Contents: IntroductionPoem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Sources For Further Study |
Criticism
Bryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published books and essays on English Romantic poetry. In this essay, Aubrey examines how Blake’s poem illustrates his belief in the unity of all life, expressed throughout Songs of Innocence, and the spiritual perception of children.
It is easy to dismiss “The Lamb” as a sentimental or naive poem. Simple in its structure and vocabulary, it leaves no difficulties of interpretation. Unlike some of the Songs of Innocence, it does not force the reader to consider ironies or ambiguities involved in the state of innocence. The only question the child speaker asks (“Little Lamb, who made thee?”) is immediately dissolved, since the child already knows the answer (“Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee”). In light of this disarming simplicity, commentators have had little to say about “The Lamb.” They have preferred to dwell on the complexities of “The Tyger,” Blake’s companion poem in Songs of Experience, with its unanswered question about the darker side of life: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?”
The real problem in discussing “The Lamb” is not that it lacks depth, but that the kind of depth it possesses demands a visionary leap from the reader, who must attempt to feel the uncommon (for the adult) reality that the child speaker lives so naturally.
For Blake, childhood was a state not of dependency or ignorance but of spiritual vision. In “innocent” perception, everything in creation is embraced by the tenderness of the divine, and there is no separation between the human self, the natural world, and the divine kingdom. Everything is oneness, or unity, which spreads itself through all the phenomena of nature. In “The Lamb,” the focal point of this unity, the creator, source, and sustainer of it, is the Lamb. The Lamb is Christ, whose loving generosity flows out endlessly into the world. This generosity is emphasized by the threefold repetition of “gave” or “give” in the first stanza, in reference to the gifts bestowed by the Lamb of God on the lamb, the creature that bears his name. The child is spontaneously aware of all these realities, at all times, and it saturates him with serenity and happiness that he simply wants to express.
As a consequence of the child’s innocent wisdom, there is no drama in this poem; it conveys a sense of bliss at play with itself. In play, there are no real questions, since questions are the result of uncertainty or lack. In the world inhabited by the child in “The Lamb,” questions are just a playful pretense. The purpose of these questions is to get the knowledge of the nature of life circulating, so it can make “all the vales rejoice.”
As another way of putting it, in the state of Innocence, there is no gap between what the soul loves and desires most deeply, and what it experiences, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, in the world. Needless to say, this is not the average world in which the average adult lives, which is why, paradoxically, the simple poems in Songs of Innocence may sometimes be trickier to fully grasp than Songs of Experience, many of which are situated in the gritty, distressed world that people usually think of as being more expressive of the human condition.
But Blake says time and time again that there is no reason why this should be so, since it is the inherent ability of what he later called the “Divine Humanity” to see the “Divine Vision” in everything. For Blake there was no sound reason to believe that there must always be a gap between human desire and human achievement. About the same time as he was writing the Songs of Innocence, he wrote in There is No Natural Religion (1788): “If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.” If there was one thing that Blake believed, it certainly was not the eternity of despair. Despair can only be caused by an error in the perception of the way things truly are, always. As Blake scholar Kathleen Raine, in Blake and the New Age, remarked of “Infant Joy,” another poem in Songs of Innocence:“Being — consciousness — bliss . . . such was Blake’s understanding of the essence of life. Joy is not something that happens to the soul, it is the essential nature of every soul.”
The joy world that shines out in “The Lamb” is apparent in Songs of Innocence. “Every thing that lives is Holy” announced Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), and the phrase could almost be a motto for the world depicted in Songs of Innocence, in which life is a continuum of delight and everything is under the divine protection. Take the first stanzas of “Night,” for example:
The sun descending in the west,The evening star does shine;
The birds are silent in their nest,
And I must seek for mine.
The moon like a flower
In heaven’s high bower,
With silent delight
Sits and smiles on the night.
Farewell, green fields and happy groves,
Where flocks have took delight.
Where lambs have nibbled, silent moves
The feet of angels bright;
Unseen they pour blessing
And joy without ceasing,
On each bud and blossom,
And each sleeping bosom.
It should be noted that the moon does not merely shine; it “smiles,” it revels in “delight,” as do the flocks of sheep in the “happy” groves. Technically these figures of speech are known as the pathetic fallacy, the attribution to inanimate objects of human feelings or qualities. But for Blake they are far more than mere literary ornaments; they are fundamental to his understanding of how bliss, emanating from the divine Lamb, permeates the natural world. Natural processes and cycles are set in motion in order to multiply happiness, just as in “The Lamb,” it is the bleating of the lamb that causes the vales to rejoice, to spread joy.
