Songs of Innocence by William Blake

THE LAMB

In this deceptively simple poem Blake uses a child as the narrator who asks the questions and then
answers them. The questions, which are interconnected and repetitive, are both simple and
profound – ‘who made thee?’ This addresses the most important ideas that people have about where
we came from and who we are. By putting this question into the mouth of an innocent child,
addressing that most innocent of creatures, a lamb, Blake shows that children often go to the heart
of existence because they have not yet learned to complicate things. You have only to watch an
adult’s reaction to the question, ‘Where did I come from?’ to realise this. The answer given by the
child in the poem equally reveals innocence – the lamb was made by he who ‘calls himself a lamb’
just as the child was made by he who ‘became a little child’. This association of child and lamb
with Jesus follows the ideas proposed in the Introduction and in ‘The Shepherd’. The depiction of
Jesus as the child of the nativity and as the lamb is reinforced by the description, ‘He is meek and
he is mild’, reminiscent of Christmas carols – almost, one might say, the Jesus of Innocence, but
also the Jesus who protected children in the New Testament by saying that for those who abused
them, ‘it were better for them that a millstone were put around their neck and they were cast into the
river’. This is also the Jesus who told people, ‘unless you become as little children, you will not
enter into the kingdom of heaven.’

It is this idea that permeates the Songs of Innocence. Blake himself retained this wonderful ability
to see things from a childlike viewpoint, as he shows in this poem; he argues the need for the
imagination and simplicity of the child to remain as a guiding light through the darkening world of
experience. The world of experience is notably absent from ‘The Lamb’. The engraving depicts
the naked child feeding the lambs under a protective arch of trees, outside a simple country cottage.
The first stanza is full of images of Nature – ‘by the stream’, ‘o’er the mead’, ‘all the vales’, and of
happiness, ‘clothing of delight’, ‘softest clothing woolly bright’, ‘tender voice’, ‘vales rejoice’. The
physical environment of the lamb is characterised by life, food, ‘clothing’ and gentle noises. The
stream here is the water of life and the meadows and valleys are made for the lambs and children to
enjoy freely.

In the second stanza where the child answers the question, ‘who made thee?’ there is a movement
from the physical to the spiritual as the child talks about Jesus as the creator of both lamb and child.
The poem finishes on a short, childlike prayer, ‘Little Lamb, God bless thee.’ The repetitive nature
of the poem gives it the quality of a child’s prayer or hymn and the simple rhythm, reinforced by the
use of assonance, supports this impression (it could be sung to the tune of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little
Star’!) as does the rhyme scheme, which is in rhyming couplets – although ‘name’ and ‘lamb’ are
only half-rhymes. Although it is less obvious to modern readers, the repetition of the pronoun
‘thee’ gives a feeling of familiarity and closeness between the child and the lamb.

Blake’s own religious views centred very much on Jesus as the mediator between humanity and the
one true God – since he was both human and divine, just as Blake felt people to be. When he was
asked if he believed in the divinity of Christ, Blake replied, ‘Yes, Christ was divine … but then so
are you and so am I’. He saw Jesus as the figure that put forgiveness at the centre of the Christian
religion and Love as its most important duty. As such he was the antithesis of the tyrannical,
demanding God that used fear to enforce oppressive laws, all beginning ‘Thou shalt not …’The
emphasis on the lamb in the Songs of Innocence is a reminder that Jesus was a saviour who
sacrificed his life for the redemption of all people. This is an echo of the Jewish Passover feast,
which is celebrated by the slaughter and eating of a lamb and the time in Egypt when the blood of
the lamb placed over the doorway was a signal to the angel of death not to enter the house.

