment of Adam and Eve. The Bard has glimpsed Innocence as a state of perfection in the garden, but as to perfection of God in Christ or the Holy word. His ears do not hear the terrible being that put temptation in man's way and then cursed him for disobedience. Instead, he hears the God who weeps over the man's departure. What the bard hears is the voice of the Holy Christ,

Calling the lapsed Sod And weeping in the evening dew That might control The Starry pole, And fallen, fallen light renew. Lines (6-10) This is the Lord of Genesis, but He is heard as Jesus in the Garden who asked His disciples to watch Him. Gillham rightly says, "Christ might control the earth and raise man up, but not in the war of being omnipotent or indeed, of having any power whatever except that of eliciting a response to love. ''

The Bard in short, is not concerned with the transcendental aspects of religion and the new day he announces suffises the present darkness. The earth is told to arise fiom out of the dewy grass but this is no suggestion that she leaves the flesh. Rather, she is to awake to the flesh to realize it for what it is. What is of the earth is a gift;

The Starryjloor, The wat 'ry shore Lines (16-1 7) It's is a God's call to fallen earth and man, to unite with God once again. It indicates Christian Philosophy of God's call to the sinners.

The poem The Shepherd of Songs of Innocence gives Blake's religious statement, How sweet is the Shepherd's sweet lot! From the morn to the evening he strays He shallj6llow his sheep all the day, And his tongue shall be filled with praise. Lines (1 -4) The reference to 'Praise' is the only indication in the poem that it has a'dimension of religious significance The bold repetition of 'sweet' in the first line establishes the ingenuous tone of the poem. The Shepherd is a sturdy man who stands easily at a little distance fiom his flock. His presence confers the atmosphere necessary to the tranquility of his flock, which in its dumb way, is aware of his 'control': The 'control' involves care, confers freedom and is not an imposition of will. He praises God by addressing formal prayers. Blake's interest in the world and the quality of mind makes religion possible rather than any other religions. The purpose of the poem is to describe the human capacity for charity and tolewce which gives substance to much Christian thought. Christ calls himself as Good Shepherd. He prepared himself to protect his own sheep and even prepared to die on the Cross.

The poem The Lamb is the simplest and most transparent of Blake's Lyrics delicately inter-related cluster of ideas not only reiterates but weaves together and clarifies a number of themes and suggestions.

In the parables of Christ one comes across the imagery of the sheep and Shepherd and in the renderings of Jermiah, the Prophet, "Thou, 0 Lord, art in the midst of us, and we are called by thy name leave up not." It is from these sources that the poet has drawn the imagery of lamb. The chief land mark of Innocence - the lamb the child and God - fuse together in this poem and the completion of innocence is almost attained. Innocence has a divine source, He is called by name For He calls Himselfa Lamb He is meek and He is mild I a child thou a lamb. (Lines 13- 17) The Innocent Lamb is Christ, the incarnation of Love and tenderness. There is no suggestion of the idea of the sacrificial Lamb. The child is also identified with Christ because Christ became child and particularly praised the innocence of children. The poet symbolizes the holiness of the Lamb and the purity of the child's heart which is nothing but the manifestation of Christ's Innocence.

When he tells the lamb about the 'meek', 'mild' Lamb of God, the child is very sure that he knows the truth, and repeats his assurance,

Little Lamb, I'll tell thee; Little Lamb I'll tell thee Lines (11-12) The theme of the poem is the 'distant deeps' beyond space and before time where in The Lamb is about someone whom the speaker knows intimately as if He were a constant companion. The child knows that his creator is like himself but The Oger opens with a question and closes with the question unanswered 'what immortal hand or eye' could heor dare frame the symmetry of this beautiful but terrifying beast? Every sentence and utterance of the poem is a question to which no answer seems h&anly possible and the most obvious point of contrast between The Lamb and The Tyger is that the speaker in former poem is quite sure of his understanding while in the latter the speaker can do no more than wonder. The wonder about the Being who could create the tiger comes to a climax in the penultimate stanza where the speaker refers to the possible reaction of the Immortal Maker on viewing His handiwork. In asking if a human reaction was evoked, the speaker is speculating on the nature of the creator,

Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Lines (19-20) Even the inhurnqn stars have thrown down their spears and wept in pity and regret that such a thing as tiger should come into being and if the Creator can smile it is either because He knows more than the stars and can see a place for this new creature in the light of His superior understanding or because the sight of the voracious tiger appeals to His inscrutable nature. In either case, the mind of the creator is beyond the speaker's comprehension. Any way, the speaker just does not know what happened perhaps there is more than one creator; the lamb made by a gentle being and the tiger by a fierce one. Glen Heathen feels that the questions asked in The Tyger are posed in such a way as finally, to be unanswerable for they search a realm altogether beyond human experience. 1 I

God of Lamb is seen as a child, as gentle and loving. The mild experience and kindly usage known to the child lead him to believe what he is told about the benign nature of the creator. The speaker in The Lamb may know less in worldly sense, than the speaker in The Tyger when we go deep into the poem, it becomes apparent that Blake has allowed his Song to take its own growth and that it has burst the bounds of Experience. The nominal theme of the poem is the mystery of the act of creation, its real theme relates that creation to the grandeur and wonder of the created world. The Tiger is Blake's symbol of "abundant life" which Jesus Christ came to bring into the world. It is also symbol of regeneration and energy. There is another interpretation that Christ is symbolized by both Lamb and Tiger. Blake holds that innocence uncoupled with experience is incomplete. He says: 'The wrath of lion is the wisdom of God' As Bowra has pointed out; "The wrath which Blake found in Christ, His symbol of the divine spirit which will not tolerate restrictions but asserts itself against established rules was the means by which we hoped to unite innocence and experience in some tremendous synthesis."

Both of these creatures are two aspects of the same soul. Therefore, in the person of Christ equipoise is achieved between the meekness simplicity innocence and His wrath and harsh side. Blake is not the only poet who has had a vision of the several faces of Christ. Later G.M.Hopkins in his Deutschland has pictured Christ as a torturer and terrorist.

AAer all, the wrath and mercy unite at the same point where the ultimate reality of God is felt. In order to achieve the goal of reality, Blake feels that there are two means, the fmt being through Innocence of the lamb and the other being through the experience of the tiger.

The companion poems of Holy Thursday in Songs of Innocence and Experience describe a service in St, Paul's Cathedral attended by the Charity school children of London, Charity boys and girls were children who would have been left destitute had it not been for the existence of tbe schools, instituted privately by the wealthier citizens of London. The benefactors would give various reasons for maintaining the schools, These motives were uswlly of a religious or humanitarian natwe, but it was often thought necessary to justify the institutions as a good investment for the community,The children it was argued were prevented from becoming criminals, they were given religious instruction and the degree of literacy attained was sufficient to make them usell as servants without allowing them to compete with their better ones. The 'wise guardians' of charity schools were often obliged to defend their enterprise against attack by putting forward such arguments of expediency and making it publicly known that their charity was given as an investment.

In the Holy Thursday Blake assumes that not perhaps without reason that charity is based on, selfish considerations. It horrifies him to think that charity, in any form and from any motive, should be necessary and its existence indicates a failure on man's part to order his affairs properly. Men keep religious festivals and attend religious services. No man really loves his fellows and where charity is to be found, it is given in self defense. Men are pious hypocrites. The service in St. Paul's is a mockery and in the first line of the poem Blake challenges its validity, The sacred duty of Christian is to love his neighbour and in a society where this duty was observed social evils could not exist. The hymn of praise and joy sung by the children is a 'trembling cry' - a precarious and uncertain waiting indicative of the real insecurity. The magnificence of the occasion is an empty parade, and the prosperity it seems to indicate is false. In the second stanza the ideas of multitude and order, simple innocence and dignity are combined with references to the host of heaven,

The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands. Lines (6-8) The children show the delicacy of 'flowers', their cleanliness and youthfulness are seen as 'radiance' and they 'raise their hands' in gestures that show helplessness combined with grace of movement and splendid beauty. There are echoes, in the Song of the passages fiom the Bible and of accounts of heaven found in the traditional mythology of Christianity.

