William Blake's "The Lamb": Symbolism and Innocence
This paper analyzes William Blake's poem "The Lamb," published in the 1789 collection Songs of Innocence. Drawing on several Blake scholars, the paper examines the poem's religious symbolism, pastoral conventions, and childlike narrative voice. It situates the work within Blake's biography, his Swedenborgian influences, and the contrast between his early "organized innocence" and the darker tone of the 1793 Songs of Experience. The paper also considers the poem's identification of the lamb with Christ, the symbolic imagery of the child and the lamb, and the poem's use of simple, repetitive structure to convey spiritual wonder through an innocent perspective.
- Introduction: Blake's Style and Context: Blake's style, influences, and poem's publication context
- Pastoral Convention and the State of Innocence: Pastoralism, innocence, and Blake's personal struggles
- The Lamb as Religious Symbol: The lamb as Christian symbol of divine care
- Childlike Narration and Symbolic Imagery: Childlike voice, repetition, and visual symbolism
- Reception and Legacy: Limited commercial success and Swedenborgian legacy
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What makes this paper effective
- It integrates multiple scholarly sources — Ackroyd, Erdman, Gardner, Lister, and Paanamen — to support each analytical claim, giving the argument bibliographic credibility.
- It situates the poem in biographical context, connecting Blake's personal struggles and Swedenborgian influences to the thematic content of the poem.
- It traces the poem's specific imagery (the child, the lamb, the cottage, the intertwining trees) and links each element to its symbolic function, demonstrating close reading skills.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates the use of contextual criticism — reading a literary text through the lens of the author's biography, intellectual influences, and historical moment. Rather than treating the poem in isolation, the writer draws on Blake's relationship with Swedenborgian theology, his personal losses, and the structural contrast between Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience to explain why the poem takes the form and tone it does. This approach shows how external context can illuminate internal textual meaning.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by introducing Blake's style and the poem's publication context, then moves into scholarly perspectives on pastoralism and innocence. It proceeds to close reading of the lamb as a Christian symbol, then analyzes the childlike narrator and specific symbolic imagery. It closes briefly with a note on the poem's limited commercial reception. This structure moves logically from broad context to close textual analysis to reception history.
Introduction: Blake's Style and Context
In the poem "The Lamb," William Blake distinguishes his unique style through the incorporation of religious symbolism, inventive lines, and simplistic patterns. "The Lamb" was published as part of a series of poems in 1789 titled the Songs of Innocence; Blake wrote "The Lamb" and the other works as a series of lyrics. The entire collection represents an enlightened state in Blake's life, written before a contrary, darker state of mind found in the 1793 sequel, the Songs of Experience. Blake was influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg, a writer who gave Christianity a mystical interpretation, and that influence is found in Blake's work. Poems like "The Lamb" were more simplistic in style and nature before Blake became more contrite and prophetic in the Songs of Experience.
Through simplistic structure, Blake chose the narrator of a child — a voice that speaks through childlike eyes of the innocence of all humanity and of the lamb as Christ, marveling over God's creations. As one scholar describes it, "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).
Pastoral Convention and the State of Innocence
Throughout "The Lamb" and the other poems in the collection, "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 [the] characteristic 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 himself wrote that "'Innocence dwells with wisdom but never with Ignorance'" (Erdman, 105).
To understand the poem fully, we must consider what Blake was experiencing at this time in his life. He and his wife were struggling as illustrators and printers, his brother had died, and the poems suggest he was grappling with the nature of God and creation — approaching these questions through a back-to-basics simplicity of thought and structure. We do know that Blake 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 poems, like "The Lamb," "project the innocent's ability to recast his world imaginatively into one where we can not only be at home but also be cared for by a loving shepherd. It is pointless to object that 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 anticipated some objection to "The Lamb" and other poems of the Songs of Innocence. He 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).
References
Ackroyd, Peter. Blake: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954.
Gardner, Stanley. Blake. New York: Arco Publishing Company, Inc., 1969.
Lister, Raymond. William Blake: An Introduction to The Man and to His Work. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1968.
Paanamen, Victor N. William Blake. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.
Paley, Morton D. Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake's Thought. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
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