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Songs of Innocence by William Blake
THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER

This poem is written in the same rhythm and ballad form as the ‘Little Black Boy’ and for the same
reason. The simple and direct narrative comes from a child – in this instance a little chimney
sweep. Perhaps even more than children who were set to work in factories or mines or the many
other forms of labour that children had to endure, the chimney sweeps had a particularly miserable
existence. There were a lot of them, for one thing, since every house had a chimney. They were
generally very young, since many of the chimneys had awkward bends that required tiny bodies. It
was a horrible job meaning that they had skin engrained with soot, permanently inflamed eyes,
burns from the hot bricks and often unhealed sores where their skin had rubbed off against the
chimney sides. The daily distortion of still-growing bones meant that many of them were crippled
and their lungs were filled with the choking soot. If they were reluctant to engage in the terrible
task, they were beaten, or fires were lit underneath them to force them up the chimney. They were
kept by a master and they slept in dormitories on the floor, with few facilities for washing, and
given little other than a space to sleep and some food. Blake deplored the society that could treat
small children in such a way and exploit them for money; even more the parents who would sell
their children to a master in such a trade, although poverty often dictated this course.

In this poem we see Blake using satire to express his anger. The poem appears to be a simple story
told by the child and it is his viewpoint that the reader sees. The child reports how his mother died
while he was still little (perhaps in childbirth or as a result of complications, which was a major
cause of death among women) and his father sold him before he could even speak properly. Blake
deliberately shows his first words as ‘weep weep weep weep’ as he has little cause to do anything
else. Literally, the words suggest the lisping child plying his trade, ‘sweep, sweep’, but, with the
repetition, also sound like a small bird, thus emphasising the vulnerability of the child as well as his
unhappiness. The following line points an accusing finger at the reader with the use of the pronoun,
‘Your chimneys I sweep’ which shows the complicity of all adults in this cruel exploitation. The
continuation of the line, ‘in soot I sleep’ shows the impossibility of any escape from the filthy
conditions imposed upon the children.

The tale of ‘little Tom Dacre’, personalises the narrative, giving an identity to this child sweep
which ensures that the audience are aware of the boys as individuals. Tom cries when his head is
shaved, a normal practice for the infant sweeps. His hair is described as ‘curl’d like a lambs back’
which refers to his innocence and to the idea of Tom as a victim, being sacrificed. The narrator, in
a heartbreaking imitation of an adult, advises him that it is all for the best, so ‘the soot cannot spoil
your white hair’, which also contrasts the angelic nature of the child with the darkness of the soot
and, by implication, with the evil of those who exploit him. Tom’s dream symbolises the position
the little chimney sweeps are in, ‘lock’d up in coffins of black’, which represents the enslavement
of the children, the claustrophobic dark chimneys and the living death they endure daily. In the
dream an angel, a heavenly messenger, with ‘a bright key’ opens the coffins and ‘set them all free’.
They find themselves in an earthly paradise where they run over ‘a green plain’ and wash in the
river of life. This symbolises the change in their condition, from exploited slaves to free, playing
children, which is the condition that Blake wants for all children. It also shows the children as
‘naked and white’, and therefore in a state of innocence, having washed off all traces of their
enslavement and misery. They also ‘rise upon clouds’ which, like the child in Introduction,
suggests that they are associated with the spirit of imagination and it is this that sets them free –
perhaps this is also symbolised by the ‘bright key’ of the angel which releases them from physical
bondage into the paradise of imagination.

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Songs of Innocence by William Blake

The conclusion of the poem appears to be clichéd, but it is put in childlike terms. Thus Blake is
showing the way in which children trust and believe what adults tell them. It is ironic in the sense
that when the angel tells Tom, ‘if he’d be a good boy / He’d have God for his father & never want
joy’ the interpretation of being ‘a good boy’ would mean different things to Blake and to some of
his readers. For those who exploited children, or supported the status quo, it would mean that he
should obey his master and not complain about his miserable life and then he would get his reward
in heaven; for Blake, however, it would mean that he would be true to his imagination which Blake
saw as the divine part of human beings. In the same way, the final line, ‘So if all do their duty, they
need not fear harm’ is ambiguous: it could mean the duty to be a good and cheerful worker, or it
could mean the duty owed by the individual to preserve his innocence through dreams and the use
of poetic imagination.

THE LITTLE BOY LOST

The first stanza is narrated by the child, begging his father not to walk so fast and to speak to him,
‘Or else I shall be lost’. This could be seen in conventional religious terms as the soul begging God
the Father for guidance through the sinful world. It could also be read as the uncaring father
leading his child into the forest of experience and there abandoning him.

