Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Boozy alumni reunion at my old Cambridge college last weekend had a wonderful surprise: an exhibition of a facsimile edition of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.

On display was the cover of the volume which features that well-known subtitle, “Shewing the two contrary states of the human soul” – which had, while I was a student, inspired my determination to see these contraries transcended. After all, had Blake not also written “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”?

Also on display was the poem “London” with its famous phrase, “mind-forg’d manacles” which has, over the years, powered much of my thinking as a therapist. For, if the chains that bind us are largely products of our own minds, surely those very minds can be recruited to dissolve what they have created?

 

— Shomit

 

Posted in Blog on Tuesday, October 1, 2019
Tagged with Cambridge, William Blake

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