The stage adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead has been drawing attention for its fierce, strange beauty, and reviewers keep circling back to a single name that predates Tokarczuk by two centuries: William Blake. You could treat this as a literary footnote, a nod to the fact that Tokarczuk's protagonist Janina quotes Blake and shares his outrage at cruelty toward animals. But there is a stronger claim available: Tokarczuk built her entire moral vision on the structure of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and without Blake's voice sounding underneath, the novel and its adaptation lose a full register of meaning. That stronger claim holds up.
A clean split exists in most conversations about the connection: Blake as quaint precursor, or Blake as kindred spirit separated by time. Both framings flatten the actual relationship. Blake in the 1790s was constructing a theory of perception. Innocence and experience, in his formulation, are rival cognitive states, each with its own logic, each incomplete on its own. Tokarczuk picks up exactly this argument. Janina is trapped between two ways of seeing, one naive, one furious, and the novel tracks what happens when she can no longer hold both. To understand what the adaptation is doing on stage, you need the source.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a short collection, fifty-four plates in all, and it moves with the deceptive speed of a children's primer. The "Innocence" poems open with children on greens, lambs in fields, a chimney sweep comforted by angels. The voice is gentle, almost lulling. Then the "Experience" poems arrive and the same subjects return disfigured: the chimney sweep is now a black mark on the national conscience, the lamb becomes the raw material for the "Tyger's" terrifying symmetry, and the green is patrolled by priests who bind desire with briars.
What separates this edition from a standard poetry anthology is its commitment to Blake's plates. Blake engraved and hand-colored every page himself, intertwining vines, figures, and letters so that the text cannot be cleanly extracted from the image. In "The Sick Rose," a worm coils through the letterforms. In "London," human figures slump beneath the words that describe their suffering. Reading these poems in plain typeset, as most editions offer, strips away half the argument.
Blake designed his plates so your eye would enact the struggle between innocence and experience before your conscious mind caught up. A fair objection: Blake's visual program can feel totalizing, even coercive in how it choreographs attention. The plates leave little room for ambiguity. Where a bare poem might let you sit with the chimney sweep's song and decide for yourself whether it is comforting or devastating, Blake's illustration makes the decision for you, framing the child in flames and angels at once. For all his fury at systems that constrain human perception, Blake built a perceptual system of his own. That contradiction is real, and it does not resolve neatly. The parallel to Tokarczuk gains its force precisely because she inherits this contradiction. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes its title and several of its epigraphs directly from Blake. Janina reads the "Auguries of Innocence" as prophecy. But Tokarczuk wraps outrage in astrology, in unreliable narration, in comedy that keeps threatening to tip into madness. The stage adaptation, by all accounts, leans into this instability, and that instability traces straight back to Blake's original structure: innocence and experience held in suspension, each making the other visible. If you want to understand why the adaptation feels singular rather than merely political, this slim collection of plates is the clearest route in. The poems are short enough to read in an afternoon. The images will take longer.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is ninety minutes of reading, maybe less, plus as much time as you want to spend with the plates. It will not explain every choice the Tokarczuk adaptation makes, but it will give you the grammar behind those choices. And if Blake's conviction that how we see determines what we are willing to tolerate sounds familiar in 2026, that is because the argument never stopped being live. It just went underground for a while.