I couldn't quite decide what to think or how to feel about Blake, but I really enjoyed Lauren's blog post about this poem, and how it shows the dual nature of love. So for now I will just put this song up and hopefully add more later: 

Paper Bird - Blue Sparks

I wanted to expand my thoughts on Blake and just talk generally about the interesting juxtapositions in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, and the way that he utilizes the language of traditional religious iconography to encourage his readers to become active participants in his work as opposed to mere outside viewers.  It seems as if Blake is taking this theme of traditional iconic expression and manipulating it for his own purposes.  He often seems to be utilizing the icon and the traditions it has, as an aid in his critiques of these traditional institutions, manipulating their meaning into messages that explore the darker side of these institutions.  In Songs of Innocence and Experience Blake approaches the world from two different angles, through the lens of the naive, malleable mind of the innocent, and the corrupted, jaded mind of the experienced.  These two opposing forces, often with "sister" poems in each section help to support this theory that Blake is taking the glorified, holy traditions of the iconic ideals, and bringing them down to earth, where it is unavoidably messy.  Blake seems to feel that this traditional icon expression is unrealistic, and he tries to humanize these images by taking them out of their religious context and inserting them in with the human fallicies explored in this set of poems.  This idea that Blake is utlizing is interesting because I think that Blake is a religious person, as he makes many refrences to Christianity in his poetry, but it seems that he is crititquing the institution of his time and perhaps wanting to shed light on what he sees as the foolish notion of perfection and peace that is encouraged through the church.  It is obvious that Blake wants to explore the human condition in its reality and not its ideals.  This is a topic that I would like to do more research on and perhaps expand into an even longer discussion of Blake's style and influences.