“The Echoing Green” begins with a similar vision: “The sun does arise / And make happy the skies.” And in the first stanza of “Laughing Song,” human joy interacts with the joy that runs through nature:
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joyAnd the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit.
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
The poem gives the impression that the entire scene is bubbling over with bliss that leaves no corner untouched.
It might be objected that this is merely a child’s view, or an attempt to appeal to the naivete of a child. A laughing world is, after all, not the kind of world most adults live in. But to this objection, Blake in effect responded, Why not? He often liked to challenge the limited nature of what “everyone knows,” especially as far as perception was concerned, as in the following two lines from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”
In other words, if humans learned to liberate their five senses from the dullness of habit and blunted expectations, they might see the world as it really is, or at least as it is according to Blake. Blake never tired of explaining this, trying to coax his reader into seeing the Divine Vision. In Europe (1794), for example, the poet spots a fairy sitting on a tulip, and he asks it a question: “Tell me, what is the material world and is it dead?” The fairy replies, “I’ll sing to you to this soft lute; And shew you all alive / The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.”
As has been shown, the Songs of Innocence bears ample testimony to this perception of the universe as consciousness alive with joy. And the image of the lamb is central to the vision, since Christ, the Lamb of God, is the source and informing essence of the joy that animates everything in the universe. Lambs appear in other poems in Songs of Innocence. The very first poem, “Introduction,” features a piper, who is also the poet, who encounters a child. “‘Pipe a song about a Lamb,’” the child asks, and the poet replies: “So I piped with merry chear.” At the child’s request, he then sings the same song, and the child weeps with joy to hear it.
The merry piper who sings about a lamb is a clear reference to the poem “The Lamb,” and the song he sings is the eternal reality of the Lamb who is also a child — the very child who is listening to the song. As in “The Lamb,” the poet creates a self-referential loop, in which distinctions of subject and object break down in the fluid intimacy of entwining interrelation.
Seen in this light, another poem in Songs of Innocence, “Spring,” becomes a celebration not only of the seasonal renewal of life but also of the lamb / Lamb / child intimacy. The last stanza reads:
Little lambHere I am.
Come and lick
My white neck:
Let me pull
Your soft Wool.
Let me kiss
Your soft face.
Merrily Merrily we welcome in the Year.
Given that this is the vision that animates Songs of Innocence, several details of “The Lamb” become more significant than they might at first appear. The word “bright,” for example, that the child uses to describe the lamb’s coat, seems at first a rather odd adjective to use in this context (even though it provides a rhyme for “delight” in the previous line). However, the word occurs very frequently in Blake and is often used to suggest a kind of radiance that Blake associated with heightened perception, or a fully alive, even divine quality, as in “The feet of angels bright” quoted earlier. Wordsworth, another English Romantic poet who celebrated the purity of childhood perception, also used the word “bright” in this context.
Another detail concerns the illustration to the poem. Since Blake intended his books to be read in the form in which he printed them, in which each poem was accompanied by an illustration, it is always worth examining a poem’s visual aspect. The illustration for “The Lamb” shows a child reaching out to touch a lamb, while sheep graze behind them. There is also a cottage, an oak tree and a stream. But what catches the eye are the two saplings on either side of the illustration, both of which are entwined with vines. The saplings reach up to the top of the frame, and then arch over the entire scene, intertwining with each other in what looks like a riot of jubilation. The cooperative interfusing of nature that is part of the theme of the poem thus receives visual representation.
Blake’s belief in the validity of visionary, childlike perception that is everywhere present in Songs of Innocence was for him not a theory but a living truth. Recent research into childhood gives some support to Blake’s view. In Visions of Innocence: Spiritual and Inspirational Experiences of Childhood (1993), Edward Hoffman, a psychologist, describes hundreds of accounts of “peak experiences” during childhood, as recollected by adults. These include spontaneous moments of bliss, insights about self-identity, life and death, and startling changes in the way ordinary things are perceived. One woman recalls a vacation at Lake Michigan when she was eight years old:
Open-eyed in the cool water, I lay watching the sunlight reflect and sparkle off the tiny, water-polished stones. I continued gazing and began to notice how the pebbles washed back and forth, right below me, at the shallow edge where the water met the land. . . . Suddenly, I shifted into a state of awareness that was far more acute than usual. I experienced a powerful sense of the beauty of the stones, the sparkling light, the fluid motion of the water, which became so overwhelmingly joyful that I could hardly endure it.
