Summary

The poem begins with the question, “Little Lamb, who made thee?” The speaker, a child, asks the
lamb about its origins: how it came into being, how it acquired its particular manner of feeding, its
“clothing” of wool, its “tender voice.” In the next stanza, the speaker attempts a riddling answer to
his own question: the lamb was made by one who “calls himself a Lamb,” one who resembles in his
gentleness both the child and the lamb. The poem ends with the child bestowing a blessing on the
lamb.

Form

“The Lamb” has two stanzas, each containing five rhymed couplets. Repetition in the first and last
couplet of each stanza makes these lines into a refrain, and helps to give the poem its song-like
quality. The flowing l’s and soft vowel sounds contribute to this effect, and also suggest the bleating
of a lamb or the lisping character of a child’s chant.

Commentary

The poem is a child’s song, in the form of a question and answer. The first stanza is rural and
descriptive, while the second focuses on abstract spiritual matters and contains explanation and
analogy. The child’s question is both naive and profound. The question (“who made thee?”) is a
simple one, and yet the child is also tapping into the deep and timeless questions that all human
beings have, about their own origins and the nature of creation. The poem’s apostrophic form
contributes to the effect of naiveté, since the situation of a child talking to an animal is a believable
one, and not simply a literary contrivance. Yet by answering his own question, the child converts it
into a rhetorical one, thus counteracting the initial spontaneous sense of the poem. The answer is
presented as a puzzle or riddle, and even though it is an easy one—child’s play—this also contributes
to an underlying sense of ironic knowingness or artifice in the poem. The child’s answer, however,
reveals his confidence in his simple Christian faith and his innocent acceptance of its teachings.

The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus. The traditional image of Jesus as a lamb underscores the
Christian values of gentleness, meekness, and peace. The image of the child is also associated with
Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a special solicitude for children, and the Bible’s depiction of Jesus
in his childhood shows him as guileless and vulnerable. These are also the characteristics from which
the child-speaker approaches the ideas of nature and of God. This poem, like many of the Songs of
Innocence, accepts what Blake saw as the more positive aspects of conventional Christian belief. But
it does not provide a completely adequate doctrine, because it fails to account for the presence of
suffering and evil in the world. The pendant (or companion) poem to this one, found in the Songs of
Experience, is “The Tyger”; taken together, the two poems give a perspective on religion that
includes the good and clear as well as the terrible and inscrutable. These poems complement each
other to produce a fuller account than either offers independently. They offer a good instance of how
Blake himself stands somewhere outside the perspectives of innocence and experience he projects.
MAIN IDEAS ANALYSIS

Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) juxtapose the innocent, pastoral world of
childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression; while such poems as “The Lamb”
represent a meek virtue, poems like “The Tyger” exhibit opposing, darker forces. Thus the collection
as a whole explores the value and limitations of two different perspectives on the world. Many of the
poems fall into pairs, so that the same situation or problem is seen through the lens of innocence
first and then experience. Blake does not identify himself wholly with either view; most of the poems
are dramatic—that is, in the voice of a speaker other than the poet himself. Blake stands outside
innocence and experience, in a distanced position from which he hopes to be able to recognize and
correct the fallacies of both. In particular, he pits himself against despotic authority, restrictive
morality, sexual repression, and institutionalized religion; his great insight is into the way these
separate modes of control work together to squelch what is most holy in human beings.

The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and
trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written from
the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from an adult perspective. Many
of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the
corruption and distortion of experience. Others take a more critical stance toward innocent purity:
for example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the emotional power of rudimentary Christian
values, he also exposes—over the heads, as it were, of the innocent—Christianity’s capacity for
promoting injustice and cruelty.

