William Blake\'s \"The Lamb\" in the Poem

William Blake's "The Lamb"

In the poem "The Lamb," William Blake distinguishes his unique style through the incorporation of religious symbolism, creative lines, and simplistic patterns. "The Lamb" was published as part of a series of poems in 1789 titled the Songs of Innocence; actually, he wrote "The Lamb" and the other works as part of a series of lyrics. The entire work represents an enlightened state in Blake's life, and it was written before a contrary, darker state of mind in the 1793 sequel, the Songs of Experience. Blake was influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg, a writer who gave Christianity a mystical interpretation, and that influenced is found in Blake's work, like "The Lamb," poems that were more simplistic in style and nature before he became more contrition and prophetic in the Songs of Experience. Through simplistic structure, he chose the narrator of a child, as in this poem, told through childlike eyes, speaking of the innocence of all us, and that the lamb is Christ, marveling over God's creations. It describes how "the lambs graze upon the cropped grass beneath the images….the dramatic perspectives and continual allusiveness of these lyrics has meant that they have been endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted….these are not poems…these are discrete works of art in which the words are only one element in a unified design" (Ackroyd, 122). Blake loved the "obtuse. He will have nothing said against superstition, which is 'ignorant honesty…beloved of god and man" (Erdman, 116).

Throughout this poem and its other poems, "pastoralism is the controlling convention…for Blake, the shepherd-sheep relationship and the special world inhabited by shepherd and sheep become the way of representing characteristics mode of perception in the state of Innocence" (Paanamen, 74). In the Songs of Innocence, "the field is predominantly field, valley, and hill in poems like…'The Lamb' "(Gardner, 50). Blake wrote that "'Innocence dwells with wisdom but never with Ignorance' " (Erdman, 105). We have to examine what Blake was attempting in his life at this time. He and his wife were struggling as illustrators and printers, Blake's brother died, and I suspect he was questioning the nature of God -- though none of the research confirms this theory, but to look at God and Creation, as he does in this work, it's a back-to-basics approach in thought and structure. We do know he sought an alternative to cynicism, "a state of mind Blake called organized innocence….cannot be understood if we suppose that the author himself is innocent or oblivious of 'life's pelting storm'…a person aware of much amiss and seeking a cloak against ill winds could have made Blake's conscious creative effort to organize a place of shelter for Wisdom and Innocence, lion and lamb, to dwell in together" (Erdman, 105). Blake's poem like "The Lamb" "project the innocent's ability to recast his world imaginatively into one where we can not be at home but also be cared for by a loving shepherd. It is pointless to object such a world does not exist in what seems to be the world of common sense and 'experience': such an objection would be raised by a Bacon or by a similar advocate of ratio perception" (Paanamen, 75). Surprisingly, Blake expected some objection to "The Lamb" and other poems of Songs of Innocence. Blake wrote " 'those who are offended with any thing in this book would be offended with the innocence of a child & for the same reason, because it reproaches [them] with the errors of acquired folly' "(Erdman, 107). By examining the poem, we must consider the subject: the lamb, the very animal that has a predominant place throughout the Christian Bible. It is the "first symbol of God's created Innocence, and a demonstration of His care for creatures of earth. So divine care is reflected in the social practice of sending poor infants to the country….the whole pastoral tenderness is given a symbolic Christian identity. This God is…identified in the child and the lamb. He has crated and is protecting" (Gardner, 76). Consider the last lines of the poem: I a child and thou a lamb/We are called by his name.