Here, in a real experience, is the joy that underlies “The Lamb” and which Blake called simply “Vision.”
Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “The Lamb,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
What Do I Read Next?
- Blake’s “The Tyger” in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) is a companion poem to “The Lamb.” It poses the question of whether the meek and mild God who created the lamb also created the fierceness of the tiger. It is a question the poem does not answer.
- Written a little later than most of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790 – 93) is a rebellious and funny satire that includes the essence of Blakean wisdom in a series of provocative proverbs.
- Peter Ackroyd’s Blake (1995) is the best biography of the poet. It conveys not only Blake’s fierce, lonely determination but also his insecurity and the frustration he felt at his lack of worldly success. Ackroyd also gives a vivid picture of London of the time.
- London Life in the Eighteenth Century by M. Dorothy George (1965) is a classic work that gives a sweeping portrait of the city at the time in which Blake grew up there. George emphasizes how much cleaner, healthier, and more orderly London was at the end of the century than at the beginning.
- Like Blake’s Songs of Innocence, Hans Christian Anderson’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (1837), has much to say about the innocent wisdom of children.
- “We Are Seven” by William Wordsworth, published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798, contrasts the adult and the child’s view of life and death.
- “Fern Hill” (1945) by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas is another poem about the delights of childhood, although unlike “The Lamb,” it is written from the point of view of an adult looking back.
crucial symbol: it points to an aspect of Christian myth and ethics which is a real force against violence, which can bring peace in a way that mutual fear and selfish love never will.
“The poem unfolds in staccato lines and a series of ominous questions. The poet asks of the tiger what makes his eyes burn so brightly, what ‘twists the sinews’ of its heart.”
“The Lamb,” one of the poems of Songs of Innocence, elaborates on these symbols and themes. The poem begins with a question: “Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee.” The speaker inquires of the lamb as if he is about to deliver a gentle lesson. He goes on to elaborate on the question;
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!
The sounds of this stanza are soft and inviting. Along with the gentle AA / BB / CC rhyme scheme, the lines themselves have a singsong quality. Also, many of them, when read together, have a kind of calming effect by virtue of the repeated l sound (little, lamb, life, delight, woolly, I’ll, tell, bless). The words and images presented — stream, mead, delight, softest, tender, and rejoice — are positive and pastoral. One can picture a lamb frolicking in the green grass, wearing a coat of soft wool “clothing.” Even the bawling of a lamb has a pleasing quality to the poet. The stanza ends by repeating the opening question: “Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee.”
The second stanza answers the question posed in the first stanza. Using lines that are structured in a parallel fashion to those that began the poem, the speaker gently says, “Little lamb I’ll tell thee, / Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!” The reader pauses in anticipation of his answer of “who made 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 and thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
This is the stanza in which the poem’s allusions to Christianity come into full bloom. The speaker notes that the one who made the lamb is called by the same name as the lamb. Indeed, in the Christian tradition, Jesus, known as the Lamb of God, is idealized with the lamb-like qualities of meekness and mildness. These are qualities that are inviting and reassuring to a child. The speaker also aligns himself with the lamb, noting that they share the common name of Jesus. This stanza gives the poem a joyful and reassuring feeling. It is concluded with a benediction: “Little Lamb God bless thee. / Little Lamb God bless thee.”
Yet this is not the last word on the image of the lamb. This poem, and the volume in which it appears, takes on more complex meaning when compared to the poems of Blake’s companion volume, Songs of Experience. Blake had begun working on Songs of Experience as soon as he had completed Songs of Innocence. Originally Blake intended to pen direct satires of the Songs of Innocence, poem for poem. The innocent — perhaps oversimplified — world of the Songs of Innocence did need to be tempered. However, the poems that evolved in Songs of Experience, while at times correlating to the earlier volume, were often more general in their assertions, and more nuanced, to be direct counterparts. Blake’s biographer Peter Ackroyd described the songs: “These are not pure lyrics emanating from one voice but dramatisations of various mental states and attitudes — or, perhaps, dramatisations of the various selves that inhabited Blake.”