The second stanza brings no response from the father–figure and the child is left, lost and alone in
the dark and the wet. This is a very deep and primitive fear for children and the reader may
empathise with the little boy left in the deep mire (or marsh), so the fear of sinking might be added
to his misery. We are not surprised ‘the child did weep’, but the final line suggests some hope as
his weeping seems to make ‘the vapour’ fly away. If the vapour is a mist, which seems likely, it
will represent concealment or obscurity, so for this to depart means that clear sight or revelation
must be at hand. The reader will have seen what the next poem is called and will know that there is
a happy outcome to the child’s panic. This idea is reinforced by the jogging rhythm of the lines, but
Blake’s use of wild nature – forest and marsh – suggests the dangerous world of experience, even
while, in the engraving, it shows angels surrounding the text and the small boy following a light –
perhaps the vapour flying away, perhaps the light of poetic imagination.

THE LITTLE BOY FOUND

In the companion poem, the child is said to be ‘led by the wandering light’ which could be the
‘vapour’ of the previous poem or could represent a guardian or angelic spirit. He begins to cry but
God appears, in white, the symbol of goodness and purity. We may see this as Jesus, the divine
man, or as the representation of the divinity in Man. He is described as ‘ever nigh’(ever near) and
as ‘like his father’ and is thus associated and contrasted with the father who lost him in the previous
poem, suggesting that the true father responds to his child and stays close to him in the dangerous
world of experience. That the child is not yet ready for this journey is shown by God restoring the
little boy to his mother, who has been searching for him. However, she has been searching in the
‘lonely dale’, the world of innocence and she, too, is contrasted with the father in the previous
poem, both because she has been looking for the child, instead of losing him, and because she
believes him to be in the world of innocence and not that of experience. The fact that she is
‘weeping’ and ‘pale’ shows the grief and worry of the caring and protective parent. The importance
of the childhood world of innocence and the need for wise guidance into the world of experience is
a Blake theme that is shown in these two simple yet profound poems, with their nursery-rhyme
metres and their emotional symbols.

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Songs of Experience by William Blake
The two ‘Holy Thursday’ poems together show Blake as a social reformer, demanding justice for
those who cannot fight for themselves. He shows the self righteous attitude of those who demand
gratitude and conformity as the price for giving charity, which in practice is merely their duty to the
next generation. By implication he is also showing the enormous gulf between the poor and the rich
in his society.

THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER

A much more sombre poem than that with the same title in Songs of Innocence, where the little
sweeps could escape through the power of imagination, this poem shows the parents of the little
sweep as jealous of his innocent freedom and happiness.

The poem opens with an onlooker describing

‘A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!’
The contrast between the black sooty figure of the child and the white snow brings to mind both
conventional dead metaphors about good and evil and Blake’s subversion of these in poems such as
‘The Little Black Boy’. Clearly Blake does not intend the child himself to be seen as evil, but
rather what has happened to him – the conspiracy in the adult world to force him into this dreadful
occupation. This is shown in his cries of ‘weep, weep’ which recalls the professional cry of the
sweep asking for hire, but also shows the misery of his situation as they are ‘notes of woe!’ When
the onlooker asks, ‘Where are thy father and mother? say?’ the little sweep becomes the narrator
for the rest of the poem, as he gives an answer that reveals Blake’s anger at his treatment and
compassion for his condition. He tells the reader that his parents have ‘both gone up to the church
to pray’. This shows the hypocrisy of the parents in this outward religious observance, while they
sell their child into slavery as an apprentice sweep.