Analysis

The Songs of Experience work via parallels and contrasts to lament the ways in which the harsh
experiences of adult life destroy what is good in innocence, while also articulating the weaknesses of
the innocent perspective (“The Tyger,” for example, attempts to account for real, negative forces in
the universe, which innocence fails to confront). These latter poems treat sexual morality in terms of
the repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and secrecy, all of which corrupt the ingenuousness of
innocent love. With regard to religion, they are less concerned with the character of individual faith
than with the institution of the Church, its role in politics, and its effects on society and the individual
mind. Experience thus adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision while compensating
for some of its blindness.

The style of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is simple and direct, but the language and the
rhythms are painstakingly crafted, and the ideas they explore are often deceptively complex. Many of
the poems are narrative in style; others, like “The Sick Rose” and “The Divine Image,” make their
arguments through symbolism or by means of abstract concepts. Some of Blake’s favourite rhetorical
techniques are personification and the reworking of Biblical symbolism and language. Blake
frequently employs the familiar meters of ballads, nursery rhymes, and hymns, applying them to his
own, often unorthodox conceptions. This combination of the traditional with the unfamiliar is
consonant with Blake’s perpetual interest in reconsidering and reframing the assumptions of human
thought and social behaviour.
Context

FURTHER STUDY CONTEXT

William Blake was born in London in 1757. His father, a hosier, soon recognized his son’s artistic
talents and sent him to study at a drawing school when he was ten years old. At 14, William asked to
be apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, under whose direction he further developed his innate
skills. As a young man Blake worked as an engraver, illustrator, and drawing teacher, and met such
artists as Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose classicizing style he
would later come to reject. Blake wrote poems during this time as well, and his first printed
collection, an immature and rather derivative volume called Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783.
Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, followed by Songs of Experience in 1793 and a combined
edition the next year bearing the title Songs of Innocence and Experience showing the Two Contrary
States of the Human Soul.

Blake’s political radicalism intensified during the years leading up to the French Revolution. He began
a seven-book poem about the Revolution, in fact, but it was either destroyed or never completed,
and only the first book survives. He disapproved of Enlightenment rationalism, of institutionalized
religion, and of the tradition of marriage in its conventional legal and social form (though he was
married himself). His unorthodox religious thinking owes a debt to the Swedish philosopher
Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), whose influence is particularly evident in Blake’s The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell. In the 1790s and after, he shifted his poetic voice from the lyric to the prophetic
mode, and wrote a series of long prophetic books, including Milton and Jerusalem. Linked together
by an intricate mythology and symbolism of Blake’s own creation, these books propound a
revolutionary new social, intellectual, and ethical order.

Blake published almost all of his works himself, by an original process in which the poems were
etched by hand, along with illustrations and decorative images, onto copper plates. These plates
were inked to make prints, and the prints were then colored in with paint. This expensive and labor-
intensive production method resulted in a quite limited circulation of Blake’s poetry during his life. It
has also posed a special set of challenges to scholars of Blake’s work, which has interested both
literary critics and art historians. Most students of Blake find it necessary to consider his graphic art
and his writing together; certainly he himself thought of them as inseparable. During his own
lifetime, Blake was a pronounced failure, and he harbored a good deal of resentment and anxiety
about the public’s apathy toward his work and about the financial straits in which he so regularly
found himself. When his self-curated exhibition of his works met with financial failure in 1809, Blake
sank into depression and withdrew into obscurity; he remained alienated for the rest of his life. His
contemporaries saw him as something of an eccentric—as indeed he was. Suspended between the
neoclassicism of the 18th century and the early phases of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single
poetic school or age. Only in the 20th century did wide audiences begin to acknowledge his profound
originality and genius.
Discuss Blake’s use of auditory imagery in the poems, and cite one example.

