The Lamb (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

“The Lamb,” has long been one of Blake’s most popular and acclaimed lyrics. English poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne notes in his 1906 work William Blake: A Critical Essay that the poem is one of the Songs of Innocence that has “a very perfect beauty”: “All, for the music in them, more like the notes of birds caught up and given back than the modulated measure of human verse. One cannot say, being so slight and seemingly wrong in metrical form, how they come to be so absolutely right; but right even in point of verses and words they assuredly are.” Sir Geoffrey Keynes similarly feels that “The Lamb” is “rightly regarded as one of Blake’s most triumphant poems,” explaining in his 1955 introduction to Songs of Innocence and of Experience that “it is also one of his most transparent. The lamb and the child, both symbols of innocence and of religion, converse together, the child properly supplying both question and answer. They are illustrated together in the design, with a cottage to one side and the oak of security in the background. On either side are delicate saplings arching over the scene without any overtones of Experience.” Many critics have looked at “The Lamb” within the context of the entire collection of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. John Holloway believes that the poem is representative of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which he sees as a harmonic collection with a distinctive form. In “The Lamb” the critic writes in his 1968 study Blake: The Lyric Poetry, “poetic form here merges into explicit statement. The point is that one can virtually assert this poem to have a structure, inasmuch as it has a structure of ideas: and the structure of ideas is a structure of identity, of the merging and inter-fusion which is the ultimate condition of harmonious oneness. In a world of harmony,” the critic adds, “the work of the Creator tends simply towards being a duplication and reduplication of himself: until finally, it is oneness which is blessedness.” Michele Leiss Stepto likewise observes a directness in the subject of the poem, which she believes “makes explicit the identification of the lamb, type of a sacrificial humanity, with the infant Jesus dear to the Christian church.” By contrasting the question of creation posed here with that in “The Tyger” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Stepto suggests in The Yale Review that “The Lamb” “deals with the origin of the victims of evil”: “In calling himself by the name of the lamb, Christ claimed kinship with the suffering victim and promised, by his act of self-sacrifice, to banish both tiger and lamb.”