Blake. Flashcards
What happens in Introduction?
- The poet sees a vision of a child on a cloud.
- The child instructs him first to play a tune, then sing, then write his poems down.
What is the commentary on the poem?
This poem introduces the Songs of Innocence and at the same time, it also introduces us to a certain kind of ‘innocent’ writing, symbolised in conventional 18th century pastoral terms by the shepherd’s pipe.
How is Blake present?
Blake is very much present as the narrator. The I which occurs in each stanza, including three times in the final one of this poem; in it, he is asked by a child to ‘pipe’ songs with merry chear’. It is important to note that the poem itself, with its jaunty rhythms and simple rhymes, is an example of such a ‘song’; even here, amid the apparent simplicity of structure and narrative stance, there is something reflexive about Blake’a work, something that always calls attention to itself as an act of writing or inscription.
How does the poem look forward to the Lamb?
At the same time, the poem looks forward to the Lamb as both a symbol of innocent happiness and also, through its associations with Jesus, as a religious image, thus pointing us towards the complicated argument about religion which Blake will mount throughout both sets of Songs.
What is perhaps most interesting here is the duality of reaction in the second stanza. When the song about a lamb is first piped, we are told of the piper’s merry chear, but when he pipes again, we are told that the child wept to hear and the reader mighr reasonably ask what this weeping is about.
Although we are told in the third stanza that the child is then weeping with joy, this might not entirely erase a different impression in the second one, where the weeping might have something to do with the fragility of the lamb, with a sense that the world of innocence might not be all there is to apprehend and that we need to be prepared for the very different understandings of the world which we encounter in later poems.
What word jars?
And even here, in this apparently most innocent of songs, there is a word which might seem to jar. What does Blake mean by stained in line 18? Does he simply mean to refer to the mutual operation of ink and water, and thus to the water-colour of his illuminations, or does he suggest here the inevitability that even the writing about innocence will taint the subject matter?
What is the context of Blake’s writing?
- Blake wrote in an England alive with political ferment and fear in the wake of the American and French revolutions. It was also a time of social turbulence as developments in industrial processes ushered in an irreversible trend of urbanisation. With these events came significant social consequences and changes in the perception of humanity.
- Blake was deeply concerned with the fate of the individual within society and explores critically in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the evolving nature of the growing urban society he inhabited for most of his life.
