Songs of Experience: Infant Sorrow

Songs of Experience: Infant Sorrow by William Blake is a powerful example from the artist’s revolutionary illuminated books, a format that merged poetry and visual art into a single unified whole. This specific impression, part of a lengthy printing period stretching from approximately 1794 to 1825, was created using relief etching printed in a warm orange-brown ink. Blake subsequently personalized the piece by hand-coloring the details with watercolor and applying delicate touches of reflective shell gold, underscoring the spiritual and emotional weight of the image.

The piece belongs to the Songs of Experience collection, which serves as a poignant counterpoint to the optimistic Songs of Innocence. Blake uses the print medium to explore themes of early life struggle, a central subject demonstrated by the composition featuring both infants and women. The visual narrative depicts the vulnerable arrival of the newborn, contrasting the purity of the child with the overwhelming distress or disappointment felt by the surrounding maternal figure. This focus on cyclical human suffering and the burden of mortality distinguishes the mature works of Blake.

Blake’s innovative technique of relief etching allowed him to achieve an unprecedented level of integration between the poetic text and the accompanying imagery. The careful addition of watercolor ensured that no two prints were identical, making each copy a unique work of art despite being derived from the same etched plate. This method, combined with the subject matter, cements the work’s importance within the British Romantic movement. This particular impression of Songs of Experience: Infant Sorrow is a significant example of the artist’s vision and is held in the renowned collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Because many of Blake's important prints are now in the public domain, his groundbreaking artistic techniques remain available for contemporary scholarly examination.