Page 273 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes In these lines, we imagine the child patting the lamb on the head and running off to find some new
adventure. He seems to have been instructing the lovable farm animal on the basics of the Christian
religion. He blesses the lamb twice, completing the pattern in which the lamb is addressed as “thee”
two times at the beginning and end of each stanza.

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.

What are Blake’s favorite image of innocence, and how does he use them?

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.

26.2.2 The Little Black Boy
Text
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh my soul is white!
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.
My mother taught me underneath a tree,

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