Blake and Grendel

William Blake, a man with little formal education who was thought mad by many, criticized the world and wrote genius ideas about society. His poems are works which display paradoxes and in "Introduction (Song of Innocence)" and "Introduction (Song of Experience)" he comments on the ignorance of the unenlightened and the despair of the enlightened. These contrasting poems still manage to work together, similar to how John Gardner uses the contrasting ideas of innocence versus experience in his novel Grendel. 

In “Song of Innocence”, Blake writes about a child telling a piper to “pipe song about a lamb” which symbolizes Jesus and purity. The piper is then instructed to drop his “happy pipe” and sing “songs of happy chear” then lastly write his songs in a “book that all may read”. These artistic forms of portraying the joyous song demonstrate the association that art and music has with innocence. This relates to Grendel in his early days of inexperience, before he was touched by the knowledge of the evil, pointless world. The Shaper’s song sounds much like the Piper’s song. The song about religion, people weeping with joy, it all sounds very familiar. However, Blake does state that a shortcoming of innocence is that it can be ignorance. This can be seen clearly within Grendel because the people were entranced by the Shaper’s words, ignorant to the truth, or lack of truth, behind his words.

The contrasting poem, “Song of Experience” would then demonstrate the Dragon’s perspective. The Bard “who Present, Past, & Future sees” sounds like the exact description of the Dragon, who is also all-knowing. The dragon’s “ears have heard The Holy Word” of the Shaper, but they have also experienced the darkened world that those who gain knowledge see. Grendel is engulfed into this world when he accepts the dragon’s perspective and is tortured by the darkened world, only seeing the experience side of life.

Blake himself never identified himself wholly with either view of innocence or experience, and he stood on the outside pointing out the fallacies in each. While the balance of both would be perfection, Grendel experienced such a tormented experience because of the imbalance he found in his life. He abandoned the Shaper’s ideals about innocence and inhaled the scent of the dragon, letting experience become his aura. This imbalance can be seen in Chapter 7, where he narrates his story in two parts, Cut A and Cut B- Cut A containing all of the content and Cut B being empty. This imbalance, Blake would likely claim, is what led to Grendel’s death. He was metaphorically torn, and eventually was physically torn, his cause of death.

In both introductory poems an idea of conflicting sides of humanity is expressed. These conflicting views are demonstrated in Gardner’s Grendel with the ideologies of the Shaper and the dragon. The lack of balance between the two states is what leads to Grendel’s end, and the fallacies of both perspectives are demonstrated in the poems and in the novel alike.