Songs of Innocence by William Blake (1757 -1827) The Lamb Little Lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life & bid thee feed, By the stream & oer the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing, woolly, bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice! Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Little Lamb, Ill tell thee, Little Lamb, Ill 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. Blake, William. The Lamb. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. 6th ed.2 vols. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. II: 29-30.

Songs of Experience by William Blake (1757 1827) The Tyger Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And waterd heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Blake, William. The Tyger. The Norton Anthology of Poetry

. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, MaryJo Salter and Jon Stallworthy.5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. 743-44.

The Lamb advances us to a position on the gradient of language acquisition from which the innocent can make simple inferences but cannot
199 blakes works

grasp gurative language. The overt scene of instruction presents the childs catechizing a lamb, but that action together with some evident allusions indicates another, antecedent scene where the young child also a lamb in colloquial contemporary endearment was somewhat similarly instructed concerning the Agnus Dei or Lamb of God. Singers of this particular glee can thus see parts for the lamb as young sheep, young child, Son of God and a text itself called by his name. At the poems end, in a move Blake sets up repeatedly, the bottom drops away, here via the uncanny exact repetition of a blessing which, coming directly after the culminating rst -person plural (We are called), has the effect of drawing the focus back from that scene to an observer or maker, poet potentially powerful enough to call into being and bless the Little Lamb God just seen:
Little Lamb God bless you. Little Lamb God bless you.

With The Little Black Boy and The Chimney Sweeper the ubiquitous ideological use of language to rationalize instruction particularly oppressive for children moves to the fore. Another incarnation of the lamb, little Tom Dacre treasures up the slightly older sweeps solicitous nonsense that soot cannot now spoil his white hair and cherishes it into a wish-fullling dream of angelic assurance that if hed be a good boy, / Hed have God for his father &never want joy. And, the poem insists, such an imaginary nonsequitur has the authentically real effect of making Tom happy & warm despite the cold morning. Again the conclusion opens out rather than ties up as the frame narrator old enough to care for Tom as an other but still so young as to narrate largely by simple conjunctions voices a conclusion which may be heard as at once innocent (literally, free from harm); ignorant, given the debilitated end which awaited sweepers like Tom and himself; and apocalyptically threatening the poems art -purchasing, house-possessing (your chimneys) readers with the mob vengeance of thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned &Jack. So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm thus invokes multiple contexts, one of which would require nothing less than a complete change of the readers perspective. Inuenced perhaps by pronunciation of his name, Blake seems to identify particularly with black. The little black boy receives one of the collections most intimate scenes of instruction from an actual mother whose kisses mingle emphatically with what she said (kissed me). The mothers lesson turns on the idea that we are put on earth a little space in order to lear n in a remarkable formulation to bear the beams of love and, with that, the ultimate inconsequence of racial coloring. Beams of love seems conventional enough (God shines with them in Isaac Wattss immensely popular
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Hymns for Children), but that one must learn to bear them hints at their implication in a heavy ideological double-cross. Parting shots here are the omitted apostrophe which makes the black boy echo conventional malediction in imagining Ill shade him, even as he fantasizes unreal silver hair for the white boy and, pathetically, the concluding wan hope that he will nally be like him and he will then love me.