Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Read Aloud‪)‬

All fifty-four of Blake's plates, each with the poem beside it and the voice reading it aloud, the spoken stanza highlighted as you listen.

The Tyger, The Lamb, London, The Sick Rose and A Poison Tree are all here, in the order Blake bound them.

William Blake etched, printed and hand-coloured Songs of Innocence and of Experience himself, and bound each surviving copy in his own sequence rather than any fixed order. This edition follows the order of Copy Y, so The Little Black Boy arrives in two parts as Blake set them, and the songs of Experience answer the songs of Innocence where he meant them to.

Facing every plate is a note written for this edition: what Blake drew there, and how the picture works with the poem, or against it. The chimney sweeper's vision of a green plain, the tiger's forge, the sunflower's weariness - these were never only words on a page. Roughly 3,700 words of new commentary across the book.

The narration is a digital voice, generated with ElevenLabs. Fifty-one of the fifty-four poems are read aloud with stanza-level highlighting; the three sectional title plates are printed but not narrated. The plate notes are for reading rather than listening.

Poem text from Methuen's English Classics edition, edited by George H. Cowling. Plates individually restored and recoloured. Notes and narration prepared for this edition by EverFrame Press.