The second stanza clearly reveals one of Blake’s themes in the songs of experience – that of the
jealous adults who cannot bear to see the innocent world of imagination that they no longer inhabit,
without trying to destroy it. This is made obvious by the first word of the second stanza:
‘Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.’
It is the child’s innocent happiness as he plays and sings that have caused the jealous parents to cut
short his childhood – and, in this occupation, his life, as the phrase ‘clothes of death’ emphasises.
Unlike in the poem of the same name from Songs of Innocence, there is no ‘angel with a bright key’
to set him free into the world of imagination. There is a hint that some of this world remains with
the child when he says:
‘And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury’
– but everyone knows that children can still play and seem happy even in the most dreadful
situations; the parents cannot be unaware of the kind of life their son must be leading. The
suggestion is that the parents are colluding with the Church and the State:
‘And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.’
The final line is reminiscent of the ‘Clod and the Pebble’ where jealous love ‘builds a hell in
heaven’s despite.’ Blake accuses the people who should be protecting children – the parents, the
King whose duty is to protect all his subjects, and the priests who owe a Christian duty of care
towards all, especially children, of creating a hell on earth for them instead.
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Songs of Experience by William Blake

The simple, direct language that Blake uses reveals the hypocrisy of the adults through the words of
a child.

THE LITTLE GIRL LOST

The poem begins with the voice of the prophet – the bard – who sees a future time when the earth
‘Shall arise and seek
For her maker meek:
And the desart wild
Become a garden mild.’
This introduction appears divorced from the rest of the poem, but it is an indication to the reader
that Blake is writing about a symbolic future when the material world (the desert) will become a
spiritual one (a garden) as the human race is reunited with God. Lyca is a symbol of the human
soul who has wandered in the desert and is caught in the sleeping world of experience. She is found
by wild animals who do not harm her (it was a medieval tradition that wild animals would not harm
a virgin) but the lion, who may represent death, but could also symbolise wisdom, removes her
clothing which is appropriate to the material world of experience, and takes her in the state of
nakedness that is often portrayed by Blake as innocence, to his cave. The description of the lion as
‘kingly’ is slightly at odds with his movement, as he ‘gambold round’ but the place where Lyca lies
is depicted as ‘hallow’d ground’ and she is guarded by the moon, Diana, goddess of virgins. The
sexual imagery in the poem has been seen as Lyca awakening to sexual desire, but moving beyond
this almost immediately to the new Eden, where her knowledge is not forbidden or shameful. She
is said to be ‘Seven Summers old’ which is a number that connects the new Eden to the creation
which was said, in Genesis, to have taken seven days. This view is reflected in the illustrations
where a girl and a man point upwards towards a bird that represents freedom, while the serpent
depicted below it, is facing away from them. The second engraving shows Lyca preparing for the
sleep of experience, wearing a red dress – traditionally the sign of passion.

The ballad form in which the poem is written is suited to a story, of which this forms the first part,
while the rhyming couplets help to move the action forward, but also form small enclosed ideas of
their own within the poem.

THE LITTLE GIRL FOUND

These two poems form part of the same story, and in the second poem, we are shown the suffering
of Lyca’s parents. Again the number seven is significant, as they are said to have wandered for
seven days and ‘Seven nights they sleep Among shadows deep.’ The second line recalls the 42nd
psalm; ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no ill.’ Lyca’s
parents, however, do fear for her and they follow her trail until they are stopped by the lion. Here
he becomes ‘A spirit arm’d in gold’, the herald of the New Jerusalem, and he leads them to their
daughter, who sleeps peacefully ‘Among tygers wild’. The parents from the world of experience
have followed their child back to the world of innocence which was Eden before the fall, but which
is different in that it contains knowledge and wisdom. Blake’s final picture shows naked children
playing happily with lions and tigers, while the female personification of earth, also naked to
represent innocence, lies in the foreground. Again the imagery has biblical connotations, recalling
the words of Jesus, ‘Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of
heaven.’

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Songs of Experience by William Blake
THE TYGER

