Auguries of Innocence

In Blake’s mysticism, faith and innocence are inextricably linked, while doubt leads to corruption and spiritual decay. “Auguries of Innocence” asserts that the faith in question is not faith in Christian institutions per se, but in the Christian truth revealed in the figure of Jesus Christ.

Blake’s Christ is both the lamb who gave up his life in Line 23 and the righteous God who will hold all souls to account on Judgement Day. While in Christian doctrine, the divine is distinct in essence from humans, in Blake’s radical world view, this essential distinction is blurred. Furthermore, the souls of even animals are linked with the divine spirit itself. The speaker recurrently emphasizes the spiritual link between humans, animals, and God, such as in Lines 21-22, where “The wild deer, wandring here & there / Keeps the Human Soul from Care.” To understand the full import of the lines, one can turn to the Bible, in which the deer often symbolizes the faithful human soul. In Blake’s vision, the deer represents the animal (innocence), the human (faith), and the divine spirit (the wild). Thus, all three entities are united in the figure of the deer.

Faith is instrumental in making humans realize their divine potential. When people reject faith, they shun their own innate innocence and divinity. Blake is scathing of doubters in “Auguries of Innocence,” condemning those who teach children to doubt to a “rotting Grave” from which they will never escape. By disabusing a child of faith, the grown-up does not just make the child lose innocence but also loses their own innocence. The speaker also refers to philosophy—or purely rational or scientific inquiry—as “Lame” (Line 105), or limited in that it can only understand the little that it surveys. Even the ant who knows only the inches it surveys and the eagle the miles it tracks are wiser than philosophy. Blake’s disdain for science, reason, and doubt all originate from the same source: The poet mistrusts these approaches to knowledge because they rely only on the information revealed by the senses and the intellect.

The poem sets up a symbolism in which children, natural elements, and animals are on the side of faith, while rationalists, industrialists, and all those consumed by greed are aligned with doubt. For Blake, doubt is corrupting because it rejects the imagination. Imagination and innocence are the natural state of humanity, since children are born in these states. That is why the poem often refers to doubters as those who mock “the Infants faith.” When the doubter propels the child into the world of adults, the child loses faith in their capacity to believe and imagine, and thus leaves the pure realm of innocence. For Blake, it is only by maintaining or regaining faith that the human mind and spirit can achieve its full imaginative potential.