Blake’s work shows a constant awareness of the ironies of publishing “songs” in written form—

publishing poems that lay claim to an oral culture in a series of elaborately visual engravings. This

awareness reflects the general Romantic preoccupation with the possibility of capturing in writing

the rhythms, immediacy, and spontaneity of the spoken human voice. Blake seems, if not pessimistic,

at least dubious about such a possibility, as can be seen in his Introduction to Songs of

Innocence. Here, a child gives a wandering bard three commands: first to play his pipe, second to sing

his songs, and third to write them. This progression may imply a decline, from the purity of music

(without linguistic meaning), to orality (bound by meaning but still spontaneous and fleeting), to

literacy (without need for human presence and perhaps less personal). The speaker’s pen,

ambiguously, “stain[s] the water clear”; thus the image simultaneously implies both a purification (to

“stain” it “clear”) and a corruption (to “stain” the “clear” water). On which process does the

emphasis lie? Is writing part of the descent into experience?

Comment on Blake as a social critic.

Blake wrote in an era of great social and political upheaval. The democratic ideals of the French

Revolution of 1789—the year of the first publication of Songs of Innocence—undoubtedly influenced

him. But in politics Blake aligned with no particular system or idealism; he speaks always for the

primacy of the individual and the imagination. Blake did attach importance to particular social

reforms: one might extrapolate some of these from a poem such as “London,” depicting great

suffering and oblivious social institutions, or one might consider Blake’s use of the plights of innocent

children in a whole range of poems such as “Holy Thursday.” But a reading of Blake as social critic

should always keep in mind the transcendent, humane values of the imagination and of the self

unrestricted by narrow social convention; for these values formed the core of his moral code. This

code stringently opposes an impersonal, conventional transcendence, and rejects the consolation of

a life after this world—both of which are offered by the Church. See in particular the irony of “The

Little Black Boy” for evidence of this last point.

What were (and are) the effects of Blake’s mode of publishing his poems with handcrafted colored

engravings?
Blake is somewhat misnamed as a poet; he is perhaps better called a craftsman or artisan, and is

widely studied and valued as a visual artist. To be understood fully his poems must be considered as

material artifacts. The color and composition of surrounding images can deeply change our stance on

a poem. (You might find an edition of Blake containing his images in color and test out this

hypothesis on “The Nurse’s Song.”) We should also recognize that such an arduous publication

process helped condemn Blake to relative obscurity during his own lifetime. Poems universally

known today would have been read by very, very few of Blake’s contemporaries.

Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing wooly bright;

He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meek & he is mild, He became a little
child: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name.

William Blake’s poem The Lamb has been regarded “as one of the great lyrics of English
Literature.” The Lamb by William Blake consists of two stanzas, each with five rhymed couplets.
Repetition in the first and last couplet of each stanza turns these lines into a refrain, and helps in
providing the poem its song-like quality. The flowing l’s and soft vowel sounds also make a
contribution to this effect, and also bring forth the bleating of a lamb or the lisping character of a
child’s chant.

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

The Lamb is a didactic poem. In this poem the poet pays a tribute to Lord Christ who was innocent
and pure like a child and meek and mild like a lamb. The little child asks the lamb if he knows who has
created it, who has blessed it with life and with the capacity to feed by the stream and over the
meadow. The child asks him if the lamb knows who has given it bright and soft wool, which serves as
its clothing, who has given it a tender voice which fills the valley with joy. In the firs stanza of ten
lines of William Blake’s poem The Lamb, the child who is supposed to be speaking to the lamb, gives
a brief description of the little animal as he sees it. The lamb has been blessed with life and with the
capacity to feed by the stream and over the meadow; it has been endowed with bright and soft wool
which serves as its clothing; it has a tender voice which fills the valley with joy.

The readers here are provided with a true portrait of a lamb. In the poem the child of innocence
repeatedly asks the lamb as to who made him. Does he know who created him (the lamb)? The same
question has been put repeatedly all through the first lines of the poem. The child addresses Little
Lamb to ask him who made him and wants to ascertain whether he knows who made him. The child
wants to know who gave the Lamb his life, who fed him while living along the river on the other said
of the meadow. H also wants to know from the Lamb who supplied him with pleasant body-cover
(clothing) which is softest, full of wool and shining. The Lamb is also asked by the child who gave him
such delicate bleating voice, which resounds a happy note in the surrounding valleys. The stanza is
marked by the child’s innocence which is the first stage in Blake’s journey to truth.