The vision of the Songs of Experience is by its very definition darker and more complex than that of the companion volume. And of the poems in Songs of Experience, “The Tyger” is most commonly linked with “The Lamb.” There could be no two animals more different: one is known for its meekness and mildness, the other for its ferocity. And “The Tyger” begins not with a singsong question, but with a terrifying assertion:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The poem unfolds in staccato lines and a series of ominous questions. The poet asks of the tiger what makes his eyes burn so brightly, what “twists the sinews” of its heart. The lines are fired off with such speed, even accusation, that the poem takes on the feel of a chant, or a kind of panting. The poem culminates in a final image of violence:
When the stars threw down their spearsAnd water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
These last lines are indeed a shock. The poet imagines a creator smiling at destruction. In a final twist, he spins on his heel and invokes the image of a lamb: the echo of the lamb that had been described so compassionately in the previous volume.
However, the images of this poem do not necessarily negate, or defy, the image of the lamb presented in the Songs of Innocence. Rather, the descriptions of the tiger enable the reader to see a more complete picture of the forces inside of all living things. Blake’s contrasting visions are hopeful and pious, as well as primal and violent. Perhaps by presenting these themes in companion volumes can one only gain a sense of their true emotional power.
Source: Erica Smith, Critical Essay on “The Lamb,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
Jennifer Bussey
Bussey holds a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies and a bachelor’s degree in English literature. She is an independent writer specializing in literature. In the following essay, she interprets Blake’s poem as a deeply religious poem appropriate for children.
William Blake’s “The Lamb” appears in Songs of Innocence, a collection of poems published alongside Songs of Experience. These two collections are intended to show the dichotomy of human experience as people move from youth to maturity. In Songs of Innocence, Blake depicts childlike, joyful, carefree subjects, while in Songs of Experience, he portrays cynical, mistreated, and elusive subjects. Many of the poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience are to be read together for contrast. For example, “Little Boy Found” from Songs of Innocence was written to complement “Little Boy Lost” from Songs of Experience. “The Lamb” considers the nature of divine creation and parallels the dark and mysterious poem “The Tyger.” “The Lamb” is often considered representative of Songs of Innocence because it celebrates nature and life as created by a loving God.
Most stories and verse written for children during Blake’s time were blatantly preachy, as they were created to provide moral instruction for life. During the last part of the eighteenth century, many tracts were published with the intention of guiding
“The speaker of the poem is a child — a child who becomes a teacher who explains God to other children in easy-to-understand terms. This technique engages children’s imaginations and builds self-confidence. The poem opens with two questions, which reflects a childlike curiosity.”
young minds in matters of ethics and propriety. Blake, however, understood how uninterested children are in such heavyhanded messages, and as a result, his writing is lighter and more interesting to children. In fact, when Songs of Innocence and Experience was published, it was unconventional and challenged existing children’s literature. Today, Blake’s influence is still felt in this genre, despite the fact that he never considered himself a writer exclusively for children.
The introductory poem of Songs of Innocence tells of the poet happening upon a child on a cloud, who urges the poet to share his songs with everyone. The poem ends with the poet declaring, “And I wrote my happy songs / Every child may joy to hear.” Blake is true to his word, as the ensuing poems are lively and optimistic, and many have a singsong quality that is appealing to children. In “The Lamb,” he expresses a relatively simple idea that can be understood by children, and he does so in a poem that has a light tone, a tender subject, and a straightforward question-and-answer format. Both the style and the content lend themselves to a young audience.
Readers may suspect that Blake is referring to more than a lamb right from the start, although the broader reference is not made explicit until the second stanza. In the first stanza, the speaker asks the lamb if it knows who made it, setting the stage for the poem’s religious musings on the divine creator and the creator’s relationship to mortal creatures. As the speaker proceeds to tell the lamb that the same creator who made the lamb also made the lamb’s natural surroundings, the reader begins to understand the relationship between the lamb and God. The lamb’s creator provides for the animal’s needs and expects it to live peacefully in the lush natural environment.
