“Infant Joy” from “Songs of Innocence” by William Blake is a simple song that highlights the joy of childbirth from a mother's perspective. The mother asks the child what to name the newborn. The newborn is called Joy, because that's all he knows. In contrast, "Infant Sorrow" from William Blake's "Songs of Experience" is a simple song that focuses on childbirth from the child's point of view. It's a much less pleasant experience than Mom's. The newborn baby struggles as it leaves the comfort of the mother's womb and enters the world. Romanticism is emotionally defined by Margaret Drabble as “an extreme affirmation of self and the value of individual experience” (Drabble 842-43). The songs "Infant Joy" and "Infant Sorrow" highlight the adverse experiences of childbirth, which are the result of the child's loss of innocence due to greater experience in the world, thanks to Romanticism's emphasis on human experience. The poems also highlight the individual infant's experience of imagination, which is "a watchword" in Romanticism, and whether it is bound and repressed or encouraged to flourish by parental authority (Drabble 842-43). The different personal experiences of childbirth and imagination are seen through the language the poet uses to describe childbirth, the nature the child decides for himself, and the amount of constraint the parents place on the child, which may be related to the newborns. ability to imagine. “Infant Joy” brings to light the positive personal experience of the birth of a child from a mother's perspective through a conversation with the newborn. The mother asks the newborn what his name should be: “What should I call the… medium of paper……convenient and as a result, the child decides on a negative nature in contrast to “Infant Joy.” The child in “Infant Joy” experiences less of the world than the child in “Infant Sorrow”. The extra experience that the child has in “Infant Sorrow”, causes the child to see the world in a less happy state which results in a stifled imagination. The different perspectives of children demonstrate how important this is personal experience, especially in Romanticism. Works Cited The Oxford Companion To English Literature (5th ed.) Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Print.Blake, William of English Literature. 8th ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2006. Print.Blake, William English Literature. 8th ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2006. 95. Print.