“The Child of Innocence lives by intuition, enjoys a spontaneous communion with nature and sees
the divine in all things.”

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
In the second stanza of the poem, there is an identification of the lamb, Christ, and the child. Christ
has another name, that is, Lamb, because Christ is meek and mild like lamb. Christ was also a child
when he first appeared on this earth as the Son of God. Hence the appropriateness of the following
lines: “He became a little child:/I a child & thou a lamb,/We are called by his name.” The child in this
poem speaks to the lamb, as if the lamb were another child and could respond to what is being said.
The child shows his deep joy in the company of the lamb who is just like him, meek and mild. The
poem conveys the spirit of childhood – the purity, the innocence, the tenderness of childhood and
the affection that a child feels for little creatures.

A religious note is introduced in the poem because of the image of Christ as a child.  The Lamb is a
pastoral poem. The pastoral poem note in Blake is another symbol of joy and innocence. In the next
ten lines of the second stanza from William Blake’s poem The Lamb, the child himself proceeds to
answer the questions he has asked the Lamb in the first stanza. The child says that the person, who
has created the Lamb and has given many gifts described in the first stanza, is himself by the name of
the Lamb.
It is Jesus Christ who calls himself a Lamb. Jesus the Lamb is meek (submissive) and mild (soft-
natured), and he became a child for the sake of mankind. The narrator (I) is a child, he is Lamb and
they both are called by Jesus’s name. The Lamb identifies with Christ to form a Trinity of Child, Lamb
and Redeemer (Jesus).

Personal Comments

The Lamb by William Blake has been written in the form of question and answer. Where its first
stanza is descriptive and rural, the second concentrates on abstract spiritual matters and consists of
analogy and explanation. The question of the child is both profound and naïve, and the apostrophic
form of the poem make a contribution to the effect of naiveté, since the situation of a child in
discourse with an animal is a convincing one, and not just a literary contrivance. Still by giving
answers to his own question, the child succeeds in converting it into a rhetorical one, as a result
countering the initial spontaneous sense of the poem. The answer is depicted as a riddle or a puzzle,
and even though it’s an easy one—child’s play—this also helps in contributing to an essential sense
of sardonic knowingness or artifice in the poem. However, the child’s answer discloses his self-
reliance in his simple Christian faith and his innocent acceptance of its teachings.

Life of William Blake

William Blake was the most remarkable poet among the precursors of the Romantic Revival in
English. The son of a hosier, Blake was born in London in November, 1757. His father James Blake
and his mother Catherine were both Dissenters. There were five children in the family, Blake was the
second one. It appears that the denial and deprivation of love from the family might have generated
in Blake’s mind, an exotic imaginary world of his own. At the age of seven, he was sent to a good
drawing school in the strand, and four years later, in 1772, he began a seven years apprenticeship in
engraving under James Besire. He was an engraver to the London Society of Antiquaries, where he
learned his craft as well as acquiring some of his poetical and political opinions. In 1779 he began
studying at the Royal Academy and within a year began exhibited pictures there, often with historical
themes. At twenty-four he married Catherine Boucher, who was an illiterate. So, he taught her to
read, write, and make colors and prints. He never had children, but he was devoted to his younger
brother Robert and taught him drawing and nursed him.

Works of William Blake

William Blake’s poetry is as delighted as it is  challenging, and its wide appeal ranges from the
deceptive cadence of his lullaby-like pastorals and songs to the troubling notes of  the tragedy of the
lapsed soul and the stormy music of the prophetic works. The writings of Blake may be classified
under the following literary heads:
1. Lyrical poems, including songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
2. Irregular rhyme-less verse
3. Rhythmic prose & Descriptive and critical prose
However, Blake’s most widely read poems are contained in Songs of Innocence and Songs of
Experience.