In the second stanza, the poem’s Christian symbolism is clearly evident, as, in line fourteen, the speaker tells the lamb that the one who made it is also called a “Lamb.” At this point, the reader understands the first stanza in a new light. The lamb is a traditional symbol for Christ. (In John 1:36, the book’s author, the apostle John, has John the Baptist saying, “Behold the Lamb of God!” The lamb imagery recurs in Revelation, which is widely believed to have been written by the same author.) The pure white lamb signifies something divine and innocent of sin, and Blake incorporates multiple references to this symbolism. The “softest clothing wooly bright” of line six is not just the spotless lamb’s coat (which seems to glow with divine light). This line also recalls the swaddling clothes in which the baby Jesus was wrapped, and refers to God’s hair like “pure wool” (Daniel 7:9). Line fifteen (“He is meek and he is mild. . . .”) is a clear reference to biblical scripture, which describes Christ as mild and even tempered, even when facing His enemies. Further, among the Beatitudes is the statement that the meek shall inherit the Earth (Matthew 5:5).
Blake then writes that Christ “became a little child,” referring to the biblical account of Jesus coming to Earth as an infant and maturing into adulthood just like any other man. The mention of becoming a child also refers to Christ’s lesson that people must become like children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Mark 10:15 and Luke 18:17). When the speaker tells the lamb, “I a child and thou a lamb, / We are called by his name,” Blake creates a powerful image of the divine connection among the child, the lamb, and Christ. The speaker essentially tells the lamb (and the reader) that they, humble mortal creatures, are touched by the divine so intimately that they all share names.
Although the lamb as a symbol of Christ is the most compelling religious symbol in the poem, Blake deftly uses other religious elements to provide thematic depth. The structure of the poem is deceptively strict in its organization. Each stanza begins and ends with repetitive couplets. In the first, the couplets are questions, as this stanza is the question section of the poem. In the second, the couplets are statements, as the speaker is answering the question from the first stanza. In the second stanza, when Blake introduces the figure of Christ, the second and fourth couplets each comprise two identical lines, while the center couplet describes Christ as meek and mild, and as a child. The speaker describes Christ in both the past and the present (“He is . . . / He became. . . .”), indicating the timelessness of the subject. This formality in structure is a subtle religious element because the poem, like creation itself, seems on the surface to be spontaneous and unorganized, but in reality has a complex and intentional structure of balanced symmetry.
Other religious elements in the poem are more obvious. The format, with the speaker asking a question and then answering metaphorically, parallels the didactic parables of Jesus as He spoke to His disciples and followers. In line three, the speaker says that the lamb’s creator instructs it to feed in the meadows. This is reminiscent of the Last Supper, when Christ instructed the disciples to eat the bread as a symbol of His body. Blake ends the poem with, “Little Lamb God bless thee. Little Lamb God bless thee.” These final repetitive lines act as a benediction to the lamb and to the reader, who has come to understand that the Lamb as Christ is closely akin to the figures in the poem and, by extension, to the reader.
Blake’s focused and straightforward message is presented to the reader in light verse that is appealing to children and adults alike. Blake wrote poetry with children in mind, but did not consider himself a children’s writer. At the same time, much of his poetry was not intended for adult readers only. The result is poems like “The Lamb,” which contain profound ideas, yet are written in such a way that they are accessible to a wide range of readers. “The Lamb” is ideal for reading aloud because of its rhythmic composition of short lines and simple words. The subject of a lamb is one to which children are responsive, as it is an adorable, nonthreatening creature often featured in children’s stories. The tenderness of the subject is emphasized by the poet’s use of soft words throughout the poem, such as “wooly,” “lamb,” “bless,” “tender,” and “softest.”
The speaker of the poem is a child — a child who becomes a teacher who explains God to other children in easy-to-understand terms. This technique engages children’s imaginations and builds self-confidence. The poem opens with two questions, which reflects a childlike curiosity. The child’s enthusiasm to answer his own question reflects youthful, innocent excitement at having something interesting to tell. The speaker feels that he has an important insight, and he is eager to share it with anyone, even a lamb. The adult reader knows that the child has only begun to understand the complicated nature of divinity, but the speaker is too young and innocent to grasp this.
For modern-day children, the language may be a bit stilted because of the use of “thee” and “thou,” but the sound and subject of the poem are adequate to interest them. Although very young children will not understand the religious significance of the poem, older children will. Still, children will gain a sense that the speaker is talking to a lamb about God, and as they grow older and revisit the poem, it offers them new insights. It is a poem that grows with children, and is able to do so because the form and tone are so engaging to young ears.
Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on “The Lamb,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
“Blake’s belief in the validity of visionary, childlike perception that is everywhere present in ‘Songs of Innocence’ was for him not a theory but a living truth.”