In Holy Thursday Blake dismisses position of the children; he sees agony in the eyes of the children. In the second stanza, he questions fate of the children,

Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be song ofjoy? (Lines 5-6) He explores the underlying significance of the event. He believes that good works under garb of religion are not acceptable. The ceremony, with its impression of wise guardianship is a lie to cover our real situation,

And so many children poor? It is a land ofpoverty! (Lines 7-8) It must be a land, where there is a shortage of the necessities of life, for if it were rich and men capable of ordering their affairs in Christian manner there should be no need of institutions for the relief of the poor. According to Blake charity is unnecessary because England is fairly prosperous and she can provide as much food as the children requires.

Holy Thursday in Songs of Experience is full of moral anxieties and accusations discussed on a religious and social level. Blake speaks out against the Ecclesiastic conventions of St. Paul's Cathedral where the starving children are compelled to kneel and pray. Christianity trumpets the gospel of love and kindness but the Church worshippers seem to be indifferent towards the empty bellied children. Bowra felt that perhaps the worst thing in experience as Blake sees it is that it destroys love and affection. l3 On no point does he speak with more passionate conviction. He who believes that the full life demands not merely tolerance but forgiveness and brotherhood finds that in various ways love is conupted or condemned.

The Church is not indifferent to the miseries of the sweeper - quite the contrary-it is horrified but it is apparently helpless to remove the evil or to get to the root of poverty and ill treatment. The Christian ideal of the brotherhood of man seems too ponderous to keep pace with the twists, and evasions of its enemy. The word 'appalls' implies that though the Church may feel shock and anguish at man's inhumanity it can only stand by, inarticulate, faint and helpless.

There is a Christian hope in the poem. When one does our duty God will take care of our life. In his dream Tom Dacre saw,

That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack, Were all of them locked up in cofins of black. (Lines 9- 10) Then there comes an angel and tells Tom that if they behave properly they can have God as their father. The next day though it is cold outside Tom feels the warmth imparted by the dream and he goes peacefully to brush the chimneys. The poem ends didactically and reminds us that to do our duty is the way to happiness.

The last tvio lines of the poem bring out the implications of the Church going parents in a manner very characteristic of Blake,

And are gone to praise God and His priest King Who make up a heaven of our misery. Lines (1 1-12) The linking together of God, priest and King on equal terms, present existence of heaven and its foundation on misery imply a great deal. God is seen as collaborator with 'Priest' and 'King'. This is a quite contrary view of God. Blake ends the poem with a happy note that God will take care of the people who do their duties perfectly and heavenly God will protect them. But in of Songs of Expetience, Blake equates God with 'Priest' and 'King' symbols of tyranny and repression. Blake's attack on Church and parents are very clear. When boy is asked by someone, about his parents, he frankly tells,

They are both gone up to the Church to pray To win the love of God the parents go to Church, but they forget to show love to their own son whom they neglect. When the unfeeling and hard hearted parents see the Chimney Sweeper dancing and singing, they believe that they have inflicted no injury on the boy and under this misapprehension they go to God to praise. But the boy says,

They clothed me in the clothes of death And taught me to sing the notes of woe (Lines 7-8) The line 'who make up a Heaven of our misery' - means that the Church, State and even God live on the fruits of the boy's labours. This God is none but Urizen. The word 'Heaven' of the line of the poem is the source of tyranny exercised through the Priest and the King who are his agents. Blake believes that the Church is held as the main cause for the misery of the poor and exploited, It has no soft feelings for sufferers, instead it makes them more and more poor. In fact God is a mask or pretext under which they can commit any act of cruelty. The parents of the boy have given with great complacency to offer their prayers. Their hollowness in setting their children for a few pounds does not hinder peacehl prayers. They take it for granted that their children are secure, safe and sound. But actually they are dying in their sooty clothes and are being suffocated inside chimneys.