This is probably Blake’s most famous poem; easy to remember because of its rhythmic verse and
use of rhyming couplets, the animal itself holds a fascination for people, partly because of its beauty
and partly because of the danger it represents. For Blake it is a symbol of righteous anger – the
emotion he saw as driving progress. In ‘The Proverbs of Hell’ he wrote ‘The tygers of wrath are
wiser than the horses of instruction’ – instruction being associated with schoolmasters and priests.
The poem begins with an image of the creature,
‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night’
The tiger’s flame coloured stripes are associated with passion, while the light and dark of its coat
shows both contrast and balance. Forests are associated with experience and therefore with danger.
The narrator asks the first of a number of questions in the poem,
‘What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’
While its creator must be immortal, it is a puzzle to know what kind of creator could make such a
fearful creature – symmetry refers presumably to its patterning. More questions follow – all of
them rhetorical since there can be no answer, and all of them directed to the origins of the tiger.
‘In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?’
The ideas here of cosmic fire associated with the tiger adds to its grandeur with a suggestion of
Prometheus (a character in Greek mythology) stealing fire from the Gods as a gift for man:
‘On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?’
There is also an echo of the Greek Icarus, flying too close to the sun and being flung to earth, but
the impression is of something universal and even courageous.

The next stanza takes the idea of the tiger as a physical being;
‘And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
The identification of the parts of the tiger with the creator that made it gives it a supernatural power,
while the connection of ‘shoulder’ with ‘art’ is suggesting the combination of physical strength and
imagination required to produce such a creature. This is followed by the image of a blacksmith’s
forge (perhaps an association with Vulcan, smith to the Gods?) which is also implicated in the
making of the tiger:
‘What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?’
The idea of the tiger’s creation being a combination of nature and creative art is taken a step further
here, as though only a cosmic forge could produce sufficient heat to create its brain. The idea is
reinforced by the hammering rhythm that runs throughout the poem.

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Songs of Experience by William Blake
The image of the stars as a heavenly army, throwing down their spears in surrender to the power of
the tiger, or perhaps in horror at its creation, serves to extend the idea of its supernatural qualities.
The question that follows, however, is at the heart of the poem and also at the heart of the songs;
‘Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
The belief in a single creator must extend to the belief that he who created good must also have
created evil – the tiger and the lamb share the same world. They are the two contrary states of the
human soul, representing the worlds of innocence and experience. If the lamb represents goodness,
innocence and meekness, the tiger represents passion, wrath and energy.

The final stanza repeats that at the beginning, with the difference being that the question is no
longer whether a creator would be able to ‘make’ the tiger, but how he could ‘dare’ to do so. The
circular structure of the poem indicates the eternal nature of the questions and the themes within it.
There is no real answer to the ‘problem of evil’ in the universe, or to whether the creator of the
lamb would smile at his unleashing of the tiger. The words that are repeated throughout the poem,
such as ‘dare’ and ‘dread’ suggest something at once brave and awful, while images of ‘burning’,
‘fire’ and ‘furnace’ suggest not only the tiger’s orange stripes but the two eyes in the darkness and
the anger burning in its brain. Fire is associated with creation and destruction, with cleansing and
with warmth. These contradictions are present in the world, just as good and evil are both present.

LONDON

One of the bleakest poems in the collection has Blake, the narrator, wandering the streets of his
home city and noting the misery around him.
‘I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow’
The word ‘chartered’ refers to the granting of rights to land or rents, the implication being that most
of London is owned by a small number of people or corporations. It also has connotations of
‘charting’ or mapping out, with its hints of confining and defining limits. There is also an ironic
association with the idea of a charter of rights, which does not extend to the poor and dispossessed.
As the wanderer continues, he encounters others,
‘And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.’
The use of the word ‘mark’ to mean ‘notice’ is balanced by its second use to mean ‘signs’ and what
the observer notices is signs of weakness and woe. The weakness can mean physical or moral or
both and is combined with ‘woe’ to show a condition of unhappiness and debility in the citizens.
The repetition serves to point up the number of marks that are visible.

From using sight to observe, the narrator turns to hearing to record his impressions:
‘In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear’.
This is the central image of the poem and the central image of the songs of experience. The
manacles are chains and handcuffs which prisoners would have to wear and which were also used to
prevent slaves from escaping. The image of London’s poor being enslaved by the ‘establishment’ is
also an echo of Rousseau’s comment, ‘Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.’ The
description of the manacles as ‘mind-forged’ refers not only to the way in which the poor are
oppressed legally, but also to the way in which they are ‘brainwashed’ by the Church into believing
that the poverty of their condition is ordained by God and they will enjoy their reward in heaven. It
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