Hello and welcome to the Discourse. The Lamb is a poem by William Blake that he published in Songs of Innocence in 1789 and again in the combined edition Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1794. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are companion poetic collections expressing the contrast between the two aspects of creation, divinity and human nature. The full title of the collection is Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Blake etched twenty-seven printing plates for Songs of Innocence in 1789, completing those for the Songs of Experience in 1794. He then printed and hand-colored copies of the combined sets over succeeding decades. Thus, each Songs of Innocence poem has a companion poem in Songs of Experience. The companion poem of The Lamb is The Tyger in Songs of Experience. In these companion yet contrasting poems, Blake presents innocence and experience not just as stages of life but as coexisting, conflicting states of the soul.
In the Songs of Innocence, the poetic voice is often that of a child, whose emotions range from delight to fear, with darker feelings usually resolved in the earlier Songs of Innocence by adult intervention. Innocence represents childhood, purity, trust, joy, and divine love, while Experience represents Corruption, oppression, disillusionment, and societal restraints.
In The Lamb, Blake uses Christian Imagery (Christ as the lamb), while in The Tyger, he uses imagery of God as a blacksmith. Their stark differences highlight Blake’s belief in the necessary balance between innocence and experience, gentleness and ferocity, and faith and doubt. In The Lamb, God is presented as a loving, gentle creator while in The Tyger God is a fearsome, mysterious blacksmith ("Did he who made the Lamb make thee?").
The tone of The Lamb is soft, trusting, and childlike. The Lamb follows a pastoral, soothing setting with a gentle diction and simple, repetitive, nursery rhyme-like structure. It is a didactic poem intended to convey a moral or a message, rather than solely for entertainment or emotional expression.
Structure of The Lamb:
The Lamb has a simple structure consisting of two ten-line stanzas. 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 two stanzas are symmetrical; lines 1,2, 9, 10, 19, and 20 are all similar addresses directly to the lamb, functioning as the start and end of each stanza. This symmetry highlights the beauty and purposefulness of God’s creation. The poem follows a regular trochaic meter. Each stanza follows a simple rhyming scheme of AABBCCDDEE.
Blake has used apostrophe, anaphora, alliteration, assonance, imagery, symbolism, metaphor repetition, refrain, and rhetorical questions in the poem.
Summary of The Lamb:
Stanza 1 Lines 1-10
“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 speaker is a child who addresses a lamb with wonder, asking about its creator. Blake begins the poem with Apostrophe, directly addressing the lamb as if it can respond. The tone is gentle, innocent, and reverent. The lamb is a delicate and vulnerable figure, which is expressed by using alliteration in ‘little lamb.’ The child is personifying the lamb by questioning it as if it can answer. The speaker is the child of Innocence who lives by intuition enjoying a spontaneous communion with nature and sees the divine in all things.” The child repeats the same question in the second line, emphasizing the lamb’s ignorance (or purity). It appears as if the child already knows the answer, and hence, it is a rhetorical question. The child mentions that 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 that fills the valley with joy. The poet used Hyperbole, suggesting nature itself celebrates the lamb. Wool is a metaphor, a divine gift for protection and beauty.
The child continues to ask questions and wonders who made him and wants to ascertain whether he knows who made him. The child wants to know who fed him while living along the river on the other side of the meadow. The pastoral imagery appears impressive. He also wants to know from the Lamb who supplied him with a pleasant body cover (clothing) that is softest, full of wool, and shining, who offered the lamb his bleating (sound) which is gentle and sweet.
In the last two lines, Repetition and Refrain have been used to reinforce the central question and the child’s awe.
Stanza 2 Lines 11-20
“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.”
Stanza 2 reveals the lamb’s creator is God, who became a "Little Child" (Christ). The same innocent child now answers the lamb while revealing the true creator.
In Lines 11-12, the child answers his own question from Stanza 1, adopting a teaching tone, he is informing the lamb and the readers. Repetition has been used in these lines, which emphasizes the child’s excitement to share divine knowledge. The poet uses Allusion, suggesting that the Creator shares the lamb’s name—"Lamb." The Biblical allusion is to John 1:29 ("Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world"). Here is a paradox: the Almighty humbles Himself as a vulnerable animal.
The child mentions that Christ calls himself the Lamb of God, and Jesus identifies with the lamb’s innocence and sacrifice. The child describes Christ’s gentle, meek, and mild nature (Alliteration has been used). The child mentions that God not only became the innocent meek lamb but also incarnated to take a human form as Jesus (a child, like the speaker). Thus, the poet links divine innocence (Lamb) to human innocence (child).
In Lines 17 and 18, the child offers unity and suggests that he and the lamb are united under God’s love. In these lines, Blake offered his own theological idea that all living things reflect the divine ("His name").
In the last two lines (19-20), the child offers a benediction to the lamb, which mirrors the refrain from Stanza 1.
The poem highlights innocence as sacred; the child and lamb embody Christ-like purity while suggesting a unity of creation; humans, animals, and God share a spiritual bond. In The Tyger, Blake also suggests the unity between meek and fierce. The Tyger’s fiery, fearsome Creator is the same, suggesting that divinity encompasses both tenderness and power.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards.
No comments:
Post a Comment