The Little Black Boy is the most pointedly Christian as it centres on idea of the resurrection of the dead and an after-life in heaven. Christ is not mentioned in the poem, it talks simply, of God, who is also very sparingly nained by innocent speakers. The speaker of the poem, Negro boy accepts his life as a gift of God,

My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white. White as an angel is the English child (Lines 1-4) He accepts the words of his mother. She tells him that much of the ephemeral body is dust. The teaching of Negro boy's mother deals with the roles of body and soul and the meaning of earthly and heavenly existence. On earth one receives God's benefits, not directly but through the agency of His Sun and His creation and, one receives it by means of the physical body. The physical body mediates between God and soul and the body has a most necessary function. Although it eventually dies that function is part of the Divine purpose,

And we are put on earth a little space That we may learn to bear the beams of love. (Lines 13- 14) Blake significantly puts sentiments affirming the positive role of the body into the mouth of a black boy, a member of a race who, as slaves were obliged to undergo the most appalling physical hardships. In another illustration shows the two little boys leaning on God's knee. God is represented as Christ, the Shepherd and the black boy being an optimist I'll shade himfrom the heat, rill he can bear To lean in Joy upon our father's knee; (Lines 25-28) The 'Love' the black boy wants to show towards white boy is not human love but it is a divine love or Godly love or Agape. Heaven is the common destination of all and one can leave it to God to summon us from grove in His own time.

While Wordsworth saw God as imminent in Nature, Blake often lets one wonder what his real opinion was. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience present a contrary view of Blake's ideas. God inay be known to man only as man is capable of receiving him and because of this most religious idea including Christianity, present varied possible visions of the Divinity. In the Songs of Experience Blake projects God as a Jehovah - like figure. Songs of Innocence convince us with their spontaneous outbursts of joyous innocence that Blake indeed is a joyful mystic. The generous attributes of mercy, pity, love and peace which are said to be the outcome of mystical union with Absolute are projected out as the "Divine Image" in human form, Then every man of every clime That prays in his distress Prays to the human form divine Love, mercy pify peace (Lines 5-8) Where mercy, love and pity dwell There God is dwelling too. (Lines 19-20) Thus, Blake brings forth an argument which is very rational and human compassions which are the most essential and the human form of willing generosity and love and virtues is shown out to be a dwelling place of the divine. The immanent divinity can only be conceived as formless. But the abstract qualities of Love, Mercy, pity and peace are movements of the soul, they can only be expressed outwardly through the flesh, the body. Devoid of such expression through the Body, these divine qualities do not come into existence. Hence with a logical clarity, Blake views the body as essential in the search of reality as the soul is. In this connection, Harold Bloom points out that Dante in his Divine Comedy sees the form of a human at the end of his search and Blake being an artist knows' that his own best being in his creations. l4 God's best creation as widely accepted is man. If God wishes to find his best being, he must do so in men. Man is created and loved by God, and he is said to be His image and has been given the power to create as he receives it from God.

Some critics hold the '' contains no visionary or sensory images and so it is a slight deviation from the right path towards experience. But one can convincingly say that projecting so far the representatives of Innocence, it is no mistake if the poet transcends the human level and rises up to the level of ultimate and substantial truth. REFERENCES

1. "The Present State of Europe compared with Ancient Prophecies." A Sermon, preached at the gravel pit meeting in Hacknon, February 28, 1794, being the day appointed for General Fast. London: J. Johnson, 1794, pp.7,13,21-22.

2. . Robert Ryan, The Romantic Reformation : Religious Politics in English Literature 1789-1824. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956-1971, p. 155.

3. E.I. Griggs, Ed., Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol.VI. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-57, p. 622.

4. Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Garden city: N.Y. Doubleday, 1963, pp. 214-15.

5. Ibid, p. 220.

6. Yoder, R. Paul, Unlocking Language: Self-similarity in Blake's Jerusalem in Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Romanticism and Complexity, March 200 1.

7. Anne Kostelanetz Mellor, Blake's Human form Divine, London: University of California Press, Berkeley Los Angeles, p. 1.

8. Letters and papers from Prison. Blake's Letter of July 16'~1944.

9. Northrop Frye, Blake's Introduction to Experience, Twentieth Century Interpretation of Songs of Innocence and Experience. Prentice Hall, Incorporation, 1969, p. 59.

10. Gillham, Blake's contrary states: The Songs of Innocence and of Experience as Dramatic Poems. London: Cambridge University Press, 1966, p.155-156. 11. Heathen Glen, Vision and Disenchantment Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Cambridge, 1983, p. 89.

12. C.M. Bowra, Songs of Innocence and Experience from A Case Book edited by Margaret Bottrall. London: Macmillan, p. 58.

14. Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse: A Study on Poetic Argument. Garden City N.Y. Anchor Books, 1965, p. 57.