Songs of Innocence and of Experience

William Blake is known for some very mystical hard-to-understand poetry, but his "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience" is very different from his other work. Innocence was printed five years before Experience, but the books complement each other: the first consisting of poems telling of the innocence of the world, and the second tempering these poems with contrasting tales about experience. Here in beautiful, almost child-like simplicity, he describes childhood and purity, as well as the darker realities of corruption and disillusionment.